Evented

Ramneek Purewal and Lisa Zhu share an entrepreneurial spirit, a drive that sees failures as opportunities and an earnest love of all things pretty. Toss in their complementary skills – Ramneek’s business and marketing acumen and Lisa’s graphic design and styling – and you’ve got a wedding planning match made in heaven. Together, the duo own and operate Evented, a company that plans stress-free pop-up events like weddings and proposals while combining elegance with fun.

Ramneek and Lisa have always been leaders, dreamers and creatives with a fierce drive to become entrepreneurs. Even though they attended different schools, their mutual pursuit of business development and ownership led them to each other – Ramneek was heavily involved in eHUB, the University of Alberta’s entrepreneurship centre, while Lisa was engaged with Hatch, NAIT’s entrepreneurial program.

They were introduced to each other to work on Evented’s first incarnation: an online wedding vendor directory, intended to consolidate the city’s innumerable wedding vendors in one place. But between the difficulty of getting vendor buy-in and the technical aspects of the work, they decided to move on from the project. “I wouldn’t say it was a failure,” Ramneek says, “because we learned so much in the process. I don’t like the word failure. With the directory, we had to learn that our expectations weren’t going to be met and we had to adapt from it. (What we’re doing now) is a lot more creative, which is why we both wanted to do this in the first place.”