Inspiring Conversations with Marcus & Jade Jerido of TRD Media Group LLC / The Grand Moment

Today we’d like to introduce you to Marcus & Jade Jerido.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Jade and I are Alabama-born, Atlanta-built. We came up here looking for a bigger room to grow into, and Atlanta gave it to us.

The story didn’t start with weddings. It started inside a boutique called Tres Jolies, where we were shooting and styling our own content because hiring a new photographer for new arrivals became EXPENSIVE – and we had a great photographer! (Shout out to Michael Carson). Somewhere between the setups and the long edits, we caught the bug. We didn’t just like making images — we liked the act of capturing something and making it stick. That feeling is what eventually became TRD Media Group.

We came into the market through studio, lifestyle, and events first. Each one taught us something different — studio taught us control, lifestyle taught us how to read a moment, events taught us how to move fast without missing it. We loved all three. But I’ve always been wired for high stakes — it’s the same engine that drives my IT career. The work was fun, but I needed a bigger arena. The wedding niche became the challenge to conquer. Challenge accepted.

Here’s how I describe it now: the privilege of shooting weddings is that we get to capture folks’ love and immortalize it in time. There’s no second take. There’s no “we’ll get it next year.” A wedding day happens once, and either you saw it or you didn’t. That mix of stakes and skill is the most fulfilling work I’ve done outside of my IT career, and we’re only one year into the wedding space. Year one. Imagine year five.

But I have to step out of the way for this next part, because the other half of TRD doesn’t get told right when I’m the one telling it. So I’ll let Jade speak for herself.

— Jade —
By day, I’m a special education teacher. That’s the floor underneath everything else I do. My students teach me patience, and they teach me that small details matter — how a room is set up, what a child notices when they walk in, whether they feel safe enough to try something hard. I bring that same eye to every set we build.

By night, I’m a draper. And I’ll tell you the truth: I took one course. One. Something clicked in that class about how fabric falls, how a backdrop can completely change the energy in a room, and I haven’t put it down since. The backdrops behind our studio work — that’s me. The Braves set in this feature — me. When it’s going well, it almost feels like God is guiding my hands. I don’t take that lightly.

Marcus and I work because we notice different things from the same vantage point. He sees systems. I see rooms. He notices what’s broken. I notice what’s missing. Between the two of us, not much gets past us — and that’s how TRD got built, and how The Grand Moment is getting built.

That same proximity to weddings is where The Grand Moment came from. After enough events, Jade and I kept seeing the same heartbreak: incredible couples paired with the wrong vendors, not because anyone meant harm, but because the matching infrastructure was broken. So we built The Grand Moment, an AI-powered wedding vendor marketplace based right here in Atlanta — to fix the part of the wedding industry we wished was already fixed when we got here.

Alabama gave us the foundation. Atlanta gave us the stage. Tres Jolie gave us the spark. TRD Media gave us the craft. The Grand Moment is what we’re building with everything we’ve learned. And we’re still early.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Honestly? No road worth being on is smooth, and ours hasn’t been either. A few real ones:

Visibility. This is the one every founder underestimates and every founder eventually loses sleep over. You can be excellent at the work and still be invisible to the people who need you. The hardest stretch of any creative business isn’t the craft — it’s getting found by the right people at the right moment in their planning. We’ve had to learn marketing, SEO, content strategy, paid ads, PR, and partnerships almost as deliberately as we’ve learned our cameras. The work doesn’t sell itself. Nobody’s work does.

Media is expensive. Like, expensive expensive. Cameras, lenses, pipe and drape kits, fabric panels, florals, lighting, backup gear because the first set always fails on the day it can’t fail — it adds up faster than people realize. Every reinvestment is a bet on yourself. We’ve made a lot of those bets. So far they’ve paid, but you don’t get to that “so far” without writing some checks that made your stomach turn first.

Balance. This is the one I think about the most. We have two beautiful, intelligent small children who we love to pieces. In the early days it was go-go-go, let’s build our empire — and we found out pretty quickly that you can build an empire and lose the kingdom inside it if you’re not careful. So Jade and I sat down and built an actual plan for protecting our family spirit and our marriage, not just our calendar.

We’re four years into our marriage and nine years in together. It’s been a wonderful ride, and we protect it on purpose. Every chance we get, we take it — a weekend without the “chilren,” a business trip we deliberately turn into a business getaway, a date night we don’t cancel just because the inbox is loud. The work will always be there. We want the marriage to ride as smooth as a Cadillac Escalade for the long haul.

The struggles haven’t gone anywhere. They just got more familiar. That’s the honest answer.

We’ve been impressed with TRD Media Group LLC / The Grand Moment, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
TRD Media Group is a luxury event design, photography, and videography studio based in Atlanta. The design side is where most of our clients meet us first — Jade is a draper, and her work is what gets us in the door. The way she elevates a space changes the energy of an event before anyone walks in, and once people see what she can build, the conversation about photography and video tends to follow naturally.

That’s part of why TRD works the way it does. When you book us, you’re not piecing together a design team and a photo team and hoping they share a vision. You’re getting a full creative production under one roof, where the people shooting the day are the same people who built the room it’s happening in. That’s rare in this market, and it’s the part of our brand we’re most proud of.

Jade likes to remind me that part of the reason it works is because I’m a Virgo — or as she calls me, a Virgoat. Her theory is that the greats are all Virgos: Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Kobe. Her conclusion is that I’m in good company; my conclusion is that she’s a special education teacher who has clearly mastered the art of positive reinforcement. Either way, perfectionism shows up in the work, and our clients are the ones who benefit.

On the photo and video side, we work across studio, lifestyle, events, and weddings. What sets us apart isn’t just the gear or the editing — it’s that we run every shoot like the moment can’t be recreated. Because most of the time, it can’t. Whether it’s a brand building its visual identity, a family marking a milestone, or a couple saying “I do,” we treat the day as a one-take performance and bring the discipline to match. Our wedding work is where we’ve planted our flag — high-end, cinematic, and built for couples who want their day captured the way it actually felt, not just how it looked.

The Grand Moment is the second half of the story, and the part we’re building for the long game. It’s an AI-powered wedding vendor platform based in Atlanta — a matching engine, a marketing firm, and a customer acquisition system wrapped into one mission: get the right couples and the right vendors in the same room. The big platforms turned vendor discovery into a paid auction. We turned it into something honest — style, vision, location, occasion, and tier all weighted intentionally so couples find vendors who actually fit them, and vendors find couples who actually fit their work. We’re a year in, growing fast, and built specifically for the couple who wants their wedding to feel like theirs, not like the algorithm’s — and for the vendors who deserve to be found by them.

What we’re most proud of, brand-wise, is that both businesses are built on the same principle: stakes are real, the moment matters, do the work like you respect it. TRD designs and captures the moment. The Grand Moment makes sure the right people are there to help create it. That’s the throughline.

If your readers take one thing away, let it be this: we didn’t get into this industry to be one more option. We got into it to be the right one.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Family. Full stop.

Beyond that, Jade put it best:
“When folks trust us to bring their vision to life. They saw my work and trusted me to do the job. That never gets old.”

Ditto! There’s a specific feeling that comes with a client picking you out of a crowded market and saying you’re the one I want in the room on the most important day of my life. That trust is the whole job. We don’t take it for granted, and honestly, it’s what gets us back up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to load the truck.

Family first. The work that earns trust, second. Everything else is gravy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://trdmediagrp.com
• Instagram: drapedbyjade, marcusjerido
• Other: https://thegrandmoment.events