The 30-minute facials that Rachel An Liverman is known for don’t deserve all the credit for the glow she wore at her March 18 wedding to Jeremy William Crane. Love, the ancient elixir of shine, also played a part. She only wished it had taken a few shortcuts to find her.
Ms. Liverman, 37, is the founder and CEO of Glowbar, a chain of facial studios. When she met Mr. Crane, 35, on dating app Bumble in January 2022, she had been on dating apps off and on since 2011, the year she moved to Manhattan from her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts.
Assurances from friends that she was a catch no longer chased away depressing thoughts of a future without a life partner. “All my friends were married and I was at — and in — everyone’s wedding,” she said.
Mr. Crane relieved her of those thoughts within days of their first meeting, on January 10, 2022, at Barrow’s Pub in Manhattan’s West Village.
Mr Crane, 35, is the founder of Retrievables, a technology company that connects businesses dealing with overdue accounts with collection agencies. When he and Mrs. Liverman matched, he was living in Long Island City, where he had moved with a girlfriend in 2019 from his hometown of Rochester, NY.
However, his experience was very different from Mrs. Liverman’s. He liked most of the women he met online. “I went out a lot and absolutely loved it,” he said. “I enjoyed going out and meeting people and getting to know different establishments in the city.”
Mrs. Liverman had been on more than a few bad dates, including one in which a friendly waitress at Morton’s steakhouse in Union Square helped her flee through the back door. Ms. Liverman said she was “the stereotypical single girl in New York City, crying in the fetal position at night.”
By the time the two met at Barrow’s, after five days of messaging, Mr. Crane was hooked on the retort he and Mrs. Liverman had built. “We’re both very good at joking,” he said. “With Rachel, the messages just wouldn’t stop after five minutes. We were talking a lot, a lot, a lot – to the point where I was completely distracted, and all I could think about was the next message.
The back and forth on Bumble ensured that Mrs. Liverman was comfortable enough to make a bold entrance at Barrow’s. When Mr. Crane approached with a big hug and kiss, she playfully brushed him off and sat down to reattach a fake nail that had fallen off. This didn’t diminish his optimism about the woman who invited him for a beer at what she called her favorite dive bar.
They spent the next three nights getting to know each other on consecutive dates. By the end of the week, they were a couple in love. Mr. Crane immediately fell; Mrs. Liverman needed a few more days to make sure that love had finally come for her.
Mr. Crane grew up the middle son in a family of three close-knit brothers and their parents, Howard and Leslie Crane. Before founding Retrievables in 2021, Mr. Crane up StadiumPark, an app that helped users navigate stadiums and arenas. The app, which he closed when he moved to New York, was up and running in 2013, three years after he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in consumer science.
Mrs. Liverman began charting her entrepreneurial path when she was 10, with a leg waxing business in her home. A vocation to improve the complexion of the masses may have been in her DNA. The Boston Globe suggested so in her 1988 birth announcement. “It said the granddaughter of the famous Catherine Hinds was born flawless,” Ms Liverman said.
Mrs. Hinds, her maternal grandmother, who died the previous year, founded one of the country’s first accredited aesthetic schools, the Catherine Hinds Institute, in Medford, Mass., in 1979. the president and chief executive of the institute. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler but remained good friends, she said. Erwin Liverman and Mrs. Liverman’s stepmother, Nancy Liverman, who is like a second mother, also live in Newton. Her younger brother and sister live nearby.
The family supported Mrs. Liverman’s first business, Rachel’s Waxing Salon, when she was in fifth grade by providing her first business cards. “I handed them out to people and told them to get their legs waxed at my place,” she said. Two years earlier, her mother had given her her first facial in the family’s living room. “I always say I was so lucky to have grown up in an industry that didn’t sell tapes or anything,” she said. “As a little girl it was amazing to watch these women. My grandmother was a pioneer.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Tulane University in 2007, Ms. Liverman briefly worked as a buyer for TJ Maxx before transitioning into beauty. Her first job in New York was at Birchbox, a subscription product sample company. When she was raising money for Glowbar in 2017, she was head of visual merchandising and business development at Beautyblender, a supplier of pink makeup sponges. The 30-minute facial concept she developed for Glowbar was a way to address an issue staring back at her from the mirror in her West Village apartment.
“I didn’t get facials in New York because I didn’t have the time and didn’t know who to trust,” she said. “Celebrity nail salons and spas and everything in between were doing facials.” Glowbar, which opened in 2019 and now has six locations in New York and Connecticut, offers them exclusively.
For other couples, a shared entrepreneurial instinct may have been enough to get the sparks flying. For Mr. Crane, that was an afterthought. It was the ghost of Mrs. Liverman that he fell in love with before bringing her home on their first date. “Rachel is easy to love,” he said. “She’s captivating and authentic and just comes across as if she’s never met a stranger.”
Mrs. Liverman felt a labored sense of ease with Mr. Crane. “I’m a tall person and I get people’s attention, and I would have walked into the bar with all this swagger,” said Ms. Liverman, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall. (Mr. Crane is six feet tall.) Friends who regularly came to her aid after disastrous dates in the past, including her neighbor Erica Thomas, had pointed out that men can find her intimidating.
“But Jeremy was different,” Mrs. Thomas said. Her confidence didn’t shock him at all. She could be herself with him. He immediately saw the light in her.”
On January 11, the day after their Barrow’s date, Mr. Crane made her a branzino dinner at his home in Long Island City. On Jan. 12, she paired it with a chicken skillet in the West Village. Two months later, when his lease expired, he moved into her house, where they still live. “I felt good about it,” Mr. Crane said. “It didn’t feel like a risk.”
His proposal didn’t feel risky either, because Mrs. Liverman had told him how she wanted it to happen. “I didn’t want my friends jumping out of the bushes in a park,” she said. “I didn’t want forced attention. I just wanted to be engaged in bed with my first cup of coffee.
Mr. Crane did not deviate from that view. On June 4, 2022 at 7 a.m., he gave her an emerald green solitaire ring and a love letter. In the letter, he said, “I told her I knew right away I wanted to be with her forever. I told her that she makes me feel satisfied and valued and challenged.”
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Ms. Liverman and Mr. Crane were married on March 18 in Manhattan at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts. Rabbi David Gelfand, of the Temple of Israel in New York City, led a traditional Jewish ceremony for 225 guests.
Ms. Liverman, in a floor-length, off-the-shoulder wedding gown by Vera Wang, was escorted down the aisle by her parents to a huppah decorated with white flowers. Mr. Crane, in a Corneliani tuxedo, was there surrounded by a group of their close relatives. To mark the beginning of their life as a married couple, the rabbi wrapped them in a tallit, or wedding shawl, which had passed through generations of Mrs. Liverman’s family; they later drank wine from a goblet that belonged to Mr. Crane’s great-grandfather.
The moment when Rabbi Gelfand pronounced them married was “magical,” Ms Liverman said. “When I saw all our loved ones there in front of both of us, I was overwhelmed with gratitude,” she said.
At a reception also at the foundation, the spirit of gratitude was still with her. Mrs. Liverman addressed her guests and said, “I actually looked at Jeremy and said, ‘You were so worth the wait.'”
On this day
When March 18, 2023
Where The Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, New York
Dewy I Dos Ms. Liverman’s wedding day skin care routine was simple: she swallowed water. “I drank as much as I could to stay hydrated,” she said. “I let my makeup artist do the rest.” Five days earlier, she had undergone a Glowbar facial and dermaplaning skin treatment.
Nonstop Ms. Thomas called the wedding “epic” and received dance training during the reception, with the band Milan 77. “The dance floor was always packed,” she said. “We never stopped dancing.” Betty the Traiteur provided small snacks.
Classic New York The couple’s weekend-long celebration included a rehearsal dinner at the pastrami and pickles institution Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan, meant to celebrate the city that brought them together. For Ms. Liverman, it was also a chance to take an energetic farewell from the New York dating scene. “We finished our faces,” she said.