When planning an event, I can easily spend hours looking through websites, blogs, pictures, magazines and books for creative and unique ideas that I can bring to the table. I am in the business of creating fabulous events, so I can’t afford mediocrity… it’s my job to make an event something guests will never forget! And as far as I am concerned, it starts with the details. Whether it’s a new color combination, a creative way to display escort cards, or an unusual room layout, the culmination of great details are what make a great event. To hire a planner or not to hire a planner? That is frequently the question for recently engaged couples. Especially nowadays, when budgets are tight, hiring a planner is a big decision. While you might consider it a frivolous expense and decide to take on the planning entirely by yourself, take a look at our top 10 reasons to consider hiring a wedding planner before making any decisions:
10.) Wedding planners can help translate your dreams and vision into reality. Your wedding planner should make an effort to get to know you, and really understand your sense of style and vision for the wedding. A good wedding planner should be an extension of you: your planner will channel your tastes and personality into every aspect of the planning. He/she will consider your style when recommending vendors, coming up with ideas for centerpieces, helping you select invitations, etc. Ideally, you should feel that your planner enhances your vision, combining their professional experience with your personality and vision and translating it into the wedding of your dreams.
9.) Wedding planners can save you money. A good wedding planner will give you tips and advice about which decisions will affect your bottom line the most. For example, choosing a venue that will let you bring your own alcohol can save you thousands of dollars versus choosing a venue that requires alcohol to be purchased on-site. Additionally, planners will draw upon their relationships with vendors to help negotiate discounts and extras. Planners bring more business to vendors than an individual couple will, so they can often leverage this potential business into negotiated savings for you. Planners will be able to recommend ways to achieve the desired results, but for less money. Essentially, a good wedding planner can help you get more bang for your buck in every aspect of the wedding!
8.) Wedding planners recommend venues and vendors that are in line with your vision, budget and style. A good wedding planner will be familiar with all of the different venues and vendors in the area. If you communicate your dream wedding to your planner, he/she should be able to recommend a few venues, photographers, caterers, florists, etc. that will work well with your budget and wedding vision. Think about how much time, energy and frustration you might waste doing the research on each individual vendor. And then think about how much time, energy and frustration could be saved by having a wedding planner who can make recommendations for you. And chances are, in some cases, your wedding planner will give you better recommendations than you could have found yourself: often they have the inside scoop on a new venue opening up, or a special deal being offered by a caterer.
7.) Wedding planners help ensure that your wedding day runs smoothly and according to schedule. Anyone can create a timeline for the wedding day. But making sure this timeline actually gets followed in the midst of wedding day excitement is another story all together. Wedding planners will call your vendors if they arrive later than expected to ensure the whole day doesn’t get behind schedule. They’ll help nudge guests along to dinner when they aren’t quite ready to leave cocktail hour. And they’ll remind the band that it’s time to announce speeches or the first dance. Not only will a planner help keep the day on schedule, they can make recommendations about how the schedule should be set up based on their experience. You may only plan to leave an hour for pictures before the ceremony. But an experienced planner will tell you to leave an hour and a half, because chances are, your hair and makeup will run later than expected! Having a planner give advice on the wedding day timeline, as well as make sure that the timeline is followed on wedding day will go a long way towards making sure everything runs smoothly!
6. ) Wedding planners will help up the ante for your wedding, bringing the latest and greatest wedding ideas to the table. You may be reading all of the wedding magazines and blogs throughout your engagement, and consider yourself to be fully informed about all things wedding. But while you are in the wedding mode for the year or so that you’re engaged, your planner is in wedding mode all day, every day! He/she is constantly exposed to the best of the best, attending industry events, networking with vendors, keeping up with the cutting-edge trends in the wedding industry, and more. A good planner should provide and implement ideas that help make your wedding even more amazing than you had originally hoped.
5.) Wedding planners will save you hours and hours of time. Your wedding planner will make recommendations that can save you hours of research. It’s our job to keep up-to-date on the local vendors and resources for planning your wedding. Good planners will have this information at their fingertips, and be willing to share it with their clients. Having these recommendations will save you time doing research and allow you to spend it on other, more fun parts of the wedding (where to register, finding the perfect pair of wedding shoes, deciding how many bikinis to bring on your honeymoon, etc.). As they say, “time is money”.
4.) Wedding planners are a great excuse for you to avoid conflict during the planning process and on the day of the wedding. A wedding planner can come between you and the challenging people involved with, or in attendance at, your wedding in a lovely, subtle, extremely tactful way. Overbearing bridesmaid? Let the planner think of a tactic to keep her occupied while you and your wedding party are dress shopping. Divorced parents who don’t get along? Let the planner come up with a seating arrangement that includes everyone, while avoiding conflict about who should sit where. Drunken, obnoxious uncle from Ohio? Let the planner find a quiet, far away spot for him to sober up. Transferring some of the responsibility for the more difficult aspects of the planning to your planner will help lessen the stress on you.
3.) Wedding planners have well-established relationships with vendors, resulting in a higher level of service for you. Planners tend to work with the same vendors over and over again, and this creates a loyalty to them. The wedding industry is very much an “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” type of business. It benefits a wedding planner to have relationships with other vendors because we need to be able to recommend vendors we know and trust to our clients. It reflects poorly on the planner if a recommended vendor doesn’t live up to your expectations or conduct themselves with the highest level of professionalism. At the same time, it behooves the vendors to have a good relationship with a planner, because planners refer them a great deal of business. So vendors will often go over and above from a service perspective when working with a planner, because this ensures that a planner will continue to send business their way. This means that for the bride and groom, working with a planner is a win-win situation: your planner will recommend only the vendors they know and trust, and those vendors will want to provide excellent service for your wedding so that they will remain on the planners’ “go to” list.
2.) Wedding planners are on constant budget patrol throughout the planning process. A good planner will help make sure that you are not succumbing to the budget creep that is all too common when planning a wedding. Initially, they’ll help you decide on a reasonable budget based on your expected guest count and vision for the wedding, and give a you realistic breakdown of costs for each element of the wedding. As the planning unfolds, they will help you decide which elements are most important to you, and where the majority of your dollars should be allocated. And yes, they will also remind you when you’re tempted to try on that $10,000 gown that your budget only allows for spending $5,000 on your dress. Because they’re not emotionally involved in the planning, your wedding planner is in the perfect position to be the voice of reason as far as budget is concerned and help keep you on track throughout the process.
1. ) Wedding planners allow to you to be a guest at your own wedding. If you don’t hire a planner, the responsibility falls on you, your family and wedding party to make sure things run smoothly on wedding day. You will have to worry about whether: all of your vendors have arrived at the venue on time, the day is running according to schedule, the setup has been completed before the ceremony and reception, the vendors have been paid in full at the end of the evening, etc. etc. etc. But if you hire a planner, he/she will take care of all of that for you. And if you hire a good planner, he/she will also take care of all the extras as well: slipping you a plate of appetizers during cocktail hour (because chances are you will be too busy talking to make a plate for yourself), carrying an emergency kit (because your hair will inevitably need a few more bobby pins or some extra hair spray at some point during the day), gathering your gifts and cards from the reception and bringing them up to your hotel room (and maybe while they’re up in your hotel room, they will even decorate your bed with rose petals and a bottle of champagne!). You spend so much time and money on this day – do yourself a favor and hire a planner so that you can just relax and enjoy everything!
For more information about The Celebration Studio and our wedding planning services, please contact us:
email: info@thecelebrationstudio.com
tel: (720) 279-0075
Brooke Hill
Owner & Principal Event Designer
The Celebration Studio
