Rima & Richard

How did you choose the color palette for your wedding?

We really took a “yes, and” mentality when thinking through the bold & colorful aesthetic we wanted for our wedding! We love bright colors, patterns, and aesthetics that make you do a double take. Our apartment is painted all different colors and crammed full of DIY projects, and that’s the energy we wanted to bring to our wedding.

An idea we latched onto very early on was to have our big wedding party in different vivid colors. At the same time, we didn’t want it to look like it was just a rainbow. We struggled to find any inspiration that had the vibe we wanted, so we ordered a ton of Azazie bridesmaid dress swatches and tried to find 10 colors that fit our vision. We even photoshopped photos of models in the dresses into the ceremony location to see what it would look like in the context of our wedding venue. This really helped us lock in our final color palette!

Our final palette had a festive but elegant balance of vibrant warm and cool colors with a pop of yellow. Our own outfits were lighter, yet bold colors to stand out from our wedding party, and we had colorful accessories like the boutonnière, tie, bouquet, and hair clip to pull all the shades together! Everything else fell into place from there with all of our decor being a slightly wider palette based on the wedding party’s colors with a few pops of lighter wildflower-inspired colors!

What made you choose your venue and theme?

From browsing different types of venues, we knew pretty early on that we wanted a wedding with lots of greenery and plants, without the stress of unpredictable Michigan weather! The atrium garden of the Westin Southfield ended up being so wise because it POURED during our reception! We actually first found out about our venue in a random Facebook group where someone shared pictures of their wedding in the atrium! We called them right away and heard they were renovating in June 2024 but had a couple of May dates still open. We toured it virtually and loved it, and had Rima’s parents tour in person before we decided to go for it! 

Our overall theme for our wedding (and life in general) is best described as colorful and crafty! We love everything bright and vibrant and colorful, so traditional wedding themes with a limited color palette would not have felt authentic to who we are, and all our guests would have been shocked! All our vendors kept asking what our color scheme was and we kept having to say “all the colors!”. There were definitely some skeptics since this is an unusual route and goes against all conventional advice, but we were confident we could pull it off and are so happy with how it all came together. 

In the same vein, we knew we wanted to do a lot of DIY elements for our ceremony and reception. This included making 180 miniature pieces of pottery for our guests’ table assignments and favors, having a live painter capturing a moment from our ceremony, and including a “first craft” moment at the end of our ceremony that became a collaborative project with all our guests where everyone was asked to add their own design to a huge canvas. 

Can you give us an honest SuitShop review?

When we were looking for outfit options for our wedding party to fit the color scheme we wanted, we realized that so few suit companies offer fun colors to begin with! When we came across the SuitShop website, we saw burnt orange, burgundy, teal, and green suits offered, and were excited about that variety. The gender and size-inclusive options made it extra attractive as we had a mixed gender wedding party wearing suits. We’re especially lucky to live near the Boston showroom, so we came in to have a consultation with Allison where she told us about all the custom colors that we could consider—which was a complete game changer for our entire wedding process.

The quality and affordability of the suits, paired with the quality of the service we received were unparalleled—we were sold on SuitShop! We both went to MIT for undergrad and Rima is currently a PhD student there, so we were extra excited about the company’s MIT roots!(SuitShop's co-founder, Diana, is a MIT Sloan School of Management graduate.) We then got a ton of the Made-to-Order suit color swatches and matched them up with our Azazie dress swatches to pair the groomsfolks up with a bridesmaid in the same color. This worked remarkably well! We were also so excited to have Richard in a fun color that would stand out from the rest of the party and SuitShop’s options really enabled that vision. We’ve since recommended SuitShop to so many others, especially those looking for a pop of color. Rima found out midway through our wedding planning process that she was going to be interviewing for faculty positions at universities so she got herself a SuitShop suit for job interviews as well!

Do you have any advice for marriers to be?

We found it incredibly rewarding to make our wedding meaningful and unique to us. We started our planning process by throwing out the traditional playbook and prioritizing what felt the most meaningful to us. We ditched all the traditions and rules that didn’t fit for us: restrictions on color schemes, matching numbers of people on each side of a wedding party, wedding parties split by gender, etc. None of those things felt good to us or accurate to what we wanted and our relationships with our friends! Our final day felt much more real and authentic to who we are.

Since we come from different cultural backgrounds, we also spent a lot of time deciding what elements we liked and didn’t like from each culture's traditional wedding celebrations and also thought about new traditions we could introduce that would be meaningful to us and the result was so worth it. We planned out a very cute intimate ceremony heavily involving our family and friends, celebrating our story, and crafting!

We were definitely a little nervous about how our eclectic ceremony would be received but we were so pleasantly surprised at how much people loved it and how it helped others reframe what could happen in a wedding. People tell you things have to be done a certain way because of norms but at the end of the day those really don’t matter, do things in a way that’s authentic to you and makes you happy! Your wedding is about you and your relationship and we hope that examples like this help others feel empowered to do the celebration in the way that feels most representative of you and your marriage. 

If you loved this SuitShop Real Wedding as much as we did, check out another feature over on Green Wedding Shoes.