When planning your wedding, there’s a lot to consider. But one thing you know for sure is that you want it to look and feel like it was created just for you. A tell-tale sign of a good wedding? When your guests leave grinning ear to ear, saying, “that was so them!”
As wedding planners, we take great pride in crafting these one-of-a-kind celebrations and have really fine-tuned how we pull that off over the years. First and foremost, we really get to know our couples and all about their relationship. We’ll ask about the basics (where they grew up, what they do, and how their love story began) and then dive in to more niche things (like how they spend their ideal Saturday morning together or even who their dream dinner party guest is). We also like to cover the five senses, asking about preferred food flavors, favorite songs, colors and metals, etc.
It’s basically like speed dating, except instead of seeing if we’re your dream girl or dream guy, we’re trying to figure out how to design your dream wedding . We want to know what you collect and how you decorate your home, how you live, what you enjoy doing, so we can build an event around you from the ground up.
We also like to ask our couples to choose a handful of words to represent the feelings they’d like to evoke on their big day. To us, it’s not just how a wedding looks, it’s how it feels too.
We worked with one couple that had an inside joke about gnomes popping up in surprising places, so we placed a few in the centerpieces and in the bathrooms.
Below, is the guestbook table for another couple, where the groom proposed six times so we created a vignette to incorporate photos from and the story behind each proposal.
We helped one of our country-music loving couples incorporate a special serenade, when groom Chris wrote bride Anna a song and sand it to her in a private moment before the ceremony. He shipped his guitar to our office weeks prior and we stashed it out of site until he was ready to surprise her.
Stationery is a great place to incorporate more backstory. Take Amanda and Matt. Their “thing” is a bear and fox, as her last name was Fox and everyone believed Matt’s spirit animal to be a polar bear. So illustrations of those animals were incorporated into the couple’s crest, which appeared on many of the paper pieces throughout their celebration.
And Lauren and Chris incorporated places that were meaningful to them. The pair met in North Carolina, and Chris is a huge fan of his alma mater, so Carolina blue tassels dressed up the escort cards. And since they got engaged in and call NYC home, guests left the reception with two Big Apple staples: Levain’s famous cookies, and the street vendor coffee cups filled with some late night fuel.
One more fun way we personalized a wedding was with a pair of bicycles decorated with flowers. Rachael and Ben enjoy going on bike rides together, plus they were staying at a farmhouse in England when they got engaged and guests of the property were given cruiser bikes, so they spent the day riding around. Thus, the couple’s own bikes were dressed up for the wedding, accompanied by a sign welcoming their guests on the way to the ceremony, and used for a few portraits.
So dig deep and think about the aspects of your personalities and lives together that you can weave into your big day to make it look and feel just like you.
Photos by: Laura Murray / James x Schulze / Elysium Productions / Kristen Kilpatrick / Rebecca Yale
