A couple who invited 50 brands and celebrities to their wedding in a ploy for gifts finally revealed the brands they heard back from, including Chick-fil-A and the Toronto Blue Jays
tiktok.com/@megiipierson
- In May, a couple blasted out their wedding invitations to a handful of brands and celebrities to see what free goodies they could get.
- They've gone viral in the process and recently shared the responses they've gotten back.
- While the gifts have been somewhat scant, the experiment has added levity to their wedding-planning process, they told Insider.
A Canadian couple who accidentally ordered their first batch of wedding invitations on the wrong paper stock decided to make the best of the blunder by blasting them out to roughly 50 of their favorite brands and celebrities in a ploy for free gifts.
And a series of TikToks about the hack, which they first began posting about in May, has gone viral. The couple are now sharing a handful of responses that have come in ahead of their August nuptials in Banff, Alberta.
Megan Pierson and Dylan Coney, who are both 26 and reside in Calgary, got engaged last March, they told Insider. Pierson works in radio and Coney in architecture, and both post lifestyle TikToks on Pierson's account, which has 156,000 followers.
The two first spotted the wedding invite hack elsewhere on the platform and decided to try it for themselves — especially after they received their misprinted invites.
"Instead of sending them back, I was like, 'Well, why don't we just use these,'" Coney told Insider. "Honestly, if we didn't accidentally make that mistake, we probably wouldn't have done it."
They mailed the invites to celebrities they either admired or brands they patronized across the US and Canada, they said, with Coney tracking down the addresses on a Facebook Group dubbed Wedding Celebrity Contact, which has 73,000 members.
Among the invitees were Chick-Fil-A, Disneyland, Wrangler, Red Lobster, Bath & Body Works, Shania Twain, Justin Bieber, Wayne Gretzky, Dolly Parton, and Tiger Woods. Pierson and Coney included a handwritten note with each invitation, expressing their admiration and noting that they would be documenting the experiment on social media.
Pierson said her dream response would be from Johnny Depp, while Coney's would be the country singer Hardy.
In late June, the couple finally started to hear back from their list of brands and celebrities.
"We weren't expecting anything, and the first one was a surprise," Pierson said in their first unboxing TikTok, as the couple revealed stuffed toys and socks from the restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A, as well as a gift card and tote bag. That video has clocked 4.6 million views.
Last week, they received their second response: a letter congratulating them from the Toronto Blue Jays – one of Coney's favorite teams ever since he was a young boy, he told Insider. "Unfortunately, no tickets or season tickets for that matter," Pierson joked.
After going viral, Pierson said several local businesses have also reached out, including a Colombian frozen food company and a Canadian T-shirt brand, asking to send them swag (and for the chance to be promoted on her TikTok.)
The couple clarified in a video last week that they don't expect (or even necessarily want) any celebrities to show up to their wedding. They also took the opportunity to respond to commenters who criticized them for soliciting freebies, saying that the haters were "just jealous."
Both told Insider that approaching the experiment with low expectations has made the viral responses all the more enjoyable. It has also added some much-needed levity to the wedding planning process.
"It's something so easy that you can do together that is so fun, as opposed to all the other wedding stuff, which can be be stressful," Coney said. "This is like random little surprises to break up the stress."