Exploring Life & Business with Alvina Kwong of WedVibes Media

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alvina Kwong.

Hi Alina, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Before any of this, I was a true corporate girl. I spent years in marketing at Nestle – including running activations for Nescafé – before moving to Ferrero as Head of Trade Marketing, managing their entire national trade-marketing budget. It was a place where I learned real business and leadership, traveled constantly, and built friendships that have lasted well beyond it. But it was also relentless — sales forecasts, P&L, KPIs, high-stakes activations where a smiling photo hid a genuine fight to hit both sales and profitability targets. In real sales, nobody calls a mistake “experience.” The price of getting it wrong is high, and I lived that pressure for years.

At some point I decided to change my life completely, and I moved to California to study Film Business at UCLA. I remember my last day at Ferrero clearly – I was so sure I’d be back within a year to see everyone again. I had no idea how wrong that would turn out to be, in the best way.

Everything changed when I met Daria at UCLA. We started a digital marketing agency together, and our first project was producing an energy drink commercial in LA – that shoot was taken in March 2020, exactly a week before COVID lockdown hit. Not exactly the timing you’d plan for launching a business, but it turned out to be the beginning of everything.

From there, things moved fast: I ended up getting a national-interest green card, we started WedVibes together (more about that in the next answer) and I found myself fully immersed in the world of artists and creators – a long way from spreadsheets and sales negotiations, but drawing on everything that decade in corporate marketing taught me.

Today I’m proud to be a co-owner of WedVibes, building something with Daria that didn’t exist when either of us started out.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not even close. There’s a saying that entrepreneurs are people who endure difficult tasks – we meet challenges from so many different fields every day that our brain literally adjusts across wildly different topics: human connections, legal knowledge, acquiring new skills like AI, and more.

Plus, I left a stable, high-pressure corporate career at Ferrero and Nestle for something with zero guarantees – trading forecasts and P&Ls for an industry I had to learn from scratch. Then Daria and I started our business together literally a week before COVID shut everything down. We didn’t get time to find our footing before we had to rebuild, more than once, from almost nothing. It taught me that any day can bring anything, nothing is guaranteed, and everyone can and will make mistakes. That’s the only way to learn.

Some of the hardest parts happened outside of work entirely, too. Getting my green card was its own multi-year process – the kind that doesn’t move faster no matter how hard you push. Adjusting to a whole new way of living – a new language, even a new way of communicating – taught me a patience I never needed in my corporate days.

What’s carried me through hasn’t been avoiding the hard stretches, it’s staying in them – messy and uncertain – and trusting that persistence actually adds up over time.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
WedVibes Media is an umbrella business.

On the storefront, it’s a luxury wedding media, education, and community platform. At the core, we sit between 2 audiences – couples and wedding professionals – and our job is making sure the right people find each other.

On the couple side:

We produce educational content and inspiration that’s grown to 310,000 followers. Our purpose is to educate them on pricing, current trends, and every kind of style and aesthetic, and help them find the right professionals to bring their vision to life.

We also recently launched our own boutique wedding planning agency, taking on up to five weddings a year – for now in Europe, with plans to expand into the US.

On top of that, we’re building our first venue in California, which is incredibly exciting.

On the professional side:

As marketing experts, we run a community representing tens of thousands of wedding creatives and brands worldwide, offering coaching, workshops, and masterclasses. We work with talent at every scale, from a cake artist in Mallorca to brands like Ritz-Carlton and Tiffany & Co.

We built something that gives creatives both visibility through our platform and real strategy in the same place, because we see every side of the industry — and because we focused on building a profitable business first, not just a pretty portfolio.

Another major part of our brand is the editorials and campaigns we produce for creatives and brands – photoshoots designed to build genuinely profitable portfolios, not just pretty content, for professionals around the world.

And for the second year in a row, we’re running the VOW for Girls Congress – a charity initiative alongside VOW for Girls, the nonprofit working to end child marriage globally. It’s an online congress with 40+ speakers, paired with in-person soirées in San Francisco, New York, Lake Como, and Paris. Last year we raised $45,000, supporting 250 girls – this year, our goal is to double that.

So if there’s one thing I want people to take away, it’s that WedVibes isn’t one thing. We started as media, became a community and education platform, expanded into services for couples, and we’re already becoming something bigger than that.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck’s real, but I think it only works if you’re already moving. Meeting Daria at UCLA is the clearest piece of good luck in my whole story – I wasn’t looking for a business partner, I was there to study something completely unrelated, and that one connection ended up reshaping everything that came after. You can’t manufacture that kind of timing.

Then there’s the other kind. We launched our business a week before COVID shut the world down. At the time, it felt like the worst possible luck. Looking back, I don’t think it was luck at all so much as a test of whether we’d keep going when everything fell apart immediately. We did, and that mattered more than the timing did.

Honestly, I don’t fully believe in luck as something that just happens to you. I believe in staying in motion enough that when a lucky moment does show up – a person, a connection, an opportunity – you’re actually positioned to take it. Daria happened because I moved to a new country to study something I cared about. The comeback after COVID happened because we didn’t stop building. Luck opened the doors. We still had to walk through them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wedvibes.media
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/alina_krupenina_la
• Other: https://instagram.com/wed_vibes

Image Credits
Grabazei Photography https://www.instagram.com/grabazei_photography/
Panos Demiropoulos Studio https://www.instagram.com/panosdemiropoulosstudio/
Ohh Ginger https://www.instagram.com/ohh.ginger/
Roman Ivanov https://www.instagram.com/romanivanov_photo/
CalenRose https://www.instagram.com/calenrose/
Alina’s portrait Tanya Beloved https://www.instagram.com/tanya.beloved/