Calling all brides with 300+ guests!

As far as the cake goes, we had a two tier cut cake and cupcakes that were different flavors

Oh my! I’m stressing out just thinking of 300+ guests. Wow.

We had a tiny wedding but just wanted to suggest skipping favors. Kinda outdated and not necessary anymore. And WAY too much money for 300 guests.

Having 2 weddings! My cultural traditional wedding with about 400 people or so (and that’s small!) and my western American wedding About 225 people. For the larger wedding the cake will be a small 2 tier cake but I’m having the baker make small cutout slices of a vanilla cake or fruit cake as that’s cheaper than baking a cake to fit that amount of people! As for favors haven’t figured that out yet haha! My bridal shower will be very intimate since most people aren’t local so just inviting my best friends and very close women to me! Maybe just a shower of 30 people or less

Also considering skipping favors with the large crowd and people throwing them away maybe

Our wedding is at 285 but I'm still responding because weddings this big seem to be a rarity on here. I'm close enough!

1) My aunt is planning my bridal shower and I honestly haven't a clue how many will be invited
2) We are not doing favors. People leave them behind. Both myself and my fiancée have disabled siblings and we are making a donation to 2 organizations that have helped support each of them. This is in lieu of favors and we will probably have a sign somewhere that says "in lieu of favors, a donation has been made to ___ and ___ "
3) We are skipping cake entirely and doing a candy bar instead for those with sweet cravings. There will be a dessert course as part of the meal, anyways.

We have a little over 300 people on our guest list but are planning on having 200 since it will be almost 3 hours away from my hometown. Both of my brothers had over 300 people at each of their weddings, though, so my wedding seems small compared to theirs' (they each had about 500 people on their guest lists).

-Shower Guest List: My mom found the guest list for one of my sister-in-law's showers, and there were about 150 people on the guest list (that didn't include the people at my sister-in-law's other shower).

-Favors: Both of my brothers just had a candy table at their weddings. We're having 3 different favors at ours (homemade strawberry jelly in mason jars, personalized golf tees, and photo strips from our photo booth). I think viewing the cars in the car museum is sufficient!

-Dessert Table: I'm having a wedding cake, groom's cake, and chocolate covered strawberries (wedding cake will feed 152 & groom's cake will feed 52 -- we will make the cakes bigger if more people RSVP yes). Both of my siblings had a wedding cake, groom's cake, and candy table. Candy can be a cheap dessert alternative, and almost all the candy was gone at each wedding because people loved it so much!

Hi Paige! Do you have any idea about how many of those 300+ guests will attend?

We invited 280 to our wedding, but it was a plane flight away for over half of hour guests and we had an adults-only wedding - so we knew that was going to lead to a lot of 'no' RSVPs (and were ok with that!) We ended up with 175 guests on the wedding day which was perfect.

> Around how many women will you invite to your bridal shower? We invited 30 women to my bridal shower, which felt like the perfect size to me! My husband and I actually both have really small families (the rest of our guests were friends and family friends), so I invited all the female relatives to the shower as well as my bridesmaids and my close friends who live in town.

Depending on where you, your family, friends, and future in-laws live - it might make sense for you to have more than one shower! You could do one with friends, one with family, or separate family showers, whatever works best for you.

> Will you do wedding favors? We ordered koozies! They're really cheap and you have to order them in bulk anyway! Other favor ideas that I think work for a large guest list are: a candy buffet (doubles down as dessert and a take-home favor), or hiring a photo booth and having the pictures be their favor. At my friend's huge wedding they had individual cake slices boxed up as to-go favors. You can also totally skip wedding favors! No one's attending a wedding thinking "oooh I wonder what they favor will be!"

> How will you do cake/desserts? We had a big multi-tiered cake that was large enough to feed everyone, and our catering team sliced it and served it up quickly! You could also cut a smaller one or two tier cake and have sheet cake slices prepped for quick distribution!

A dessert bar is also a good idea to provide a lot of options, but with that many guests it might be easier to do a dessert option where the catering staff can serve everyone instead of a bottleneck by the desserts!

We had a guest list of about 315, about 250 rsvp'd yes.

I invited 85 women to my bridal shower. Mainly my friends, aunts, cousins and my husband's mom, grandmas, aunts and cousins.

I did wedding favors, 300 favors with chocolates. We have leftovers but mostly everyone took theirs.

We had a traditional cake but we also had sheet cakes in the kitchen that the banquet hall staff sliced and served shortly after we had the cake cutting.

We invited 225 so obviously our final count was smaller than yours will be, but here is what we did & what I've encountered for some of the bigger weddings we have been to.

1. Bridal showers are typically 20-50, I'd stick to inviting women in the immediate vicinity of the bridal shower location.

2. We did favors, and spent around $400 just on favors. I don't think it's necessary so I'd make the decision WAY closer to your wedding date when you have final numbers and see where you are in your budget.

3. Mini dessert table! Give people options for grab & go, easy to eat on the go!

I invited 300 and ended up with 250. So I feel your pains of a large wedding aha.

1) for cake I did a traditional cake but luckily found a cheap bakery for it. Otherwise I was just going to do something like cookies aha

2) I did a candy buffet table for my wedding favors

3) I only invited my friends to my bridal shower so it was only like a total of almost 20 girls. You don't have to invite absolutely everyone.

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I agree! favors are a waste of money! everyone throws them away or gives them to someone else after the party.

We invited 350+ guests and around 260ish attended. I was definitely surprised that so many were not able to attend! We still had a large wedding, just not as huge as anticipated.

I feel like were close to 50 women at my bridal shower...maybe 60 invited. We stuck with: Grandmas, Moms, Sisters, Nieces, Aunts, Female Cousins & their Daughters, and close female family friends (some my age and some of my mom's friends I've known forever). We didn't include every single woman invited to the wedding. I only had one shower but some people do one for bride's side and another for groom's side to reduce size.

For wedding favors we went the koozie route! Definitely wait to order those until you have a more firm guest count and order less than you think. Kids won't take them and plenty of guests will forget.

We had a 3-tier cake and then 4 sheet cakes of varying sizes. I had the baker decorate them so that they were super simple to cut so guests could grab them quickly.

Sheet Cake

We have 350 on our list, and think we will land at 250-275 (just from hearing people's experience). Venue holds 300 max. On one hand I want to send the invit to all 350, and see what happens. There's no way all 350 would show (I don't think). However we'll be smart and send out 300 invit and then start sending the extra 50 on a rolling basis, as we get declines. Not sure what else to do.

We are either doing koozies or no favors at all (open bar is their favor, lol). We're having 2 showers since we're from 2 dif cities, I'm expecting about 20-40 at each. Haven't thought about cake yet. I'm so excited about it all!!