Alumna Creates Wedding Brand with a Courteous, Craftsman’s Touch

Maxine (Fileta) Derderian, a second-generation Egyptian American, comes from a family of entrepreneurs and always wanted to start her own business. She graduated from King’s in December 2015 with a degree in Business Management, and is already quitting her day job to devote her efforts to her own business full-time.

Like most businesses, Maxine’s began as an idea, in January 2015. Maxine and her best friend from childhood, Monica Danielson, wanted to make it easier for people to engage with beauty. Eventually, they discovered their entrance into that calling lay in their native Southern California—the epicenter of the multimillion-dollar wedding industry.

As Maxine and Monica entered the phase of life known as “Everyone is getting married!” they noticed their engaged friends telling a consistent story about wedding vendors: a story of rude, inconsiderate behavior that loaded a happy, expectant time of life with stress. To make matters worse, their friends had to deal with many such vendors at once, since vendors tended to offer only one service. Seeing an opportunity to address two problems at once, they created Willow & Wine: a multiple-service wedding brand with a deep focus on courtesy and caring customer relationships. They got their first client in June 2015, while Maxine was still a student at King’s.

The name Willow & Wine carries both Scriptural and local significance. Maxine knew from the beginning that the business—in which floral design was one of the initial offerings—would incorporate natural elements. “Willow” draws on the willow branches of Southern California and other foraged greenery they include in arrangements, and echoes Psalm 137, in which Jewish captives hang their harps on willows by the rivers of Babylon. The Biblical significance of “Wine” is more obvious, invoking both Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana and the practice of Communion. “Wine” also nods to the beautiful California wine country that the co-founders both love, and is an almost-universal symbol of celebration.

Willow & Wine started out offering calligraphy and planning services in addition to floral design, and added partnerships with different vendors as they went so that, besides caterers and venues, brides now only have to work with Maxine and Monica’s company. That first wedding in June 2015 happened to be featured on Style Me Pretty, the queen of wedding blogs. Willow & Wine had five clients in its first year, twenty-seven in its second. Maxine says, “I planned five other weddings the same month as mine!” (She married Fisher Derderian ’16, whom she met when she was helping with New Student Orientation, on September 10, 2016. His family hails from Armenia, and the couple was married on his family’s pomegranate farm in central California.) Willow & Wine has done weddings on both coasts and also serves corporate and nonprofit clients in the Northeast.

As the wedding business began to hit its stride, Maxine and Monica wondered, “Do people care about our work if they’re not getting married?” They decided to revisit their original idea of connecting people with beauty, and launched a blog. Sure enough, 45 percent of their blog readers were not planning weddings. Willow & Wine is now expanding from the wedding scene to add a second dimension as a lifestyle brand. As of this writing, Maxine says they have spent the past six months designing a product line to launch this summer, including art illustrations on different products, and personalized and sentiment signs for events and home use. The company is also beginning to offer workshops that teach people to make beautiful things themselves; to date, they’ve been at Anthropologie giving such workshops three times.

Maxine sees in her work a counterpoint to the sentiment that Instagram and Pinterest should be treated with a sense of distance or skepticism because the blissful pictures they paint are often not true to life. Her response is, “If you are drawn to something beautiful, let’s find a way to make it more accessible to you.” Adding products and workshops to the business allows Willow & Wine not only to connect with more people, but to serve those people in more dimensions by bringing them into closer contact with the aesthetic visions that move them, and often, in the process, with nature as well.

Maxine and her co-founder have thought deeply about the role their faith plays in their business. “We don’t take it lightly that we’re involved in one of the most significant days of our clients’ lives. Not all of our clients know this, but we pray for all of them, and as witnesses to their marriages, we maintain relationships with them after the wedding is over.” The work can be stressful, since weddings are notorious for things going wrong, and she says it’s easy to grow hardened to the work and not hopeful when things go wrong; but as a Christian, she has a theological perspective by which to remember that the work is good and worth doing.

Maxine says her King’s education has much to do with her management philosophy and how she runs her business day to day. “We constantly remind ourselves that our decisions affect real people and that we have a unique opportunity to serve them.” It’s not unusual, she says, for her to ask herself, “What would Professor Fotopulos or Professor Brenberg advise me to do right now?”

Nor does the King’s influence only play out on the client side. One of Maxine’s goals for the company’s internal culture was for its employees to have decision rights, autonomy, and as deep a sense of ownership in Willow & Wine as her own. Although each day brings obstacles and sometimes conundrums, she ultimately considers those difficulties chances to grow. By her own account, it seems to be paying off: “From a cultural perspective, [Willow & Wine] is everything I’d envisioned.”

She adds, “I always dreamed that I’d be running my own company by the time I was 23. Someone asked me once, ‘Why 23?’ and I remember telling them that when I was a young girl I thought I would know all the answers by then. While that is certainly not true, I am very proud that I was able to turn that dream into a reality. It was a close call—I was 22 when Willow & Wine first started—but I made it. It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done.”