Introducing 100 Layer Cake: Behind the Veil

100 Layer Cake, 15 years later...

Welcome to Behind the Veil! First off, we’re SOOO happy to have you here as we make our entrance into the world of Substack! 🥂✨ Think of it as the wise sister to 100 Layer Cake—she dives beneath the surface of weddings and lifestyle content with Q&As, chats (ask her anything, or ask her friends!) and in-depth guides.

If you’re like us, you’re constantly pinning, saving, and reposting inspirational images. Your dream home, your dream wardrobe. This gorg tablescape, that pretty dessert. Maybe even a DIY that doesn’t look too, well, DIY. Have you ever wondered what’s behind those pretty pics that send your heart a flutter?

In Behind the Veil, we take a behind the scenes look into weddings, parties, trends, travel, and ways to infuse every day with a little more magic—whether you’re a bride, a planner, a hostess… or simply love a good party. By 100 Layer Cake.. All brought to you by me, Amanda Dawbarn, founder of 100 Layer Cake, and our editors. After all, who better to ask than those who have been reporting on it for 15 years?!

But first, how about a look back? Like WAY back.

As approach our 5,000^th post on 100 Layer Cake (which doesn’t include the motherhood and family content we shared on our site 100 Layer Cakelet for years), it seems fitting to take a look back on all we’ve seen and shared since our launch in 2009.

Let’s start with the first photo we ever posted, in our first blog post sharing what 100LC was all about:

Jillian, me and Kristina.. three couples that started planning their weddings around the same time, back in 2009. Sharing inspiration, resources, projects, with one another and then one day saying…let’s share all this with the world! And the rest is history.

And here’s the first wedding we ever published. This is all still live on our site and floating around Pinterest for all times, by the way:

Liss and Tyler were actually married in Mexico back in 2007. We could never have anticipated how far the DIY ceremony backdrop would come! Photo by Melissa Kaseman.

Here’s the latest Real Wedding we published, as of this writing:

Bailey and JP had a sweet yet glamorous estate wedding in Arkansas. Photo by Taylor Renee’ Photos.

Photography sure has changed, huh? But this is what we love about chronicling weddings: wedding photos aren’t just about who is in them, they’re representative of this whole cultural moment, the era they’re in, what people found important and why, both from the eyes of the couple and the experts shaping the industry itself.

Let’s take our first Color Board, for example. (Fun fact: Our color boards were our first content to go viral on Pinterest.)

Our first color board. The cross process editing on those photos? Highly coveted. Highly. If you were a fan of this style, let us know in the Chat, maybe share some of your own wedding photos or the inspiration pics behind them?

Collage-style moodboards are having a moment in 2024, but when we first starting making them back in 2009, it was all about a few photos and a color palette. We posted tons of these, plus countless DIY projects, and Real Weddings in our first year alone. We were on a roll.

Our DIY paper roses from vintage book pages was a big deal on Pinterest in 2011.

Around that time, I started to post about my travels, beginning with our proposal story in Lake Como:

A proposal in Italy, the beginning of a beautiful love affair… not just with my husband, but Italy, too.

It was always exciting to share a peek into our own milestones in between all of the other Real Weddings and inspiration we shared. We all posted our own weddings, and as the years went by, our motherhood journeys and kids parties, too.

By then we were on Color Board #46. We were invited to cool events, getting sponsored, growing our team, and sharing other life celebrations.

Oh, and we were painting everything gold. Obviously.

Photo by Sara Logan.

How many vases did you paint gold in 2014?

At this point, we were posting 12x a week, and the weddings only got more impressive.

Mid-mod weddings and Palm Springs, were in, and honestly, they never went out of style. Photo by Steve Cowell.

Amanda, Kristina, Jillian, and our writer Angela at The Cream Event, 2015.

We not only got to attend fun events, we started hosting our own, and we landed a big partnership with Crate and Barrel that allowed us to get more creative than ever:

Our first modern bridal shower inspiration shoot with Crate and Barrel, circa 2015.

Crate and Barrel showcased 100 Layer Cake in their popular print catalog, along with our favorite entertaining ideas. The next year, they invited us to do a line of paper party items with our name, which sold out in their stores across the country. A dream!

Our paper party line with Crate and Barrel, 2018.

Real Weddings, of course, were more fun to share than ever:

Paper flowers from Amy and Matt’s wedding were the big pins of 2016. Photo by Isabelle Selby.

While by 2016 we had shared plenty of weddings with hefty price tags (we’re from California, what do you expect?), we also loved giving our readers a peek into pulling off a beautiful wedding on a budget. This $10,000 Maine wedding was pretty impressive.

This sweet Portland-area forest wedding was planned for $12k. (Here’s the post, if you’re curious.) Photo by Jonnie + Garrett.

We started producing more and more original content with photo shoots, and needed our own space. We saw a need for an event venue on the westside of LA, so on a whim we decided to open a venue ourselves! We called it Festoon, and we immediately began decorating it and opened it to the city of Los Angeles for intimate weddings, birthday parties, kid events, corporate and brand events. It was well received by the media and our local community of party-throwers.

(Photo of Festoon: Marisa Vitale)

Around this time I was knee deep in home renovations, sharing all the details of my project like this, this and this.

Fast forward to 2020. The industry shut down due to the pandemic. In the midst of multiple projects ourselves, (like our new client-vendor matchmaker idea that we had started, MatchBook) we suddenly had a lot to think about. Do we try to keep going? Do we pivot? Ultimately, my co-founder Jillian decided that running an event space was her dream, and wanted to focus solely on building Festoon. And in the height of the pandemic, our other partner Kristina took a break to focus on her family. We decided that 12 years together was a good run, actually a GREAT one. We learned SO much, made so many great memories and laughed together more times than we could ever count, and are still good friends.

My passion has always been in design, events, and entertaining, so I decided to keep 100 Layer Cake moving forward, and finish developing our vendor-client event matching app, MatchBook with our team. 100 Layer Cake lived on. And eventually, a “new normal” evolved, and weddings were fun to share for new reasons—whether it was the pandemic born “micro wedding” or the many couples who waited and then went all out with an over-the-top celebration. 2022 was the biggest year in weddings since the 1980’s with 2.5 million weddings planned!

Our sister site MatchBook finally launched in 2023

Both the events industry and online publishing have changed so much in the last five years. We started to see our old blogging friends launch Substacks as a way to connect on a more personal level with the communities that truly support them and their work. We thought it was about time we did the same.

So here we are. In 2024, still sharing all the Real Weddings that you love, on 100 Layer Cake. Connecting vendors and couples with each other via our long-awaited platform MatchBook, which took the vendor booking industry by storm. (If you’re engaged, you can post a request to be matched with a hand-picked wedding Pro right here. Event Pros, if you haven’t yet, be sure to join here to start matching with engaged couples!)

And now, here I am sharing our story in a deeper way with Behind The Veil.

Thank you so much for being along for the ride… We hope you learn more, and feel more inspired, than ever before.

XOXO,

Amanda Dawbarn, Founder of 100 Layer Cake