Welcome to Art of Eloping! Since 2020, we’ve been a home for couples planning to elope, featuring the best elopement and intimate wedding vendors in the biz, robust destination guides, real love stories, and plenty of tips, how-tos, and interviews with elopement experts on our blog. We celebrate ALL love stories.

Nice to Meet You

Hi! I’m Kim Olsen, the co-founder of Art of Eloping and the author of the newly-published book Your Wedding, Your Way: Destination Elopements, Intimate Ceremonies, and Other Nontraditional Nuptial (Chronicle Books, 2022), an extensive book on how to elope, featuring the many ways it looks today and how to pull it off. Maybe it’s a chic courthouse elopement, maybe it’s a surprise wedding, or maybe it’s an intimate dinner party at home using your grandmother’s crystal—it’s all about celebrating your love, your way. Order a copy for yourself or someone you love here!

The idea for Art of Eloping came before the book. In 2018, I saw a huge gap in the wedding industry—more and more couples were eloping, and more and more vendors were pivoting from doing big weddings to elopements (or both), but there wasn’t one dedicated online resource to connect them with each other across all settings, whether urban or a forest or Bali.

After nearly two years of extensive interviews with couples to determine what tools they need to plan their dream elopement, and with vendors to determine what they need to be successful in an emerging industry, we launched on February 14, 2020, on the cusp of a pandemic that would broaden this wedding space in ways we never could have predicted. 

I hope you enjoy poking around here, whether it be on the blog for inspiration and how-tos; exploring our niche collective of experienced elopement vendors who can help make the day run as smoothly as possible; or, my favorite (because, travel), diving into the destination guides, which are intentionally long and chock-full of information covering how to elope given your chosen destination, from the best time to visit to marriage laws to the best vendors located there. We’re constantly expanding these, so if you have a request for a city, drop me a line at kim@artofeloping.com.

Before I dove into the world of elopements, I worked in journalism, covering lifestyle topics (including weddings) at Washingtonian magazine in DC as an editor, and freelancing for Runner’s World and Pittsburgh Magazine. I’m originally from northwestern Pennsylvania, lived in Pittsburgh for many years, where I got my undergraduate and master’s degree in nonfiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and now reside in northern Virginia with my partner and two cats.

Cheers to eloping!

Kim | Co-founder & Editor