On the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman, Cherie, Visualist's founder, listens intently to Deborah Kugler, founder and lead designer of intimate luxury destination wedding service OFFICIALÉ. Cherie sips a mocktail. Deborah, hungry after a full day of meetings, orders the afternoon tea.
OFFICIALÉ is both new and novel, having launched at just the end of 2023 with a refreshing perspective on what a wedding can and should be. In fact, speaking with Cherie is one of the first times Deborah has verbalised the "scribbled notes" and "simmering thoughts" on her new venture.
The pair talk of their experiences as female founders, recent adventures in Vegas, distilling art into data, and the future of the wedding industry. Before the teapot is empty, Cherie has already arranged for me to call Deborah from across the Atlantic.
A month later, via video call, Deborah, or Deb as she introduces herself, greets me like an old friend and we launch into an exploration of her journey into design, the origins of her systematic creativity, and the thought process that led to her debut into the luxury wedding industry.
√A radical root
Deb might be new to the wedding industry, but she is certainly not new to life as an entrepreneur. We start our chat with the memory of Deb's earliest creative hustle... in fourth grade! Deb created her earliest compositions on an IBM PC, brought home by her father. The PC was pre-plugged with Print Shop Deluxe and Deb soon realised that creating compositions was simply a matter of selecting and arranging compatible elements: font, image, border. Deb's artwork found a fanbase in her fellow classmates and soon enough she was trading her art for their lunch money. Deb's masterpieces could be produced, and reproduced, following a simple sum: font + image + format = work of art. This is a theory which she still applies to her work as a designer: "I love analysing the data behind something artistic and making sure that something scientific is imaginative."
Deb has always possessed an affinity for maths and sciences but selected her college studies based on what she wanted to do, not what she was told she should, and subsequently studied communication art. Her parents would have preferred something more traditional—namely medicine, law, or business. But Deb talked them round, quelling their anxiety with the idea that she could go into broadcast media. But Deb instead chose the path less-explored—I am beginning to spot a pattern here—and pursued visual communication.
Before graduation, Deb's college professor advised her that she would befit New York. So, in the year 2000, she packed her bags and made the 8,000 mile move to NYC to study her masters at Pratt Institute. Before graduation, Deb had landed a job with a manufacturing company as a product designer and was soon promoted to head of design. From there, she took a graphic design job in a marketing firm but made no secret of her intent to progress into a directorial role within the company. Three months in, Deb won the company an eight-million-dollar contract. The role was hers. Today, Deb works as the regional design director for PepsiCo in North America. Deb refers to her journey as an "atypical trajectory." She explains, "You often hear luminaries in the design industry that have a stellar projection from start to finish, as though the carpet had been rolled out for them. But for me the road was clunky and jagged, sometimes it had missing parts, and I had to really throw myself into the next leg of things in order to make it here."
Deb's job, in essence, is to make things beautiful. Though she did not become a lawyer or a doctor, her parents came to understand that her work takes much more than an eye for the aesthetic—that it is in fact founded in "a robust systemic thought process" that Deb has spent years shaping and refining.
An emotional science
Deb appreciates beauty, but she is not satisfied with the superficial. She wants to dissect and inspect, to figure out the mechanics, and apply that learning elsewhere. Complexity does not intimidate Deb—it excites her.
To an untrained eye, the wedding industry may appear uncomplicated. A wedding is the simple sum of all its parts: wedding = guest list + venue + music + decor + florals + dress... But Deb is, of course, not satisfied by this simple equation. "I feel like the wedding industry is ripe for redesigning itself", she explains. Deb is throwing caution to the wind with her own complex equation—and it takes both experience and an eye for the nuance to redefine the variables and constants, and along with them the operators and functions.
And yet, in her mathematical approach, Deb always accounts for a necessary constant: emotion. After conducting extensive research on the wedding industry, Deb concluded that "emotion" was underutilised in the brand positioning of wedding planners. The duty of a designer, Deb explains, is to translate emotion into something tangible. To make a complex emotion comprehensible. Conveyance of emotion is so central to her offering as a wedding planner that Deb named her brand after the thinking, "Casa Officialé delle Emozioné"—translated in English to "The Official House of Emotion".
In mathematics, a convolution is an operation on two functions that produces a third function. A wedding is the transformation of two individuals into a couple ready to begin a future together. In such a convolution, Deb is aware of the array of emotions that need to be brought to the forefront. "Each couple has a very unique love story to tell. My challenge is to be able to make that come forward—not to bring about some other fantasy that has nothing to do with what they love." A beautiful sentiment, but a difficult one to execute. I ask Deb how exactly she digests this information and translates it into a design, a mood, an experience. Deb's eyes light up at this question. It hits the spot—that rare intersection between her analytical mindset and her creative spirit. For Deb, the process is perhaps even more captivating than the finished product.
Data translation
Each couple, Deb explains, contains a huge sum of data. Her job is to:
1. Extract the information.
2. Analyse the findings.
3. Transform the raw data into something beautiful.
Deb begins by ascertaining the primary information: when, where, how many guests are invited. She then layers on secondary information: taste, style, personality. Deb wants to get to know her clients as individuals, and as a couple. Her questions are extensive: "Where do you shop for homeware? What is your favourite way to spend time together? What do you like doing when you're alone? What kind of music do you listen to? Do you prefer to travel locally or globally?" Deb's background in UX design trained her to never design by assumption and so, her wedding planning process always goes back to its roots—the client. It's important that her client remains informed and in control. Deborah leans in, "My process, in essence, is to bring my clients in as collaborators."
Deb encourages her clients to pick an anomalous reference point for their wedding. This becomes a motif that can be explored and abstracted to produce the unique look and feel for their big day—the "wedding personality" as Deb calls it. If a couple were choose the House of Chanel as their inspiration, Deb would begin her research at last season's runway—not the bridal collection but the ready-to-wear, she distinguishes—inspecting the concept, the materials, the repeated design devices. Deb deduces that Chanel corresponds to a lot of tweed, sparkles—"but only in the right places, carefully curated"—and pearls. Deb's innovative mind would then set about applying these familiar trademarks in an unfamiliar setting—wedding design.
For her own destination wedding on the banks of Lake Como, Deb was inspired by the concept of a Baroque artwork. The inspiration manifested first in the materials she chose for her decor: the colour palette, the mixing of metals, and the use of worn things versus the new. Her invitation was finished in an antique gold and opened up like a gate, echoing the entrance to the villa in which guests would be staying. Invitees had to peel through different layers of the invitation and hidden inside was a miniature colour palette, a subtle hint to what guests could expect from the day—the smallest details always hold the highest impact. As for the table setting, Deb leaned into the Baroque ideology with Roman busts and fresh fruit. She used nuts as an alternative way to add texture to the table because, Deb asserts, "you should bring in natural wonders. I don't think that table decor starts and ends just with florals."
Why does an invitation have to just be a card? Why do centrepieces have to be florals? Deb's willingness to experiment with the unconventional—tweed for example—is precisely what sets her apart. The wedding industry is ready for an injection of the irregular and the innovative, and Deb is seeing that it gets it.
Re-defining luxury
Deb promises to provide her clients with an inimitable celebration of their one-of-a-kind love. It is this promise of the bespoke that makes OFFICIALÉ deserving of its luxury label—a label that has become liberally applied. Deb agrees, "The term 'luxury' has been heavily overused, especially in my industry." At a recent convention for wedding planners, Deb sought out the agreed definition of luxury amongst the wedding industry. The answers she found varied: "Luxury is abundance, volume, excess." Deb could see sense in the definition, but worried this thinking was irresponsible. "Luxury is creating a fantasy." This did not sit right with Deborah either—should luxury not feel undoubtedly real? Unsatisfied with her findings, Deb analysed her own perception of luxury and landed on two definitions...
1. Luxury is the effortlessness that comes from mastering a craft.
"A luxury brands creates a product or a collection that is so refined one cannot see the amount of work that went into it. You would love to own it simply because it's a work of art. You don't see a stitch of imperfection because of the abundance of time and love devoted to it. I love the idea of effortlessness derived from mastery. I would love for my couples to experience this level of service. An effortless look is actually an effort full look, right?"
2. Luxury is the priceless quality of giving and receiving the world's most intentional work.
"Luxury and value are almost synonymous. You always think that to have a luxurious experience, you have to spend so much money. But there is a difference between money and value. Something that is valuable to one person might not be valuable to another. Instead of placing a value on my work which might not resonate with somebody else, I want to be priceless. There is the luxury of giving in my role. I want to give the luxury of my most intentional work."
More than the sum of its parts
Deb's definitions of luxury speak to her unwavering devotion to her craft and to her clients. Her weddings are not fleeting dates in the diary but are instead opportunities to share in a memorable, meaningful celebration. Deb relishes the time spent with her clients in the planning process but worries that too often precious time in the lead-up to the big day is shunned because the planner, and as a result the couple, are too focused on the singular moment at the top of the aisle. "I noticed that planners seem to focus on just that one day—not even a full 24 hours. The fact that, in a year of planning, you're only focused on 24 hours feels wasteful."
Deb rejects the narrative of the wedding day as the apogee. Her role is not to co-ordinate a singular day of celebration but rather escort her clients on a journey throughout their wedding year that benefits their physical and emotional wellness. This journey is designed to strengthen their bond as a couple and their circle of treasured friends and family. "A wedding is a celebration of a couple's love. But it's also a love story between them and the family and friends that have supported them." As such, Deb dedicates time within the planning process to gather loved ones together to simply talk about what is to come. "Preparing for a wedding is a chapter where people are bringing a couple from one point into the next and I would love to be there as the guide, the mentor, the coach, and the best friend." Deb concludes, "A wedding is an opportunity to strengthen relationships between each other, with your own self, and with those closest to you. I hope that my couples will come away from the celebration transformed not just by the 24 hours in which they get to be the bride and groom, but by a full year of appreciating the value of taking care of themselves and connecting with their people. The wedding is not a final destination, but a journey of preparation for a new life together."
It is this understanding of all that a wedding is, and all that it can be, that has become the defining piece of Deb's equation. In an industry rooted in tradition, Deborah has entered as a new variable.
