Amazon-themed marriage ceremony celebrates couple’s love of e-commerce

Eddie Levine and Jing Gao first met at an Atlanta e-commerce convention in 2016. Two years later, they shared their first kiss outdoors an Amazon vendor summit in New Orleans. And in 2020, Gao left her residence in Los Angeles to maneuver in with Levine in Chicago, bringing their e-commerce companies underneath one roof.

So it solely made sense that when it got here time to tie the knot, they turned to e-commerce for his or her inspiration. 

On Aug. 21, the couple tied the knot in Chicago, and the marriage reception was crammed with Amazon paraphernalia. On the reception, friends have been seated at tables designated by a ten-digit code used to search for merchandise on Amazon’s web site (generally known as an ASIN in vendor parlance). Wedding ceremony favors have been tiny Amazon packages, full with barcodes and crammed with treats, positioned in miniature procuring carts.

Attendees posed for images in entrance of a backdrop declaring “Jeddie (a mixture of the {couples}’ first names) Prime Day,” an homage to Amazon’s annual summer season procuring bonanza.

Though the references have been somewhat bit esoteric, not less than the couple was assured that a few of their friends would perceive them.

Levine gave a toast in the course of the reception. “I stated, ‘Final however definitely not least, e-commerce introduced us collectively. If now we have met you on account of e-commerce, instantly or not directly, rise up,” he advised CNBC in an interview. 

“Actually half of our friends stood up.”

Not everybody obtained it, although.

“The bartender was like, ‘Are you able to inform me what the deal is with all of the Amazon-inspired stuff?,” stated Robyn Johnson, CEO of digital advertising and marketing company Market Blueprint, and a good friend of the couple who attended the marriage.

Each Levine and Gao have labored in e-commerce for greater than a decade. Levine is president and co-founder of Hub Dub, which helps manufacturers handle their companies on-line and offers logistics providers. Gao runs an Amazon enterprise promoting residence décor merchandise.

Levine and Gao are a part of an energetic group of sellers, consultants and repair suppliers that is sprung up round Amazon’s third-party market. Launched in 2000, {the marketplace} has grow to be a centerpiece of its dominant e-commerce enterprise, because it now accounts for greater than half of on-line retail gross sales. As of 2021, there have been greater than six million third-party sellers worldwide on the Amazon market, in line with analysis agency Marketplace Pulse.

Gao met Levine at an Atlanta convention by means of a marketing consultant who was serving to her together with her Amazon enterprise, and who additionally occurred to be Levine’s good friend.

They did not hit it off straight away. However over the next months, Gao and Levine continued to run into one another on the e-commerce convention circuit and developed a friendship.

Their friendship turned romantic in June 2018 at Amazon’s Boost conference for third-party sellers in New Orleans. The convention coincided with Gao’s twenty ninth birthday, so she invited Levine and a few of their associates out for an evening of barhopping in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter. That evening, they kissed for the primary time.

On the final day of the convention, they went for a protracted stroll by means of the streets of New Orleans, a reminiscence they each half-jokingly describe as their “five-hour marriage contract.”

“We have been contracting the place we will reside, the household we will deliver, the faith we will have within the family, training,” Gao stated. “We have been lining it up.”

“Primarily based on 5 hours of forwards and backwards, we discovered we have been not less than a good match,” Levine added.

A couple of days later, Levine flew from Chicago to Los Angeles for his or her first date. He returned to Chicago the next day in time for a 10-day journey in Europe.

They continued courting long-distance for the subsequent two years, till June 2020. It was the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, they usually might not safely hop on a airplane for his or her bi-weekly visits. They determined it was the appropriate time to maneuver in collectively, and Levine proposed to Gao at Niagara Falls that September.

Levine was the one who got here up with the concept for an Amazon-inspired marriage ceremony.

“We went by means of all these concepts, they usually have been so boring,” Levine stated. “I needed one thing that showcased our background and gave homage to the place we got here from.”

Levine, who’s Jewish, selected Jeff Cohen, an Amazon worker who beforehand labored for Vendor Labs, which held the convention the place they met, to function a witness once they signed their marriage ceremony contract, generally known as the ketubah. And friends who helped join the couple at Amazon occasions had particular “matchmaker” indicators on the again of their chairs.

They jokingly toyed with the concept of turning their marriage ceremony right into a full-blown Amazon convention, with a software program firm providing, in jest, to sponsor the occasion.

“I stated, ‘No, I’m not getting you a sales space at our marriage ceremony,” Levine stated.