Publications
Partners
Cape Town - Event planner and creative Tony Peng gave The Juice the inside scoop about one of the most talked about local weddings of the year, between Wayde van Niekerk and Chesney Campbell.
Tony is a part of the team at Envie, a multifaceted company that conceptualises special events. He was born in Bloemfontein where the wedding took place over the weekend.
The pair got engaged at the end of last year.
Here's a look at the newly married couple:
The businessman, who is also a consultant told The Juice about what it took to plan the wedding and what it was like working with the popular celebrity couple.
Here's our chat with Tony Peng:
(Photo: Stephanie de Jager)
What were some of the challenges you faced while planning a wedding in a venue as expansive as the Bloemfontein Botanical Gardens?
Ches loves nature and wanted a garden wedding, so when she saw the Bloemfontein Botanical Gardens, she knew that that was where they were going to get married. To be honest, we didn't really face any major challenges except for the change in weather during setup. The wind was a slight problem, but everything came together even better than expected. The Botanical Gardens were extremely helpful and made it easy to coordinate and work with.
On social media posts following the event, you mentioned that the event was a secret, did guests know that they were attending a wedding and how tricky was it to keep the secret while planning everything?
The guests that were invited all knew that it was C&W's wedding. It was a secret because our couple wanted to keep their big day as intimate as possible without any media/ paparazzi involved, hence the "secret" wedding. I normally document the journey of setting up a wedding for my clients to see the behind the scenes process and since I couldn't expose who the wedding was for, I had to call it the Envie "secret" wedding.
What was it like working with Wayde and Chesney?
With Wayde's busy schedule, all he said during our initial meeting was that I should make Chesney happy (that was his brief). Walking this journey with Ches has been nothing less than fun and amazing. She is probably one of the most relaxed brides I have ever had to work with. Nothing was an issue; she didn't even have pictures of what she wanted... Her brief to us was she wanted something elegant, simple and timeless, not over-the-top or too dramatic. The style we created for their wedding truly reflected who they are as individuals, beautiful, graceful and fun. They trusted us fully to conceptualise and execute their big day and based on the reactions and compliments we've received, I believe we got it right.
