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 outdoor an Amazon supplier summit in New Orleans. And in 2020, Gao left her house in Los Angeles to transport in with Levine in Chicago, bringing their e-commerce companies underneath one roof.

So it handiest made sense that after it got here time to tie the knot, they became to e-commerce for his or her inspiration. 

On Aug. 21, the couple tied the knot in Chicago, and the marriage reception was once stuffed with Amazon paraphernalia. On the reception, visitors have been seated at tables designated via a ten-digit code used to appear up merchandise on Amazon’s web site (referred to as an ASIN in supplier parlance). Marriage ceremony favors have been tiny Amazon programs, entire with barcodes and stuffed with treats, positioned in miniature buying groceries carts.

Attendees posed for pictures in entrance of a backdrop stating “Jeddie (a mix of the {couples}’ first names) Top Day,” an homage to Amazon’s annual summer season buying groceries bonanza.

Even though the references have been slightly bit esoteric, no less than the couple was once assured that a few of their visitors would perceive them.

Levine gave a toast all over the reception. “I mentioned, ‘Closing however under no circumstances least, e-commerce introduced us in combination. If now we have met you because of e-commerce, at once or not directly, rise up,” he informed CNBC in an interview. 

“Actually half of of our visitors stood up.”

No longer everybody were given it, regardless that.

“The bartender was once like, ‘Are you able to inform me what the deal is with the entire Amazon-inspired stuff?,” mentioned Robyn Johnson, CEO of virtual advertising company Market Blueprint, and a chum 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 is helping manufacturers arrange their companies on-line and gives logistics products and services. Gao runs an Amazon trade promoting house décor merchandise.

Levine and Gao are a part of an energetic neighborhood of dealers, experts and repair suppliers that is sprung up round Amazon’s third-party market. Introduced in 2000, {the marketplace} has transform a centerpiece of its dominant e-commerce trade, because it now accounts for greater than half of of on-line retail gross sales. As of 2021, there have been greater than six million third-party dealers international at the Amazon market, consistent with analysis company Market Pulse.

Gao met Levine at an Atlanta convention thru a specialist who was once serving to her along with her Amazon trade, and who additionally took place to be Levine’s buddy.

They did not take to each other in an instant. However over the next months, Gao and Levine persisted to run into each and every different at the e-commerce convention circuit and evolved a friendship.

Their friendship became romantic in June 2018 at Amazon’s Spice up convention for third-party dealers in New Orleans. The convention coincided with Gao’s twenty ninth birthday, so she invited Levine and a few in their buddies out for an evening of barhopping in New Orleans’ ancient French Quarter. That night time, they kissed for the primary time.

At the final day of the convention, they went for a protracted stroll during 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 are going to are living, the circle of relatives we are going to deliver, the faith we are going to have within the family, training,” Gao mentioned. “We have been lining it up.”

“In accordance with 5 hours of from side to side, we discovered we have been no less than a tight fit,” 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 to come in time for a 10-day go back and forth in Europe.

They persisted relationship long-distance for the following two years, till June 2020. It was once the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, they usually may just now not safely hop on a aircraft for his or her bi-weekly visits. They made up our minds it was once the precise time to transport in in combination, and Levine proposed to Gao at Niagara Falls that September.

Levine was once the person who got here up with the speculation for an Amazon-inspired marriage ceremony.

“We went thru some of these concepts, they usually have been so dull,” Levine mentioned. “I sought after 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 prior to now labored for Supplier Labs, which held the convention the place they met, to function a witness once they signed their marriage ceremony contract, referred to as the ketubah. And visitors who helped attach the couple at Amazon occasions had particular “matchmaker” indicators at the again in their chairs.

They jokingly toyed with the speculation of turning their marriage ceremony right into a full-blown Amazon convention, with a instrument corporate providing, in jest, to sponsor the development.

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