Weddings Redefined

I'm thrilled to already be working with five pairs of interesting and dynamic new clients for 2010 Vision package weddings.  My goal is to make sure they all have a venue booked (or close to it) by the time I go away for my wedding and honeymoon.  So far, they have chosen some stunning venues: the State Room; the Fairmont Battery Wharf (brand new property); and the Hyatt Harborside. Two of those three have wedding ceremonies planned at the gorgeous Old South Church.  I love that my clients have excellent taste - it makes my job so much fun!

The venues for the other two clients are still in the works, but one is going to be a gorgeous Cape Cod wedding, with an oceanview ceremony at the bride's parents house.  Very cool.  The energy that new clients bring is always very exciting.

One of the first steps in planning (after you set your budget and guest list) is to go venue shopping.  I highly recommend you go venue shopping with no set wedding date in mind.  Finding a place to get married is one of the most stressful parts of planning - it's such a big deal, really - especially if the venue also provides the food, another really big deal!  And there are so many choices which makes coming up with a short list fairly overwhelming.

So how do I make this process nearly painless for my clients?  It depends on the couple, but I generally start the process by asking a ton of questions - I kind of see it like a Choose Your Own Adventure challenge to be conquered:

• Do you prefer urban or rural?
• Need or strongly prefer a view?
• Need or strongly prefer outdoor space?
• Do you have a big drinking crowd?
• Do you have a lot of guests from out of town/out of state?
• Is your preferred aesthetic classic New England/historic; clean and contemporary; or very modern, funky and stylized?

The answers to those questions give me a good starting point.  But, in some cases, when the client doesn't yet have a vision what their wedding will look and feel like, I bring my big binder of venues and my laptop to their house and we look at options side by side.  I have tons of venues in my binder + dozens more websites bookmarked.  We typically have some wine and look for inspiration amidst the options.  I tend to be pretty good at coming up with a excellent short list of spots to check out, and usually my first or second guess is on target.

Then, since I already know budget, timing and other expectations, I get off and running by creating a spreadsheet of possible venues with the relevant questions answered.  The couple narrows down the options and off we go on site visits, which I typically try to schedule back to back, so everything is fresh in your memory and you don't have to take much time off of work.  I'll explain how those work another day...but my clients like it when they are made to feel extra special on site visits.

So, what's your favorite venue and why?  I'd love to hear about unique or unusual sites.

Warning...rant ahead...

I was just on Twitter and one of the brilliant planners I follow, Saundra Hadley from Planning Forever, was tweeting about constantly getting calls from vendors asking for referrals.  Saundra hit the nail on the head in her tweets:

• @planningforever LOVE working with prof vendors that you have a relationship with. Verifying setup times is more like a social call, instead of business.
• @planningforever Vendors: The best thing that you can do for wedplanners that send you biz; is refer them to UR brides. Ask 'em who is your wedding planner?
• @planningforever We don't want kickbacks, dinner, starbuck gift cards .... just professional, reciprocal referrals.
• @planningforever Are other planner's phones ringing from vendors who are looking for referrals & business? Why is this one-sided? We need some love too.

I am so down with what Saundra had to say.  Because my business is built around my professional niche (gay weddings), I get called all the time by "gay-friendly" vendors who are introducing their business and asking for my referral.  You name it, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker - they literally all call me.  So many photographers who think that because they have a digital camera, a snazzy flash website and a Craigslist ad, they are a professional.  Read the first question on my FAQ.

This is the same reason I scarcely attend professional networking events or bridal industry functions.  Once vendors (even realtors, insurance agents and mortgage brokers) learn that I'm a planner and hear about my niche, their ears perk up and I can see the dollar signs in their eyes.  Sending me candles or chocolates in the mail will not get my attention.  My clients are not commodities.

Saundra is right.  If you want my business, then please, kindly pass my information along to your clients as well.  We'll look out for each other but most importantly, take amazing care of our clients.  We become a team and the result is outstanding.  But if you have another agenda, please don't bother me - especially in the middle of wedding season.  And if you think I can't tell the difference, you have me all wrong.

I suppose the question becomes: how do you get my attention?  Pure kindness/sincerity; a product, service or venue that is unique/completely blows me away; and genuine empathy for the experience of engaged gay and lesbian couples will make me pause.  When I was on a panel discussion for the Boston Wedding Group, lots of people handed me their cards after I was finished, and it felt very slimy to me.  One person that stood out told me a story about her lesbian sister's wedding.

And for those vendors that are already on my team, I adore you - and will see some of you at my own wedding.  Thank you very much for five amazing years.

One of the services offered by It's About Time is day of wedding coordination, or our Reality Package.  We call this the Reality Package because we often get calls from couples who are in over their head a few months prior to their wedding, when reality hits.  I understand.  We are getting married in 24 days and hired a day of coordinator ourselves.

So what happens on your wedding day that needs coordination?

First off, let me back up a bit and say that we first do a site visit with the client at which their vision is explained to us.  We ask the couple five pages of questions - things like, "Where do you want the flowers to be moved to after the ceremony?" and "Would you like special personal touches in the restrooms?"  Basically, we ask questions most people would never think about.

After this meeting, we put together a day of wedding schedule, which is very detailed.  It outlines the timing for formal photos, toasts, describes movement and flow and has setup and breakdown tasks.  We send this to you with all of the outstanding decisions highlighted.  These will be resolved before your wedding day.  We send the final schedule to your vendors. The schedule you see also has a packing list and list of final payments due, plus tip amounts.

Then we rehearse your wedding ceremony.  We insist on this so everyone can relax on your actual wedding day.

And then, on your actual wedding day, we generally arrive two hours early for setup and decoration tasks.  We now even have those fancy Secret Service earpieces so we can easily communicate with each other.  On your wedding day, we're in charge.  We manage flow, bring you champagne after your ceremony recessional, cue toasts, cue the photographer, DJ/band for announcements, pin corsages, line up groups for formal photos, load up your car with gifts and leftover wedding cake and generally make sure you are as relaxed as you can possibly be. 

And we include in our package vendor referrals - so if you book this package but still need a caterer, for example, we'll make referrals because we prefer to work with people we trust, so we prefer you to hire people we trust.  This makes everyone happy.

I'm sure every wedding planner has a nightmare story of a day of coordination client who planned themselves a "hot mess" of a wedding.  We've had a few of those ourselves, but our clients didn't even notice, and that's our job.

I need to be honest and let you know that if you're engaged and planning a gay wedding, there's a good chance you're going to encounter some heterosexism and possibly homophobia, even if you're marrying here in Boston.  I want to tell you this because, even as a planner, I've seen some ugly things just in the past month, even with vendors I had pre-screened, and I am livid:

• I was invited to do a presentation to a group of wedding professionals on how to work with gay couples, and one of the vendors in the audience blatantly told me upon my arrival that she didn't work with them, and instead referred them to a colleague.
• I took two brides to meet with a florist on Cape Cod with whom I'd previously worked and the florist said when we walked in, "So, which one of you is the bride?"
• I booked a trolley (a company I'd used before) for my grooms' wedding guests, and the man who helped me with my reservation asked me "Which way do they swing?" when I told him it was a same-sex wedding.
• At another wedding, the trolley driver told me he couldn't wait to see the bride and groom.  I reminded him there were two grooms.  The driver rolled his eyes and blessed himself.
• The limo driver who drove my grooms was looking for a restroom while he waited for the ceremony to end.  Someone suggested the basement of a nearby library.  He said, "I know what happens in that basement bathroom and I guess I should watch myself around these guys."
• The sales manager at the hotel where my guest rooms are blocked sent me an email asking for the name of my groom, even though I had just emailed him a guest information form I completed referring to us as two brides.

I am not telling you these things to freak you out, to deter you from planning a fabulous wedding, or to scare you into hiring me.  Not at all.  But there's a misconception that because gay weddings have been happening in Massachusetts for five years now, that all vendors are on board, accepting and understanding, and it's just not the case.  I wish it were, but I'm honestly glad that my clients didn't have to experience these situations themselves.

As gay marriage continues to be legalized (you go, New Hampshire!), it's important for wedding industry vendors to take a hard look at their marketing materials, retrain their staff, and start using more inclusive language and photos.  And a tip - just because you are a paid advertiser on GayWeddings.com or GayWeddings.us.com doesn't mean that you're off the hook.  I can promise you that those vendors I referred to above will not get my business in the future.  It's a small community and we talk.

Jen and I returned today from two days in Vermont, hosted graciously by the Stowe Mountain Lodge.  What a place!  From the moment we arrived, I told them that this is an easy referral to clients.  They completely spoiled us and the service is extraordinary. 

We met other fantastic wedding industry vendors including our new go-to for Vermont floral design, Alan and Wayne from Wildflower Designs and a new planning partner, Amy and Eric from Storied Events.  Great people.


Picture courtesy Closed Circle Photo

Of course, we toured the property's fantastic venues for weddings and are very comfortable putting our trust in them with our clients.  They even have a venue built into a cliff, the Cliff House, which requires that guests approach via gondola - no cars!  Amazing!

I get the question all the time - how do I design my wedding?  How do we choose colors?  Themes?  Do I need a theme?  How and where do I use this theme or color scheme?  My advice - start with the paper!

Truthfully, the save the date card is often the first your guests hear of your wedding plans.  It's the first element that arrives in the mail, teasing them as to what's to come.  You might as well make it interesting...

Start with that and weave those same design elements into your invitations, your ceremony program, your dinner menu, your escort and/or place cards, your table name signs, your thank you notes and so forth.  How cool to see a seamless design throughout.  It's just classy and elegant.  And I'm a big fan of green weddings, so even if you skip the ceremony program and the menu, you can still have a cohesive design theme.

Start with the paper.  And please make it recycled and preferably FSC certified.

For a number of my clients who have wanted custom design work, I've collaborated with a local graphic designer whose work I adore and whose work ethic and values I greatly respect and admire.  We are big fans of one another and I assisted with her wedding to her adorable groom Ben last summer.  Early this year, we agreed to collaborate on custom-designed stationery for couples, so this week I opened up a Stationery Design section of my website.

Please check it out if you are looking to give your wedding personality from the very second your guests open the envelope or see that postcard arrive in the mail.

If you've had especially interesting wedding stationery, I'd love to see your examples of how your personality came through - show them off to me!

Continuing with my thoughts on tablescapes from a post last week...

I saw some inspiration this morning from Courtney, owner of Flush Designs, a wedding and event design company in California.  You can read about her inspiration on her blog.  Black and white with pink for whimsy and romance is very popular this season.  She really nails it.  I love the stack of records and pink dinner plates contrasted with the white chargers!

Check out this beautiful tabletop she created:

First of all, why use lighting design for your wedding?  It creates a mood.  It can be virtually any color to match your theme.  It can hide ugly walls.  It creates ambiance and intimacy.  It is not very expensive anymore.  It's romantic.  It can save you money in other areas (flowers, perhaps).

I had a fantastic meeting last night with Paul, the owner of Boston Uplights.  He's really on the cutting edge of wireless lighting design.  He has a few innovations I'd like to share with you:

1) Wireless LED uplights.  He has a few different sizes to achieve a variety of lighting experiences.  But basically, these are lightweight, wireless and can easily placed around the room (and later moved if necessary).  He uses a single remote control to maneuver the color and strength of each of the wireless uplights.  It was amazing being in his studio seeing the room swiftly change color from his remote.


3) Paper lanterns.  Boston Uplights has a terrific innovative system for hanging paper lanterns in a tent or any venue that has a drop ceiling.  His system allows for swift setup (less $$) and amazing ease of adjusting the lantern heights.



These are terrific innovations for the industry.  Imagine taking a boring hotel ballroom and having candles dropping from the ceiling at varying heights.  So romantic, so intimate and warm.  And his price point is great.  The basic wireless LED system starts at $995, including staff for a night.  Because his technology is wireless and because he has intelligently thought about ways to make setup a snap, he can save clients a ton of money on the labor costs currently charged by other lighting companies, most of whom start at at least $1500.

And if the space doesn't have a drop ceiling (like our wedding venue), then we'll just have the standard uplights and the centerpiece uplights, though I'm confident Boston Uplights will think about ways to easily hang lanterns and candles from those venues in the future as well. I'll be recommending Boston Uplights to all my clients.