As another round of summer food-fest frolics are in full swing, let’s take a trip down memory lane to explore the pinnacle of celebrations brought to life by Denver’s favorite party architects, Jeff Suskin and Shalisa Pouw. This party-making power couple are the driving force behind DiningOut Events, producers of culinary events including Top Taco, RARE Steak Championship, and Chicken Fight! festival.
But what happens when two party people decide to get married? They throw The Wedding Party of course, an extravaganza of food, drinks, games, fun, and all things wedding related. And of course, they shared the glory. With eight other couples and 2,000 people to be exact.
Produced in 2019 in collaboration with Ben Higgins of The Bachelor fame, The Wedding Party was a feat of event planning that melded matrimony with DiningOut Events’ signature festival flair. Think nine couples, communal vows, 30 top Denver restaurants, bottomless drinks mixed by the city’s best bartenders, a 30-foot dessert table, a 16-piece orchestra, a massive dance floor, and a champagne fountain
Would I pay to party crash this wedding again? In a heartbeat.
The Beginning of the Events
In 2014 the first festival was born, Top Taco. That was followed by Chicken Fight! in 2017, and then, The Wedding party in 2019. In five years DiningOut Events, a division of the media company best known for publishing DiningOut Magazine (aka what you’re reading right now), had solidified itself as a company to look out for. However, The Wedding Party, a formal event, wasn’t the usual fete the company was known for. But now, Shalisa was part of the team and they knew it could, and had to, be done.
Romance Is Served
The two met when Shalisa worked at a nightclub Jeff owned at the time. Even so, it was a decade before he had his first date with the former Denver Nuggets dancer, then fitness studio owner who threw events for Bumble BFF on the side. They hadn’t been together very long when the ever-active and athletic Jeff blew out his arm.
“Shalisa had to take care of me for a long time,” he said. “And then one year to the day after that surgery, I blew out my knee. On top of that, I lost my dad during that period. And you know, we joke around a lot, but when shit hits the fan, Shalisa was right there. And I felt real empathy.”
Jeff proposed marriage to Shalisa in 2018. But he was asking her to be more than a bride, he asked her to be his partner in everything, including DiningOut. Shalisa was all in. She sold her Pure Barre studio and came into the DiningOut fold as the executive producer of the events division that same year.
“The event company took off,” marveled Jeff. “She put in all these procedures, organized and processed out everything we did and she gave us the ability to grow.”
The Wedding Party
While settling into the new role, one question remained, when was the wedding. Shalisa kept saying there wasn’t going to be a wedding, but that didn’t stop everyone from demanding an answer.
“That’s when my brother-in-law Jason Lazaroff said, why don’t you just tell everybody to go to one of the food festivals like Top Taco and have a great time?” Jeff said. “We’ll celebrate you guys being married and it’s fun for everyone.”
“I was egging him on and I was like, well, you can’t have just one couple get married at a festival, that’s just silly,” said Shalisa. “I said we should have multiple couples get married and throw a wedding festival.”
Over mimosas, following the buzz of Top Taco 2018, the family brainstorm session blossomed from a joking comment to a full-fledged idea. Amid laughter and bold ideas scribbled on a napkin, the concept emerged of a wedding festival where multiple couples share the stage, and the costs.
Though it sounded like the way they would want to throw a wedding, the couple wasn’t convinced this particular idea would have mass appeal. Would any other couples want in on a collective wedding? They turned to their friend and Ben Higgins, The Bachelor alum known to profess his love for love, to help them find out.
Ben recorded a video outlining the not-yet-fully-developed group wedding party concept and inviting interested couples to apply. And then he sent that group wedding invitation into the Instagram feeds of his millions of followers to see if the idea had real potential. That’s when they realized that The Wedding Party may be bigger than they ever dreamed.
“A couple of days later, we had hundreds of people apply, and there were hundreds of thousands of people online going nuts,” said Jeff. Shalisa added, “We didn’t think anybody was going to be interested, but we got the full Ben Higgins The Bachelor effect, it was crazy.”
Wedding Party Planning
The first step to create this celebration of love was to select the perfect couples for the event. Despite the way the party formed, Jeff and Shalisa weren’t planning on being one of them. Instead, they wanted to focus on planning the event. After months of interviews, they selected eight couples from across the country and Canada.
“In the end we decided to become the ninth couple and make this our wedding,” said Shalisa. “If we’re going to tell these people that this is the best way to get married but we’re engaged and we aren’t doing it, do we actually believe this is the best way to get married?”
Not only did they believe this event would prove their conviction, but they believed The Wedding Party had potential to disrupt the wedding industry. By combining the financial forces of each of the couples with product and brand sponsorships, the communal celebration could exponentially elevate the experience while slashing the cost for all parties involved.
Weddings aren’t cheap. The average cost in the U.S. that year was $33,900, which makes sense when divvying the funds between a wedding planner, venue rental, florist, photographer, cake, catering, entertainment, hair stylist, makeup artist, lighting and decor, alcohol, and other such costs, not including the dress. All that adds up quickly, and the staggering number explains why so many couples opt to skip out on the tradition.
For The Wedding Party, Shalisa handled the event production and Jeff focused on securing dozens of event sponsorships to offset costs.
“We were able to get liquor sponsors, brand sponsors, the wedding dresses and the men’s suits sponsored, the wedding bands, the couple’s hotel rooms,” said Jeff. “And you should have seen the gift baskets, stuffed with 40 to 50 pounds of stuff from each of the sponsors.”
To supplement those sponsorship dollars, they offered wedding crasher tickets to anyone who wanted to don their summer best and come celebrate the love. That added another 600 people to the guest list, bringing the total in attendance to 2,000. In the end, each couple paid $15,000 for The Wedding Party, and the fee covered what they needed plus invites for 100 guests.
Here Come the Brides
On September 1, 2019, the first ever, collaborative wedding of this level and scale made history. Jeff and Shalisa walked down the aisle, as did eight other couples. While highlight videos showed on massive screens and pre-recorded audio of the couple’s vows played, the crowed got hyped up.
“Our biggest thing was making it very personal but in a festival setting,” says Shalisa. “For the couples, it felt like it was their wedding.”
Each bride still had that moment where they were walking down the aisle with their family sitting in the front row. They got to pick their own cake, and each couple had a dedicated lounge in the main tent where friends and family could be together.
After the ceremony, the party was on. Instead of a sit-down dinner, guests and wedding crashers were treated to bottomless bites and drinks from 30 of Denver’s top restaurants in true DiningOut Events festival style. There were wine and beer tents, games, lounge areas, art installations, a 30-foot-long dessert station, the biggest dance floor you can imagine, and even an adult bounce house.
“You couldn’t do it the way you normally would do a wedding,” Jeff said. “A typical wedding might have a guitar player for the walk-in, but we got the Colorado Symphony. A normal wedding would have a band, we flew in a 16-piece orchestra from Texas, the same band that played at President Bush’s daughter’s wedding in Dallas.”
“It’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” said Shalisa.
“The only thing missing,” quipped Jeff, “were the fireworks.”
