Sheryl Sandberg posted this notice of her wedding online.
Crews erect two large sheds on Trail Creek Ranch last week for the destination wedding of Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal.
Sheryl Sandberg posted this notice of her wedding online.
Crews erect two large sheds on Trail Creek Ranch last week for the destination wedding of Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal.
Destination weddings are an important part of the valley’s tourism economy, and they don’t get much larger than one held Saturday at Trail Creek Ranch.
Sheryl Sandberg, outgoing COO of Meta (formerly known as Facebook), married Tom Bernthal, the founder and former CEO of Kelton Global, at the base of Teton Pass outside of Wilson. The couple traveled from their residence in Menlo Park, California, to recite their vows in front of friends and family.
Sandberg, who landed on the Forbes billionaires list in 2021 for her reported net-worth of $1.7 billion, spends much of her energy spotlighting and supporting women-owned and small businesses. However her spokesman, Brandon McCormick, would not provide a list of specific Jackson companies involved in the nuptials.
“The wedding included a lot of local companies and small businesses, which was important to Sheryl and Tom,” McCormick said in an email. “Almost all of the vendors were local and many were small businesses in Jackson.
“The flowers were from local farms (and some from Idaho), most of the meat and produce was all sourced locally and the weekend was full of snacks and touches from local vendors,” McCormick said.
He said Wyoming Gourmet Beef, of Cody, provided 34 packs of beef jerky sticks.
Around 250 guests, including tennis legend Serena Williams, attended Bernthal and Sandberg’s wedding, which required a massive effort. Hughes Production, an event technology service in Jackson, was hired for sound, lighting and power.
“We usually do tents, but this is actually a shed with steel beams,” Preston Krauth, a lighting technician for Hughes, said Thursday evening while standing at the entry of one colossal structure. “This is a bit bigger than we normally do.”
Two sheds of about 2,000 square feet each, with A-frame roofs and clear windows, occupied the grassy field of Trail Creek Ranch, alongside a catering tent at a little over half the size. Despite the spokesperson’s claims that the couple hired largely local, workers with Hughes Production said differently.
“There was a huge amount of outsourcing,” a higher-up at Hughes Production said Thursday as he drove away from Trail Creek. “I don’t think you can hire local businesses at this level. Anyone who’s local doesn’t want to be involved.”
Canvas Unlimited Event Rentals, a family-owned and operated event rental company in Jackson, helped a little with setup, but did not take on the full job.
“We can’t handle it,” a spokesperson for the rental company said on Friday over the phone. “There is so much work that no one in town can handle all of the equipment.”
Canvas Unlimited has already turned down contracts for next year because the company does not have enough hands.
Other local events vendors were not hired also due to size limitations, price or for no clear reason.
Kendra Alessandro, the director of communications at Fine Dining Restaurant Group, a collection of seven award-winning restaurants in Jackson, could not disclose if the celebrity couple had tried to contract her firm.
“Generally, we’re able to take on fairly large-scale events,” Alessandro said over the phone, clarifying that their company can handle occasions made up of several hundred people. “We have a really robust talent pool of event professionals in this town, so using local vendors is always a great thing.”
The couple did outsource their wedding planner from New York, Lindsey Landman Events, and their tent company from California, Hensley Event Resources.
In 2013 Sandberg started her poster nonprofit Lean In, which works to empower women and helps companies build inclusive workplaces. She regularly spotlights female entrepreneurs on her Instagram, like Emily Scherling, a jeweler she met at Cheyenne Frontier Days in late July.
The philanthropist renamed her organization in 2016 to The Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, to honor her late husband, Dave Goldberg. The chief executive of SurveyMonkey, Goldberg died of head trauma in 2015 after collapsing at a private gym in Mexico.
His brother, Rob Goldberg, introduced Sandberg to Bernthal in 2019 and co-officiated their wedding on Saturday, which Sandberg told People Magazine was “as close to Dave’s blessing” as possible. The bride posted on her Instagram a photo on her wedding day in a white gown on a gravel path, holding hands with her new husband, amid a grove of pine trees at Trail Creek.
“When a couple plans a wedding in Jackson Hole, it brings in a lot of funds for everything from flowers to catering to even the local barber,” said Andrew Kruger, communications manager at the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce.
So long as couples deal with local vendors, destination weddings in Jackson Hole can bolster the area’s economy — especially when the bride-to-be is a billionaire and the guest list pushes 250 people.
Contact Miranda de Moraes at 732-7063 or mdm@jhnewsandguide.com.
Raised in a Brazilian-American household in Southern California, Miranda is fascinated by the intersection of culture and ecology. She holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia and is searching for jackalopes in her free time.
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If we don't have enough employees and we are destroying the valley in a desperate attempt to house servants of the rich, do we really need to worry about expanding the local economy?
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