A morning in March, an hour before the first guests arrived.
A morning in March, an hour before the first guests arrived.
Silvercoast started in 2018, in the front room of Akua Asare's father's house in Cape Coast, with one wedding (her cousin's) and a notebook full of phone numbers.
Akua had been an event manager at a hotel for seven years before she resigned — she likes to say "fled" — to plan that first wedding properly. It was a small ceremony for forty people, in a garden, with a chef who arrived ninety minutes late and a power cut at exactly the moment of the vows. Akua's cousin, who has not stopped retelling the story, swears it was the best wedding she has ever been to.
By the end of that year there were three of them: Akua, her childhood friend Yaa (who, until then, had been a textile designer in Kumasi) and Naa, a stylist who had been planning her own wedding when she walked into Akua's parents' kitchen one Sunday and started taking over the seating chart. The house moved out of the front room and into a flat above a bakery, which is still our office today; it still smells, intermittently and beautifully, of bread.
There are six of us now. Akua, Yaa, Naa, and three women who joined between 2020 and 2024: Esi (operations, the person who actually makes things happen), Adwoa (florals, who trained in Bologna), and Selina (the on-day captain, who was a stage manager at the National Theatre for nine years before she joined us).
We are a small house, and we are going to stay one. We have turned down more weddings than we have hosted in every year since 2021.
We have hosted, as of this morning, eighty-six weddings. We have hosted weddings in Cape Coast, Accra, Aburi, Elmina, Kumasi, Takoradi, Lagos, Abidjan, and — twice — in London and Lisbon for clients with one foot here and another there. We have hosted weddings with thirty guests and weddings with three hundred. The smallest one is the one we talk about most.
Akua's cousin's wedding, in a garden, for forty people. Two power cuts, a late chef, one perfect afternoon.
We move into our first proper office. Yaa & Naa join. We host nine weddings that year.
Our work on Esi-Naa's wedding is published. Bookings triple. We deliberately do not.
We cap the calendar at twelve weddings a year. We have not exceeded it since.
Six women, eighty-six weddings hosted, an office that still smells of bread on most mornings.
— It is your day, not ours. We are very good at our jobs because we work in the background, not the foreground. If our website is more memorable to you than your wedding, we have got it wrong.
— Custom is the default. No two of the eighty-six weddings we have hosted look the same. They aren't supposed to. The packages are starting points, not destinations.
— The aunties are right, mostly. Listen to your elders, especially on the day. They know things about hosting that no planner ever will.
— Tired is not a wedding aesthetic. If you are too tired to enjoy your own ceremony, we have planned the day wrong.