How we pick a host, and why it’s Jeff Chang in Paris
Why our Paris host spent the pandemic working at LEGO
When the weddings stopped in 2020, Jeff Chang got a job at LEGO. He did it to get better at hospitality, specifically client experience. A working wedding photographer from Vancouver, years into a career, on the shop floor, studying how people get looked after.
Who does that?
An absolute beauty does. And now he’s hosting Way Up North in Paris.
What we look for
We’ve had a great run of hosts over many years. When we pick one, there are two things we look for.
First, the obvious one: charisma. It’s not easy to stand in front of a few hundred people and make them feel like they’re sitting in your living room.
Second: the Excellence Reflex. That term comes from Danny Meyer’s book Setting the Table, and it describes someone whose instinct is to make a situation better without being asked. Think on your feet, read the room, care about how everyone else is doing.
Roll that together and you’ve got a host.
It started with a Swedish comedian
Our first event, we went the other way entirely. We invited a Swedish comedian, Nisse Hallberg, and he was with us for the first few years. He loved making Way Up North the punching bag of most of his jokes, which we were fine with, because hearing someone completely removed from the wedding world was refreshing.
Since then, familiarity has become the thing we look for. Sometimes it’s someone who’s engrained themselves into the community, like Jack Davolio or Sandra Franzen. Sometimes it’s someone who left an insane first impression, like Fleur Vanden Bosch, who we met at an event we ran in January 2026 and who was hosting the show in Valencia a few months later.
For Paris, we wanted someone you wouldn’t guess
Our gut was to bring in someone the community would know, but wouldn’t immediately think of as a host. Someone they feel like they know, who isn’t known for this. So we brainstormed behind the scenes, held every name up against charisma and the Excellence Reflex, and one popped off the page. We said it out loud and we were like, of course.
Jeff Chang
Of course. It had already crossed our minds when he came on as a co-host for our workshop in Florence and Umbria in the fall of 2025. Then it came back in Valencia, where people were still talking about the smoke lift he pulled to close the show in Lisbon. “Will there be smoke in Valencia?” No smoke. No balloons either.
Jeff is a wedding photographer from Vancouver who’s been in the game a long time. He’s an educator, all those fun things. And he knows this community well. He first presented for us in Florence in 2024, did a WUNX in Lisbon the same year, presented again in Berlin in 2025, and was a guest in Stockholm for our 10 year anniversary.
The LEGO job
But here’s something you might not know. During the pandemic Jeff got REALLY into LEGO. So into it that he went and got a job with LEGO, as you do. He did it to get better at hospitality, specifically client experience.
Who does that? Someone who cares about other people at a level most of us don’t operate on.
What he took from it: the favourite moments don’t need to cost anything. The magic is in the unexpected, in going past what people are expecting and making them feel something. That’s what he brings to a stage, and that’s what you’ll be sitting in front of this May.
Jeff was already a master of this before LEGO. His success has come straight out of unreasonable hospitality (also a great book, by the way, written by Will Guidara, who happens to have come up under Danny Meyer).
Why a host matters
So where does that leave you for Paris? Why does a great host matter?
When we’re photographing a wedding, we know something is going to happen that we didn’t plan for. There’s a surprise waiting at every single one. Events like Way Up North are no different. We don’t know where or when the unexpected thing will turn up in our show, but we know it’s coming.
And when it does, that’s Jeff’s opportunity for magic. We’re as curious as you are to see how he handles it.
