Wedding strategy
Some celebrations only exist in one place. We help Brazilians living abroad bring their wedding home.
The case for coming home
A wedding in Europe is an event. It has a start time, an end time, and a venue that would like everyone out by midnight. A wedding in Brazil is a night that refuses to end, and everybody in the room understands this before they arrive.
This is not nostalgia talking. It is a difference in how celebration works. Your godmother will dance. Food will keep arriving long after the last person was hungry. Someone will take over the sound system at two in the morning and nobody will stop them. The people who raised you will be in the room instead of on a screen propped against a wine glass.
Your partner has heard you describe all of this. He has never once seen it. That is the real argument for marrying in Brazil, and in our experience it is the only argument that survives the first difficult month of planning.
The distance
Three vendors have not replied in nine days. A contract has arrived in Portuguese with a clause your partner cannot read and you are no longer certain you understand. The quote has moved because the euro has moved. Your mother has begun making decisions on your behalf, kindly, and she is already two decisions ahead of you.
You left Brazil some years ago. You still speak the language and you still love the country, and yet you no longer know which photographer is reliable in that region, what a fair price looks like this year, or how long the paperwork actually takes. You are planning one of the most important days of your life in a place you know intimately and no longer know currently.
Nothing about that is a failure of organisation. It is a structural problem, and it is solved with strategy rather than with more hours spent on WhatsApp.
Ways of working
Every couple begins with the Strategy Session. What follows is yours to choose.
01
You send us a brief. We spend ninety minutes together building the architecture of your wedding from the ground up: budget structure, timeline, the criteria for choosing each vendor, and the legal route to being married. You receive a written strategy document afterwards that you will use for the rest of the year.
02
We sit down together every two weeks for the length of your planning, with support between sessions. Decisions get pressure tested, budgets get held to, and every contract is read and marked up before you sign it. You stay in control of your own wedding, with somebody beside you who knows the terrain.
03
You have planned it yourself and you want somebody to look properly before it is too late to change anything. We audit the whole plan, find the gaps, rank the real risks, and give you a decision list for the closing weeks. Best taken eight to twelve weeks out, while a bad contract can still be renegotiated.
Every engagement includes all preparation and written follow up, and sessions are held in Portuguese, English or German. We send our fees with our first reply, once we understand what you are planning.
Scope
What we do
We build your budget architecture and defend it. We write the brief for every vendor and set the criteria you should judge them against. We hold the timeline. We read your contracts commercially and tell you plainly where the risk sits. We map the legal and bureaucratic path to being married, including what your documents need to look like from abroad.
What we do not do
We do not contact your vendors, negotiate on your behalf, or sign anything in your name. We take no commission from anybody and we hold no relationships we need to protect, which is precisely why our advice is worth having. We are strategists rather than lawyers, and contract review is commercial guidance rather than legal advice.
The process
01
Vision
We start with the wedding you actually want rather than the one you think you can manage from here. Your story, your families, what the day has to feel like, and what you are each quietly unwilling to compromise on.
02
Strategy
We turn that into structure. A budget that holds, a timeline that respects the distance, a region and a shortlist that fit what you described, and a clear sequence for which decision has to come before which.
03
Experience
You arrive in Brazil already knowing what happens. Nothing is improvised in the final week, nobody is calling you about a deposit, and you spend the day where you should be, which is in it.
Who we are
We are a Brazilian couple living in Hamburg. Before Your Vows exists because we went through this ourselves, with the time difference, the unanswered messages, the contract nobody could fully read, and the particular guilt of asking family at home to handle things we could not handle from here.
We came out of it with something more useful than a nice day, which was a method. We understand Brazilian weddings from the inside and European expectations from the outside, and most of our work is translating honestly between the two without quietly losing either one.
This is not a market we studied. It is a life we have lived, and it is the reason we only sell advice we would have paid for ourselves.
Begin
Write to us with where you are, where you want to marry, and roughly when. We reply to everything personally.
Received
Thank you. Your note has reached us and we will reply personally, usually within two days. If anything is urgent in the meantime, write to us directly at hello@beforeyourvows.com.
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