Carl Skanderup

Carl Skanderup runs two wedding companies out of one marriage. The pitch decks say CEO of Carats & Cake and Bliss & Bone. The truth is closer to this: he and his wife Cindy split the wedding internet down the middle - she takes the taste, he takes the ledger - and it works.

Ask him who the star of the operation is and he doesn't hedge. "She's the real talent," he says of Cindy, and he means it as strategy, not sweetness. In a business built on beauty, the man who can read a balance sheet has learned to get out of the way of the person who can read a room. That instinct - knowing exactly what you are not - is the quiet engine under everything he's built.

The billion-dollar detour

Before the invitations and the venue galleries, there was a spreadsheet the size of a skyline. As a director at Wells Fargo from 2011 to 2013, Skanderup managed more than a billion dollars in loans for publicly traded real-estate companies. His days were spent across the table from CFOs and senior executives, sizing up risk on buildings he'd never set foot in.

It's the kind of resume line that usually leads to a bigger bank, not a wedding blog. But Skanderup kept following the thread that actually interested him - the human machinery of a business, the part where money meets meaning. A stint as a fractional CFO at Alchemie. Then a hard left into the wedding world that never straightened back out.

Buying the company he didn't start

Carats & Cake was founded in 2013 as an integrated marketing and financing platform for venues and property groups - the sort of connective tissue between the couple planning a party and the venue trying to fill a Saturday. It raised real money along the way, the kind of Series A numbers that get press releases written. Skanderup wasn't there at the start. He arrived as Chief Marketing Officer in 2021, left for a turn as CMO at ROH, a revenue-optimization platform for property groups, and then did the thing most executives only fantasize about: he came back and bought the wheel.

In 2024, he and Cindy took over Carats & Cake outright and folded it in beside Bliss & Bone, their custom wedding-invitations business. Two brands, one household. Cindy handles design and the couples; Carl handles business, accounting, and production. It's less a corporate structure than a division of gifts.

The lesson that cost him

Skanderup will tell you, unprompted, that he got the early version wrong. The seductive idea - if we build it, they will come - turned out to be a trap. Nobody comes. Not to a great product, not to a beautiful one, not without someone doing the unglamorous work of being seen. That's the origin of his one repeated conviction: the product is rarely the bottleneck, the marketing is.

It reframes his whole finance background as a setup rather than a contradiction. A man who spent years pricing what things are worth now spends his days on the harder problem - convincing the world that worth exists at all. Every feature he ships at Carats & Cake bends toward the same goal: making a vendor's work easier to find, easier to show off, easier to book. He talks openly about AI arriving next, less as a buzzword than as a better spotlight.

Writing with the lights on

Most CEOs publish thought leadership. Skanderup publishes doubt. On his Substack he files what he calls "reflections on entrepreneurship, growth, and the reality of building and running companies for the past 15 years" - a phrase that carefully includes the word reality. He admits, in print, that he "almost certainly" doesn't have all the answers, then keeps writing anyway.

It's a rare posture for someone whose job is to project confidence. But it fits the man who married at the Ojai Valley Inn and then spent his career helping strangers build their own version of that day. He's a father of two who treats a newsletter like a workshop, not a pulpit. In an industry drowning in curated perfection, Carl Skanderup's edge might just be that he's willing to show the seams.