A bride asked strangers to be her bridesmaids and they all said yes

When it came time to choose her bridal party for her recent wedding, Alexis Coffey used an unusual strategy. Instead of asking close friends and relatives to stand up at her wedding, she called upon total strangers.

Coffey and her now-husband moved to Texas in January 2021. Due to pandemic restrictions, they haven’t had time to make a lot of new friends in the area. Coffey turned to the app Bumble BFF to make some new pals and realized she could find bridesmaids there, too.

Although some may scoff at the idea of asking anyone other than your nearest and dearest to stand by your side on the big day, Coffey reasoned that people often fall out of touch with their bridesmaids after their wedding anyway, making her unconventional choice seem a little less strange.

“They become strangers, so why not make them strangers from the beginning?” she told Insider.

In the end, Coffey ended up with five bridesmaids on her wedding day, all of whom were virtual strangers to her. She met them through Bumble BFF, in her neighborhood and via her photographer. At least one was recruited just days before the event.

Here she is on TikTok, talking about how the ceremony went:

While she didn’t know the women prior to her nuptials, the bride bonded with them right away.

“I would not have wanted it to happen any other way,” Coffey told Insider. “Everyone was so supportive and friendly. It was like we’d been friends for years.”

The bridesmaids also had a positive experience. One of the willing women, Danielle Haley, made some now-viral TikToks about standing up in a stranger’s wedding.

Watch Haley and Coffey talk about their unique experience in the clip below:

“The TikToks have been really unexpected but super fun,” Haley told Insider. “I’ve met a lot of girls in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and plan to keep sharing my story of meeting new girls and hopefully attending some more weddings.”