How we plan an Italian wedding
When we start working with new couples, one of the first questions we are asked is what the wedding planning process will look like. The way we work is personalised and we fit in with each couple’s preferred way of working and communication, whether that’s email, phone of face to face – day or night! However, thanks to my love of spreadsheets and organisation, we’ve developed a unique process that ensures we don’t miss a thing when planning your wedding day. Here’s a slimmed down and simplified summary of how we do it…
When a couple first get in touch, I’ll have a quick call with you to find out a bit more about you both and what you’d like your wedding to be like. You can hear a little about how me and Danielle work and see whether you like the sound of us! From our call, I’ll draw up a quote for our services (simply the hours we’ll spend on your wedding) and a total draft wedding budget, so you can see what you’re getting into before you even get started.
From there, if you decide to move forward with us, we’ll all sign an agreement and you’ll pay a 30% deposit for our work. If you’ve not found your wedding venue yet, we start here! We’ll have a another chat to get a full venue brief from you, ensuring we understand every single thing you need from your venue. We’ll go away for 1-2 weeks and contact relevant venues for you, coming back with a venue presentation for you to look over, full of venues that meet your brief and your budget. We will refine this until we secure your shortlist for you. At this stage some couples head over to Italy to view the venues. Then we secure your venue for you. The length of time of this stage depends on the speed of response of venues, your decision making and how close we are to your ideal wedding date.
You may decide to visit your shortlist of venues before making the final decision and Danielle will chaperone you on 2 day trip to Italy if required. This time is included in our quote. While you’re over in Italy, we often encourage the food tastings and hair and make up trials are done too if possible.
Once the venue is booked we build a full project plan for your wedding and (depending on how much you like excel spreadsheets) we can share this with you! We then move onto the next biggest things like the save the dates, photographer, the catering, guests accommodation and the entertainment. We use the same approach as with venues, putting forward suggestions based on your exact personal taste and requirements.
Then it’s time to get into the real details, planning the decor, the flowers, the exact venue layout and really thinking through your guests experience of the day. We’ll put together a Style Guide, suggesting the layout and the full styling of the wedding day.
Throughout it all, we’ll be there to keep the plan on time and on track, capturing all of your decisions, tracking your budget and working to get the best suppliers and the best out of these suppliers for you. We’ll produce you a detailed timeline for your whole wedding week and keep a wedding guide with the full details of every aspect of your day.
Rest assured that we’re be contactable at any time throughout your wedding planning, both working evenings and weekends to ensure we’re available when we’re most needed.
We welcome feedback and adapt our planning as we go as we know life can sometimes get in the way of a well laid out plan.
As our bride Emilie says, “Lucy and Danielle were always so quick to reply to my emails, I always felt like everything was completely in control and I could enjoy the wedding planning – something I was worried about at the start as I’m a bit of a control freak! When our plans changed due to health reasons, Lucy and Danielle changed everything and went over and above what we could have expected from them, to make sure the wedding went ahead how we had hoped.”