Google+ Jessica's Southern Wedding: Choosing a Wedding Planner - Southern Weddings

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Hi belles! Our friend and former Southern Weddings intern Jessica Clinch is the newest gal to take you through her wedding process here on the blog! Jessica will be blogging for us once a month until her wedding next May. In case you missed her first post, be sure to check it out here! — Emily

After Zack and I took a bit of time off to simply enjoy being newly engaged, the first thing we agreed to do was to choose our wedding planner! Although we both have experience in the wedding industry, we knew we wanted to hire someone to take care all of the logistics, vendor relations, and to help me organize the million and one creative ideas I have into a cohesive wedding design!

I have had the pleasure of working with a handful of talented wedding planners over the past few years with my various internships and jobs, and thought it would be so special to have one of them plan our wedding! I thought it was going to be a hard decision selecting the perfect planner, but we immediately agreed on which team would be best for us, especially after thinking through the questions below. Hopefully reading through our thought process will help you if you’re trying to find the perfect planner for your wedding!

How involved do we want our planner to be? There are so many options for what types of planner you can hire for your wedding. Many offer services ranging from month-of coordination to partial planning and full planning and design. We sort of fell in a happy medium between partial planning and full planning and design. Zack has a lot of vendor friends in Knoxville who we knew we wanted to work with, so we didn’t think we needed quite as much help finding vendors for our wedding. However, we did want our planner to handle all the details with our vendors once they were selected, and to help us work with them to bring our design vision to life.

Do they have ample experience in the wedding industry? Although I’m such a cheerleader for budding entrepreneurs and boss ladies who are just getting into the industry, Zack and I knew we wanted to hire a seasoned professional – someone who will know how to handle a situation that goes awry on our wedding day with grace, and without worrying us. Someone who has an understanding of the industry, including standard pricing details for vendors to help us create a budget, timeline creation, and a connection with other vendors in the industry. Someone we can trust.

Are they fun to work with? This might be a silly or obvious question, but we knew we wanted to work with a fun planner! Our planning team will be the people we communicate with most throughout our engagement, and will be with our bridal party and us throughout our entire wedding day. So, we knew they had to be professional, yet fun people to be around!

Does their design aesthetic align with ours? This was a very important question, especially for me. We’ve both seen a lot of weddings over the years, and a lot of different design aesthetics. I feel as though I have a strong sense of my personal design style, but I’m not quite sure how to translate the story of Zack and I into the little details of our wedding. Finding a planner who has a strong sense of style and appreciates the same stylistic details as we do was key. It is important to me that the planner we hired will be able to help us design a meaningful wedding, one that our friends and family will be able to identify as “us” through the details.

Jessica’s Southern Weddings Planner flipped to the vendor section – one of the ones we’re most proud of!

So, which planner did we choose? We are so thrilled to say that we are working with the wonderful Rebecca Rose Events team!! These ladies are beyond amazing. They were the perfect mix of everything we were looking for above, and they made us comfortable and excited during our initial consultation.

We love their design aesthetic, their passion and work ethic, and their personalities! We really appreciate the way their team is structured – Becca is in charge of all the design details and Betsy is in charge of logistics and vendor relations. We think it is a really smart approach to wedding planning, and have been so pleased working with them over the past few months! I interned with Becca in college, so it is also wonderful to have someone who knows me well working so closely with us! We have our first design planning meeting in August, and can’t wait to see all of the exciting, personal details they help us dream up for our big day!

All photos (except for Hot Dog! photo booth strip and Planner photo) by Blue Ribbon Vendor Nancy Ray. Rebecca Rose Events is also a delightful Blue Ribbon Vendor – what can we say, Jessica has great taste! :)

emily Written with love by Emily
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