this may surprise you, but Most people getting married have never done it before!

You have lots of questions and we have lots of answers!

Booking FAQs

  • We LOVE working with clients who know nothing about wedding planning - that is what we are here for! Start by filling out our proposal questionnaire and sending it in and schedule a call with the planner of your choice. She will answer all of your initial questions on our call and recommend some venues that fit your vibe and budget. We also offer a venue search package for couples who are just starting out and want more extensive help in selecting a venue.

  • Email us with a filled out proposal questionnaire and Molly will write you a draft proposal for the services that we think you’ll need based on your questionnaire. You will review that proposal on a call with your planner and she can answer all of your questions about next steps. You can schedule a call with the planner of your choice on our call scheduler (at least 24 hours after you send in your questionnaire).

  • Probably - email us to find out! We have a team of three lead planners (Kate, Alison and Cami) and though we like to book no more than one wedding in a day, we could do up to three.

    We try to limit our weddings to one per day and ideally no back-to-back days so that clients will have full access to all of our decor inventory and will not need to share with another wedding. But we will take a second wedding on a date sometimes too. When we do that, the first wedding booked will have full access to the decor inventory and the second wedding will be told that we already have another wedding on their date and that they will only be able to rent anything that the first wedding is not using.

  • We will book up to two years in advance! And if you would like to lock in pricing and your date, we recommend not waiting to book!

  • This is such a hard one because the real answer is “it depends.” Budget depends on a lot of things but the main thing is guest count. If you are eloping with just you and your fiance, the lowest budget is much more flexible than if you are wanting a ceremony and reception with 50 guests.

    That said, below are the lowest possible budgets that are, in my opinion, workable for a ceremony and reception (not an elopement or ceremony only). These budgets include venue, rentals, basic florals, Sunshower planning and coordination, basic bar and party-tray style catering. They do not include photography, videography or DJ. These are just base estimates, and if you have a higher budget, that is great and will allow us to choose vendors in every category that best fit you and your taste rather than just whoever is the lowest cost.

    • 30 guests - $8000

    • 50 guests - $11000

    • 80 guests - $20000

    • 110 guests - $30000

  • Yes, but not more than three months in advance. Our rental items are something we prefer to offer only to our planning and coordination clients. But if we are not booked for planning or coordination for your wedding date, and it is less than three months away, you can rent any of our rental items! We do have a $1000 minimum for rentals as well as an hourly packing fee (which will depend on the amount ordered).

  • Every wedding is a bit different, but we have done so many that at this point we are great at predicting event staffing needs. Usually, we have an assistant coordinator for any wedding with more than 40 guests (and we require it for weddings over 50 guests), but it depends on the venue, the complexity of the event and how many tasks our staff is responsible for. For example, hotel weddings are less likely to need an assistant coordinator, or any staff, because the hotel staff handles so many of the responsibilities.

    The number of basic event staff that an event needs are determined, in large part, on the catering and what staff and services that the catering team is handling. For example, there are full service caterers who do everything from setting the tables to hauling the trash! And there are restaurants that offer party tray catering delivery that just drop off the food and leave. We would need to staff those events very differently!

Planning FAQs

  • Our office hours are not set - they depend on the week and what days we have weddings. Unlike many mainland wedding planners, we do not only have weddings on the weekend - they are happening every day of the week! We are all in the office 5ish days a week and try to always have lots of times available on our call schedulers for clients. Molly is also only in the office, so she is available to clients when we are out at events for faster assistance!

    Clients are encouraged to email their planner for anything we need to have a record of - like your final catering decisions. But for quick questions, text is great! And for something you’d like to talk through, clients can always schedule a call with us!

  • Kate, Alison and Cami all offer wedding planning and on-site coordination. Often we will split longer wedding days between two leads so many clients work with two or all three of us!

    If you have a preference for working with one of us in particular, you can request that planner in your initial proposal questionnaire. But for most of our clients, we assign their lead planner based on the date, venue and personality fit.

    While we can all do all types of planning, in general, Kate tends to handle most of our full planning clients while Alison handles most of our partial planning and Cami most of our DIY planning clients (sometimes called “wedding management” or “month-of coordination”).

    One great thing about our planning team and our system is that even though you will be assigned one lead planner, we all work together on your wedding. We have weekly meetings where we check in with all of our weddings and share ideas and resources. These meetings also allow us to be kept up-to-date with all of each other’s clients so that if there were an emergency that prevented your planner from being there on your wedding day, any of us could step in and coordinate your wedding.

  • Yes, but only in the month before your wedding. If we get things too early, it is so hard to keep track of everything! If you have booked wedding planning and coordination with Sunshower, the instructions for mailing items to us are in your planning portal.

  • Of course! Our vendor list is extensive and you will have it at your finger tips after booking. We always tell couples that it is a huge list before booking, but when they see it they are still surprised! We are also always adding to it and updating!

  • Yes! And we are so glad you asked!! Our approach to wedding planning includes uplifting Hawaiian and other historically marginalized business owners - especially wedding vendors - as much as possible! Throughout our vendor list we have those characteristics noted about our vendors as much as possible!

  • We have a guide in your client portal to getting your marriage license in Hawaii but we do not assist any more than that. Really though, you don’t need our help. It is super simple!

  • You can see a full list with photos here!

  • Visit our Rental Inventory page! If there’s something you want to know about that you do not see there, email us!

  • For weddings where alcohol is being served at without a liquor license - for example a BYOB venue - we do require all of our clients to have a wedding liability insurance policy and to name Sunshower Weddings as additional insured. This may sound like an onerous requirement, but it is also required by almost every venue, and it is super easy to add us on too! We also have a step by step guide to getting your wedding insurance in your planning portal.

    Clients having their receptions at hotels or restaurants typically do not need this policy.

  • You can decide basically any time what rental items you will want to use for your wedding and you will work on your list with your planner and on your own when you are filling out your Decor Instructions document in your portal. But the final list is due no later than two weeks before your wedding.

FAQs about sunshower

  • We have so many wonderful planners on this island, many of whom we are lucky enough to call friends! And you will certainly be well-served by those planners just like you would be by Sunshower. There are few things, in general, that set us apart though.

    • Our enthusiasm for working with clients with many different wedding budgets. A lot of other planners work only with higher-budget clients because they specialize in full planning (which is expensive and a lot of work).

    • Our commitment to eco-friendly event practices.

    • Our extensive rental item inventory that is included in your coordination.

    • Our staff team. As far as I know, we are the only planning and coordination company on the island that will hire and manage staff for any part of your event that still needs staff - including serving food, busing tables, washing dishes and more.

    • Our planning team! Because we have four planners on our team, there is usually always someone available to answer your questions if something urgent comes up. Our prompt and thorough communication is something that our clients consistently mention in our reviews and meetings! On an island where most vendors are on “Hawai’i Time” we pride ourselves on never leaving you hanging!

  • Sunshower started as an off-grid wedding venue on an organic farm, so a strong commitment to sustainability has been a central tenet of our business since the very beginning. We care deeply about our island and our planet and want to see it treated with respect. Weddings, without thoughtful sustainability initiatives, can be huge generators of waste! So we have sustainability strategies that we try to incorporate as much as possible into the events we plan and coordinate!

    • Native plants and local florals in decor — Florals ordered through Sunshower will come from Lalamilo Flower Girl, a local flower farmer and florist who uses flowers she grows herself and forages in all of her arrangements. Clients can source their flowers elsewhere if they prefer not to order through us. However, we strongly prefer clients to use local florals and have priced our florals with Lalamilo Flower Girl to incentivize clients to buy local! Post event, any florals not taken home by clients are disposed of using the following procedure: first, event staff and vendors are given the option to take florals home to enjoy, then after that, any extra florals that still look nice are dropped off with Hospice of Kona. Then anything left after that (usually just greenery or flowers that are wilty or bad looking) are fed to Kate’s goats and/or composted if they are not healthy for goats.

    • Trash and Recycling — Events always come with a lot of trash - whether that is in the form of boxes of things shipped here, excess packaging or disposable plates, cups etc. While we cannot completely prevent all of this waste, our policies and pricing were specifically crafted with the intention to limit this waste as much as possible from going to the landfill. First, we will not work with single-use plastic, styrofoam or waxed cardboard for catering. Clients who want to use disposables for their catering must use biodegradable cardboard, wood and leaf options (if they want the Sunshower team to handle it). Those biodegradable disposables go home to Kate’s farm after the wedding to compost. Second, we have reusable rentals for glassware, plates, flatware etc. that are set at a price point low enough to hopefully encourage most if not all of our clients to choose reusable options. Some waste, most notably the large amount of recyclables produced from the bar service at events not using kegs, are not really preventable. But for events where we are handling the trash, our team will recycle all of the glass, aluminum, and plastic from the bar service.

    • Kegged drinks on tap —we love to work with Kamuela Kold Trailers for bar service! They offer beer, seltzer and cider on tap and are working on adding craft cocktails and champagne! By using kegged drinks, rather than bottled and canned, we will save so much waste from the landfill and energy that would be needed for recycling. Kegged drinks are also brewed right here on Island and do not have to be shipped to Hawaii!

    • Food waste — Events have a lot of food waste! All of the food left over from events (that no one wants to eat of course!) as well as all of the plate scrapings and kitchen scraps go into a food bucket that your coordinator will bring to Kate’s farm to give to her chickens. The day after weddings is their FAVORITE day! They pretty much eat anything, but the things they don’t eat just biodegrade and we add them to our compost.

    • Locally produced food —while we cannot control where caterers are sourcing their ingredients, we do note on our vendor rec list which caterers specialize in using local ingredients and we encourage our couples to work with those caterers as much as possible!

  • On the testimonials page of our website! We also have reviews spread out on google, facebook, weddingwire and the knot but the easiest place to find them all is here. If you’d like to get a reference from a couple we have worked with in the past, we have a list of couples that we can put you in touch with!

  • Kate was a lawyer before she was a wedding planner. Hourly “billing” just felt natural to Kate so that is how we started doing things at the beginning. But since then, we have also found that hourly billing is the best way for couples on a budget to keep their planning costs low. Anything you can do yourself (using your client portal) is something you don’t need to pay us to organize!

    Flat-rate planning packages that are offered by most planners take the average client to create the price. This means that clients who are quick to respond, decisive and do a lot of their planning tasks themselves are subsidizing clients who don’t. We much prefer to just charge everyone for exactly what they use!

Love is infectious...

But so is the coronavirus.

 
 

Covid FAQs

  • Due to the unknown nature of Covid and what may happen with variants, we allow our Clients to postpone their weddings to any available date within one year of their original date for no increase in fee or change fee. If there are increased coordination costs associated with rescheduling (ie-change of timeline, vendor notifications etc.), those will be billed at our regular hourly rate.

  • If you or your fiance are not vaccinated (and are able to be), and this will be a destination wedding for you, we suggest that you do not visit Hawaii until you are vaccinated. If you are certain you want to come to Hawaii for your wedding, you should consider finding another wedding planner as our values are not a match.

    If some of your guests are not vaccinated, that is fairly common and not an insurmountable problem for your wedding planning. Currently, there are no vaccination requirements on our island or the other island to attend an event. That said, the rules are always evolving as time goes on and covid cases go up and down and the virus mutates. If you have unvaccinated guests and are planning a destination wedding, literally anywhere in the world, there is a risk that those people may not be allowed to travel if the rules change.

  • Our planning and coordination team is all vaccinated and we will continue to get boosters as they are available. When hiring staff for your wedding, we can also make vaccination a requirement. Other vendors can be a little trickier, but still do-able. Single vendors (like a photographer or DJ) are easy - you can just ask them as you are hiring them and only hire vaccinated vendors. Catering and bar are the harder vendors for this because they will be bringing a whole team to your wedding and may not know at the time of booking who they will be scheduling. Our suggestion is to consult with your planner before hiring your catering staff so that we can navigate this together.

  • Here’s a link to our county’s Covid website with all of the most up-to-date info for Hawai’i County. As of Feb. 28, 2022 the County of Hawaii Mayor's COVID rules and restrictions have been lifted. There are currently no limits on gatherings.

    Effective as of March 26th, 2022 individuals arriving from the continental United States will not be required to create a Safe Travels account, show their COVID-19 vaccination status, or take a pre-travel test when traveling to the Hawaiian Islands. You can read more about it here.

    Travelers arriving in Hawaii directly from international airports must still comply with U.S federal requirements and we recommend that international travelers consult with their airlines regarding guidelines.

    For more information you can also visit the State of Hawaii Covid-19 Portal. The State of Hawaii has not yet updated this website but it's a good reference point for travel updates.

    If you have questions about the Covid rules, and how they will apply to your particular group, feel free to schedule a call with your planner!