Georgie Karloci

When Georgie Karloci picks up my FaceTime, she is pulled over at the side of a road somewhere in Sydney, stealing thirty minutes between commitments in the middle of what is clearly a relentless day. Despite that, she is warm and focused, entirely unbothered by the setting and talking to me from the driver’s seat with the same composed energy I imagine she brings to a stressed bride on her wedding day. It tells me a lot about who she is. This is someone who makes time, who shows up, and who operates with a calm authority that belies the scale of what she orchestrates.

As the founder of After The Rock, one of the most celebrated wedding planning and production businesses in Australia, Georgie has spent over a decade building a reputation for creating celebrations that are, in the truest sense, bespoke, with each one painstakingly tailored to the people at their heart. None of her weddings look the same, and that is entirely the point.

"There’s a thread through all of them, and a feeling and an emotion,” Georgie tells me, “but you won’t see the same candles or the same chairs or the same tablecloth. I really like to get to know a couple and who they are, and really express that in their wedding.” She pauses. “I’m looking for people who are trusting and willing to go on that journey with me.”

Georgie’s path into weddings revealed itself somewhat unexpectedly. At twenty-one she launched an award-winning corporate event management company and ran it for eight years. “But by the end I was really burnt out,” she tells me, “and I thought, that’s it for me. I’m never doing events again.” But when her brother, who was living in Singapore with his fiancée, decided that Georgie’s gift to him would be planning his wedding in the south of France, everything changed. This was 2012, before the proliferation of Instagram, before WhatsApp, before any of the tools that now make remote planning feasible. “I planned his wedding through blogs and middle-of-the-night phone calls with my rusty year-twelve French,” she recalls, laughing. When it all came together, something shifted. “It was so beautiful, and I realised how much I had loved doing it.”

She started with consulting, helping couples navigate the planning process, before quickly realising she couldn’t hold their hands for half the journey and then let go. And so, After The Rock was born, and with it a new approach to an industry that, at the time, Georgie describes as being unrecognisable from what it is today. “In 2013 it was almost naff to do weddings,” she says. “They weren’t cool, they weren’t very personal. Everything was corporate event stuff.” When she and her team came in, the industry was ready for a shake-up.

The turning point arrived in the form of Nicole Warne (the content-creator powerhouse behind Gary Pepper Girl) who hired Georgie to plan her wedding in New Zealand with just three months’ notice. It was a baptism of fire: fittings with Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, six dresses and an eclectic guest list that spanned Michael Jackson’s stylist to Nicole’s Central Coast friends. “Her eye was just incredible,” Georgie tells me. “She’d been to every event all around the world. She knew what had an impact and what didn’t.” Georgie’s own wedding had happened just three weeks prior, an event she had used to showcase ideas she had been carrying for years but hadn’t yet been able to execute. Think mass roses (unheard of at the time), a flash mob choir at the ceremony, an Italian-style flat round cake instead of the traditional tiers. “And then we went straight into Nicole Warne’s wedding,” she tells me, “before doing another really special wedding,” she pauses. “From there we had a very quick trajectory of growth.”

Today, After The Rock receives upwards of twenty enquiries per week and takes on just six to eight weddings per year. Fifty per cent of those are subject to NDAs, celebrations so private they will never see the light of day beyond those in attendance. The selectivity is deliberate. For Georgie, the work has to start with connection. “I want to know who they are,” she explains, describing how she looks for couples who will let her in far enough to create something that couldn’t belong to anyone else. “One of my clients once said to me, ‘I told you what I wanted, and you gave me what I needed.’ That’s everything to me.”

This emotional intelligence, the ability to read people, to draw out what they love about a reference image and distil it into something personal, is where Georgie operates most naturally. When couples arrive with Pinterest boards and screenshots, she interrogates what is behind them. “I always ask, what do you love about that picture? How does it make you feel? What are three words you would use to describe it?” It is a methodology that produces weddings so distinct that even when two brides happen to be close friends (as was the case with two recent January celebrations) there is never crossover.

But for all the high-end production, the technical precision and the relentless attention to detail, what sits at the heart of Georgie’s work is something much more human. She tells me about a wedding where the groom’s mother, who was gravely ill, was glowing on the day and radiant in every photograph. She passed away the following morning. Then, there was the bride who wanted to honour her late father at her outdoor ceremony. On the day, cyclonic winds and rain threatened to derail everything. Georgie went to the bride’s room to suggest a Plan B, then paused. “I just had this feeling,” she tells me. “I was like, I think it’s going to be okay.” Ten minutes before the ceremony, the clouds parted and the sky cleared. Sun beat down on the photograph of the bride’s father at the end of the aisle. She walked through, said her vows, walked back inside, and the rain returned. “It gave me goosebumps,” Georgie says quietly. “He was there.”

It is these moments that keep Georgie in love with what she does. “When I see the love in a groom’s eyes, or the way a mother looks at her daughter, it moves me so much,” she says. “It gives me faith.” She loves the speeches, even when they run long. She loves surprises (one groom who secretly took singing lessons to perform for his bride), spiritual ceremonies that leave a room breathless. “Surprise and delight is my favourite part. Those moments of pure joy.”

“Be who you are. The bride and the groom set the tone. If they are having the best night of their lives, that is infectious.”

On the state of the industry, Georgie is characteristically direct. She sees couples returning to authenticity after a period when social media threatened to flatten everything into sameness. “I hope that weddings are trending more towards people doing it for themselves,” she says, noting that destination weddings are back with a vengeance and that there is a broader cultural shift towards couples leaning into their heritage and roots. “Be who you are,” she says simply.

Now, with a young child and a deliberate move towards fewer, more creatively ambitious weddings, Georgie is entering a new chapter with After The Rock. A merchandise venture called Chachki is launching later this year and her online mentoring programme (for couples who want guidance but can’t access her services directly) is growing year to year.

When I ask what separates a good wedding from a great one, Georgie doesn’t hesitate. It comes down, she says, to the couple themselves. “The bride and the groom set the tone. If they are having the best night of their lives, that is infectious.” She has seen it time and again, the dance floors that erupt when the couple is genuinely, visibly elated; the energy that ripples out from two people who are completely happy. “We are the producers of the best day of your life,” she tells me. For Georgie, it’s a sentiment that goes beyond a tagline. It is a promise she manages to keep, time and again.

Before we hang up, I ask her what advice she would give a newly engaged couple. “Begin with what’s important to you. Not what you think it should be, or what your friend did, or what Instagram is showing you. What you want, based on who you are.” She smiles. “That’s the foundation.” And then she is gone, back into the current of a day that, knowing her, is only just getting started.



This feature was originally published in VEIL Issue Two. Discover this profile along with many more inspiring stories, weddings, and editorials in the full issue. Purchase your copy here.