At Mayflower, we believe that to create a truly personalized wedding, couples need more unique venues, fewer restrictions and more setup time to express their unique story.
Mayflower venues are unique, rare, open spaces. Customize a venue to tell your story -- choose your own tent, accents, tables, food, music -- and create a one-of-a-kind story that will leave your guests talking for years to come about a wedding that could have been no one else’s.
Mayflower connects couples who want to tell their story with open spaces. These open spaces -- farms, fields, beaches, orchards -- can stay open for generations to come because select couples invest in them to host their wedding.
Nothing truly unique and custom can be made in an afternoon. That’s why a Mayflower space is yours for the whole weekend, no sharing required. Find the perfect venue for you, choose your vendors, take your time to customize it and tell your story.
Our Story
Our values
Way back in 2015 there were two values that converged and led to the creation of Mayflower: celebrating couples’ individuality and preserving unique open spaces.
Celebrating Couples’ Individuality
Every couple has a unique story to tell, and therefore should have a unique wedding venue that supports it. We’ve seen too many unique friends have virtually the same wedding. Too often traditional wedding venues and event spaces have restrictions on design and vendor choices, limiting a couple’s chance to convey what makes them, them. Because Mayflower’s open spaces are not wedding factories, the owners are happy to give couples exclusive use of the space for a full 48-hours to allow for far greater customization than traditional venues.
Preserving Unique Open Spaces
As New Englanders, we have long loved the region’s farms, fields, orchards, historic homes and many other spaces that would make breathtaking wedding venues. Many of these spaces are now at risk of being sold or developed as it becomes increasingly expensive to maintain open land. Our goal is to help preserve and celebrate the beautiful and historic open spaces we love across New England. We work with farmers, land trusts and other land owners to connect them with an additional means of capital to maintain their properties. No faceless hotel chains or restaurants here, just real people with real open spaces they love.
Our people
Sam McElhinney
Strategy, Marketing, Sales
Sam built his career in marketing and sales at Google. He identified unmet consumer needs for brands by analyzing online behavior data as well as traditional market research data. Sam then leveraged these insights to craft new brand strategies that increased loyalty and sales for startups and Fortune 1000 brands. At Anheuser-Busch InBev he identified product gaps in current market offerings and created a new beverage brand for this unmet consumer need. Sam received a B.A. in Sociology from Dartmouth College and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. A lifelong New Englander, Sam loves to hike, fish and spend time with family. He could not be more excited to help couples create truly personalized weddings while at the same time helping to preserve open spaces across New England.
Eileen Parra
Operations, Product
Eileen loved the process of planning a wedding. After her wedding, she had the desire to pursue a career as a wedding planner. At Mayflower, she can fulfill this aspiration and more. In her role, she aims to make the planning process more enjoyable and facilitate how couples create personalized weddings. Her professional experience includes being a project engineer for the US Army Corps of Engineers and a business development associate for a solar startup. She has extensive experience in client relationship management, contract negotiations, and project management. Eileen also has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, a master’s degree in enterprise systems and a MBA from MIT.
Wesley Ripley
Full-Stack Web Development
Wesley Ripley has been coding professionally since high school and graduated in 2013 from WPI. After graduating Wesley worked at Wayfair full time for 4 years. There he had his hands in everything from leading a product focused team, to adding many new features from scratch, and making the codebase easier to work with. Wesley brings experience with large scale websites, e-commerce, and customer centric development to the team. He is pumped to leverage technology to allow open spaces to host weddings and also make it easy for couples to find unique venues, plan their weddings efficiently, and celebrate in an authentic way.
Josefina Ondo-Baca
Marketing, Sales
Josefina is a Mayflower Summer intern from Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics (UNH). She’s a rising senior majoring in Business Administration: Marketing and Business Analytics. Josefina enjoys the concept of creating stories and bringing them to life through event planning. That was a passion she discovered when she first started organizing public events as the program coordinator for one of the university’s student run Diversity Support Coalition organizations. The role includes everything from event management, to advertising and sales. By joining the Mayflower Team, Josefina hopes to enhance her professional experience in the areas of marketing and sales, while also helping couples make the wedding of their dreams come true!
Lucy Minott
Finance, Customer Experience
Lucy is a second-year MBA candidate at MIT Sloan. Prior to Sloan, she was a Product Manager at HourlyNerd, an online marketplace startup connecting businesses with freelance business consultants. Before joining HourlyNerd, Lucy worked for three years at Endeavor, a global entrepreneurship organization connecting high-growth start-ups with strategic expertise and resources. This past summer, Lucy interned on the Product Management team at Eventbrite. Mayflower combines two of Lucy's passions - marketplaces and small New England communities. Lucy is very excited about Mayflower's power to help local property owners while also giving couples a truly unique, customized celebration of their relationship.
Our Advisors
Donna Levin
Co-Founder Care.com,
Serial Entrepreneur
42 North
Wedding Planning
Hummingbird Bridal
Wedding Planning
Andrei Hagiu
Marketplace Strategy