Kate, Alison, Cami, Falynn, and Jazmin all offer wedding planning and on-site coordination. You will have just one of us assigned as your lead and main point of contact and she will also be the lead planner on the day of your wedding. But we work as a team, and from time to time, like when your lead is on vacation or you have a task one of us specializes in, you might work with another planner.

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, the planner’s experience with your venue, and personality fit.

While we all are able to plan all types of weddings, we also each have venues we love best or that we specialize in. When a couple inquires, we work hard to pair you with the best planner for your needs!

And even though you will be assigned one lead planner as your go-to-girl, we all work together on your wedding. We have weekly team 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. 

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  have lots of time available on our call schedulers for clients. Our admin, Sam, is also only in the office, so she is available to clients when we are out at events for faster assistance!

Communication preferences vary between planners on the team, but in general, couples are encouraged to email their planner for anything we need to have a record of— like your final catering decisions. But for quick questions, texting is great! And for something you’d like to talk through, clients can always schedule a call with us!

We do! Most of our elopement clients book our Kickstarter package and use the 6 planning hours included in that package to plan their elopement. Occasionally, we add on more hours if needed, but usually that is all that is needed. We’ve never had an elopement couple who have needed us to be on-site for coordination, because we help couples book great vendors for all of their services who can handle everything without our team coordinating.

There isn’t a planning service that we don’t offer - our team does it all. Budgeting is our bread and butter - the more detailed the spreadsheet, the more we love it. Design is usually approached as a collaboration between the planner and the couple, but we are happy to take on as much of the design as you’d like. It is usually the most fun part of wedding planning (other than the cake tasting).

In addition, we will handle as many of the usual planning tasks for you as you’d like, we also run errands, accept packages, finish DIY projects, steam linens, create stationery designs and more. All of those things will be billed as planning hours though - so for most clients, in order to be mindful of their budgets, they choose to use our time on the services that will give them the most peace of mind and help take the most of of their plates.

This is a tricky one - especially with destination weddings! Before COVID-19, the 'two-thirds of the guests will attend’ rule used to be a pretty good guess, but nowadays, we see RSVP percentages all over the map. For budgeting, we typically recommend budgeting for the max that you think could realistically attend if all of the stars aligned. But in practice, we usually see somewhere between 50 and 75% RSVP rate.

An important exception to this is micro weddings where you’ve hand-selected only your closest friends and immediate family to invite. Usually, we see nearly 100% RSVP rates for those weddings!

You’ll have complete control! There are a few things we will insist upon though, like rain plans, insurance, guest transportation for people who have been drinking, and anything else that concerns safety and the practicality of your event. But other than that, you’re the boss!

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 loved by our clients!

Those on a budget can plan most of their wedding using their portal and 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! Hourly planning is also super transparent and allows our couples to see exactly what we’re working on and how long it’s taking.

Even though it’s not common, we strongly believe that hourly planning is the best pricing model for wedding planning - particularly for destination weddings.

The two other pricing models that most planners use are “Flat-rate” planning and "percentage-based" planning. 

Flat rate packages are created using the needs of the average client. 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. It also means clients may be paying for services they don’t want or need, just because those are in the package. We much prefer to just charge everyone for exactly what they use!

Percentage-based pricing is a model where a planner’s fee will be set based on a percentage of the final cost of the wedding. This is the pricing system used by most luxury planners. It makes a lot of sense because the more expensive a wedding is, usually the more time-consuming it is to plan and the higher the expectations of the couple. We love percentage pricing in theory and many of our collegues use this model. But because most of our couples are planning destination weddings, and we often do not meet them in person until their weddings, we want a relationship that is built in trust from day-one. Even though it is not true, percentage-based pricing can sometimes create a perception that the planner is referring a more expensive vendor so that their planning fee will increase. We want our couples to trust that when we are recommending someone more expensive, it is just because they are the better fit for that event! We also want to be saving you money anywhere we can - and with percentage-based pricing, we would be getting paid less anytime we did our jobs better by finding you ways to cut costs. 

We have a detailed spreadsheet for every couple where we track all of our tasks and the time it takes to do them. Couples will receive monthly planning statements from our team so that they always know how we are using their planning hours and on what. If at any time couples need more planning time, they can add planning hours. Any unused planning hours are refunded after the event. It's common for our couples to add on time and also to be refunded a small amount of their planning hours after their wedding. Either way it is usually only a little bit because we are great at estimating how many planning hours our couples will need from their initial questionnaire.

That depends on the level of service you want. While of course you could use any amount of planning hours if you have tons of requests and a complicated event, we find that the vast majority (nearly 80%) of our couples use between 25 and 35 planning hours from the day they book their venue up to their wedding day. On the high end, for a single-day wedding, 60 hours is the most anyone has used. And for a multi-day event, 80 hours is the most. The lowest amount of hours we will allow a couple to book is 10, and all of those 10 hours would be allocated for the two months before your wedding for meetings between you and your planner to “hand off” the planning that you had already done. Some planners call this "wedding management." 

We can estimate how many planning hours you will likely need using this chart 
at the bottom of our proposal questionnaire.

Not exactly. To be able to coordinate a wedding, we need to fully understand what the plan is for the wedding so that we can execute it. We also need to get to know the couple (at least a little bit!) so that when unexpected issues arise (which they always do), we know how you’d like them resolved and can act as your representatives for all of the parts of the wedding day.

That said, we are happy to coordinate a wedding we didn’t plan as long as the handover from you to us happens in advance of the wedding. For this, you’d purchase fewer hours to begin with, complete all planning on your own up until 2 months before your wedding, and then hand it over to us! This requires about 10-15 planning hours on our end, plus whatever on-site coordination is needed. Most couples spend between $4000-5000 on this model of planning and coordination.

We completely understand that for many couples, this is outside of their budget for “day-of coordination,” but our rates are reflective of the personalized attention we provide and the behind-the-scenes work we put into every wedding. Our pricing also reflects not only our extensive experience but our relationships in the industry, which often result in our clients getting a higher level of service (and in some cases, discounts) from the other vendors they work with too!

If you read through our reviews, you will see many clients have hired us for this exact service, and the experience of our team executing to perfection all of your carefully planned details is priceless.