Wedding planning can feel a little like online dating … endless options, questionable matches, and a lot of second-guessing. Kevin and Elle Lashley are here to fix that, launching Wed Society St. Louis as a swipe-right-only experience for St. Louis couples.
The married couple launched Wed Society St. Louis in November of 2025. It’s the local franchise of a national platform built to help connect couples to local and trusted vendors, as well as feature wedding content they can pull inspiration from. Each Wed Society franchise focuses on the local wedding community, and for the Lashleys, it’s no different. They only use St. Louis vendors and feature St. Louis weddings.
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“Wed Society is the heartbeat of the wedding community in the communities that they serve,” Kevin says. “St Louis is very unique in the fact that the amount of weddings is different from other other regions. We actually have about 3,000 more weddings than Kansas City.”
Wed Society was first founded 19 years ago by Kami Huddleston and Ashley Murphy, who had struggled with their own wedding planning. They created a publication to help other brides in their area, Oklahoma City, source local vendors. In 2023, Wed Society underwent a rebranding and started franchising. Wed Society closed 2025 with 30 markets in 19 states.
Kevin worked in sales at AT&T and in the nonprofit marketing world before creating the Wed Society St. Louis franchise.
“My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and she homeschools two of our four kids,” he says. “She was going to be like more of a support system as I ran the business, and then it turned out, after we ended up meeting with the team, she fell in love with not only the business and the concept, but also the people.”
Elle now works as the business’ community manager and is the mastermind behind the magazine Wed Society STL will be publishing in the coming months.
“My wife is such a good business-minded person and is able to manage our members so well. She’s very organized, and she does a lot of the administrative tasks on the back end. And she has a very great eye for style and understanding what our aesthetic is,” Kevin says. “I think both of us, together, and our skillsets align perfectly with what it takes to have a successful Wed Society market.”
One of the rules for franchises is that you have to go full-time even before you have members, which meant three months without any income for Kevin and his family.
“It was definitely a big, big leap of faith in order to do something like that, to leave my career behind, to essentially get back into the sales world,” Kevin says. “It was kind of like riding a bike,you know, getting back on the horse.”
Wed Society helps franchises get their website set up, get an LLC, and build the infrastructure of a business. The Lashleys also went through an 8-week training, with an entire week at headquarters in Oklahoma.
“It’s a very intense, eight hours a day training, where we talk about anything from the history of the business all the way through resources, sales tactics, and all the different ways that we can support our members,” Kevin says.
Since its official launch in November, Wed Society St. Louis now has 46 members, including photographers, wedding planners, and DJs. Those members are paying to join the platform and then connect with the couples who choose to use it. (The website is free for couples to access.) The goal, Kevin says, is to target the luxury wedding market.
One of their newfound members, wedding planner Madison Payne, explains that her experience with Wed Society has drawn her away from big box websites and towards local listings. She now has no plans to ever go back. The Lashleys helped her set up her page on the site, which now also features several weddings that Payne planned.
Kevin also helped connect bride Leah Hill with the DJ for her wedding, which she says is the choice that scared her the most when wedding planning.
“When we were beginning the wedding process, we had absolutely no idea where to begin,” Hill says. “But Kevin, he actually reached out to me on Instagram, because we had met each other a few years back just through connections with work. He was just instrumental in helping me find someone that we know we trust, and while we haven’t had the wedding yet, we’re very confident going into it, that it’s a good fit.”
While they only started four months ago, the Lashleys are already looking toward the future, with dreams to expand into Kansas City and possibly even Illinois.
