On the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman, Cherie, Visualist’s founder, listens intently to Deborah Kugler, founder and lead designer of the intimate luxury destination wedding service OFFICIALE. Cherie sips a mocktail. Deborah, hungry after a full day of meetings, orders the afternoon tea. OFFICIALE is both new and novel, launched at the very end of 2023 with a refreshing view of what a wedding can and should be. Speaking with Cherie is one of the first times Deborah has said the “scribbled notes” and “simmering thoughts” of her venture out loud. The pair talk about being female founders, recent adventures in Vegas, distilling art into data, and the future of the industry. Before the teapot is empty, a call across the Atlantic is arranged. A month later, on video, Deb, as she introduces herself, greets me like an old friend, and we start with the origins of her systematic creativity.
A radical root
Deb is new to weddings, but not to being an entrepreneur. Her first creative hustle was in fourth grade, on an IBM PC her father brought home preloaded with Print Shop Deluxe. She realized that making a composition was simply a matter of selecting and arranging compatible elements: font, image, border. Her artwork found a fanbase among her classmates, and soon she was trading it for their lunch money. Font plus image plus format equals a work of art. She still works this way. “I love analyzing the data behind something artistic, and making sure that something scientific is imaginative.”
She had a real affinity for math and science, but chose her studies by what she wanted to do rather than what she was told she should, and studied communication art. Her parents would have preferred something more traditional, namely medicine, law, or business. She talked them round with the idea that she could go into broadcast media, then quietly chose the path less explored, visual communication. A pattern, I am beginning to notice. On a professor’s advice that she would suit New York, she made the 8,000-mile move in 2000 to study her masters at Pratt.
She landed a job as a product designer before graduating and was soon promoted to head of design. She moved to a graphic-design role at a marketing firm and made no secret of wanting to become a director there. Three months in, she won the company an eight-million-dollar contract. The role was hers. Today she is the regional design director for PepsiCo in North America. She calls the journey “atypical.” “You hear luminaries in design who had a stellar projection from start to finish, as though the carpet had been rolled out. For me the road was clunky and jagged. Sometimes it had missing parts, and I had to throw myself into the next leg to make it here.” Her job, in essence, is to make things beautiful, and her parents came to understand it takes more than an eye. It rests on what she calls “a robust systemic thought process” she has spent years refining.
An emotional science
Deb appreciates beauty and refuses to stop at the surface. She wants to dissect it, find the mechanics, and apply them elsewhere. Complexity does not intimidate her; it excites her. To an untrained eye a wedding looks simple, the sum of guest list, venue, music, decor, florals, dress. Deb is not satisfied by that equation. “The wedding industry is ripe for redesigning itself.” She is redefining the variables, and she keeps one constant that she found underused across the field: emotion. A designer’s duty, she says, is to translate emotion into something tangible, to make a complex feeling comprehensible. It is so central to her work that she named the brand for it: Casa Officiale delle Emozioni, the Official House of Emotion.
In math, a convolution is an operation on two functions that produces a third. A wedding, she notes, is a convolution too, two people becoming a couple. “Each couple has a very unique love story to tell. My challenge is to make that come forward, not to bring about some other fantasy that has nothing to do with what they love.” A beautiful sentiment, and a hard one to execute. When I ask how she digests all that and turns it into a mood, her eyes light up. It is the rare intersection of her analytical mind and her creative spirit, and she clearly finds the process more captivating than the result.
Deb rejects the wedding day as the peak. The year is the project.
Data translation
Each couple, she explains, contains a huge sum of data, and her job runs in three steps: extract the information, analyze the findings, and transform the raw data into something beautiful. She begins with the primary facts, when, where, how many, then layers on the secondary: taste, style, personality. Her UX-design training taught her never to design by assumption, so the process always returns to the client. Her questions are extensive. “Where do you shop for homeware? What’s your favorite way to spend time together? What do you do when you’re alone? What music do you listen to? Do you prefer to travel locally or globally?” As she leans in: “My process, in essence, is to bring my clients in as collaborators.”
She asks each couple for an anomalous reference point, a motif she can abstract into what she calls a “wedding personality.” A couple who chose Chanel would send her to last season’s ready-to-wear, “not the bridal collection,” she distinguishes, to read the concept and the repeated devices: tweed, pearls, sparkle “only in the right places, carefully curated.” Then she applies those familiar trademarks somewhere unfamiliar. For her own wedding on Lake Como, the reference was a Baroque artwork. It showed up first in the materials, the color palette, the mixing of metals, worn things against new. The invitation was finished in antique gold and opened like a gate, echoing the entrance to the villa where guests would stay; hidden inside was a miniature color palette, a quiet hint of the day to come. The tables carried Roman busts and fresh fruit, with nuts for texture, “because you should bring in natural wonders. I don’t think table decor starts and ends with florals.” Why does an invitation have to be just a card? Why do centerpieces have to be florals? That willingness to experiment is exactly what sets her apart.
Redefining luxury
OFFICIALE promises an inimitable celebration of a one-of-a-kind love, and that promise of the bespoke is what earns it the luxury label, a label Deb thinks has been badly overused. “The term has been heavily overused, especially in my industry.” At a planners’ convention she went looking for the agreed definition and found only variations she could not accept: luxury as excess, luxury as fantasy. So she wrote her own two.
First, luxury is the effortlessness that comes from mastering a craft. “A luxury brand creates something so refined you can’t see the work that went into it. You don’t see a stitch of imperfection, because of the abundance of time and love devoted to it. An effortless look is actually an effortful look.” Second, luxury is the priceless quality of giving and receiving the most intentional work. “There’s a difference between money and value. Something valuable to one person might not be to another. Instead of placing a price that might not resonate, I want to be priceless. There is a luxury of giving in my role. I want to give the luxury of my most intentional work.”
More than the sum of its parts
Those definitions point back to her real objection to the industry, which is one of scope. “Planners seem to focus on just that one day, not even a full 24 hours. In a year of planning, being focused on 24 hours feels wasteful.” She rejects the wedding day as the apogee. Her job, as she sees it, is to escort a couple through the whole wedding year in a way that benefits their wellbeing and strengthens their circle. She sets aside time in the process simply to gather loved ones and talk about what is coming. “A wedding is a celebration of a couple’s love, and also a love story between them and the family and friends who supported them. I’d love to be there as the guide, the mentor, the coach, and the best friend.”
Her conclusion is the defining term of her equation. “I hope my couples come away transformed, not just by the 24 hours in which they get to be the bride and groom, but by a full year of learning to take care of themselves and connect with their people. The wedding is not a final destination. It’s a journey of preparation for a new life together.” In an industry rooted in tradition, Deborah has entered as a new variable.
Officialé is at casaofficiale.com and @casaofficiale.
