Our love affair with our job

It’s no secret that we love our roles. Creating weddings in Italy and running Wiskow & White is an incredible, rewarding, varied role…but how did we end up here?

My first ever role was as an intern for Oxfam, where I had to go to wedding shows to promote their pre-loved bridal brand and their wedding favours. I hated wedding shows with an absolute passion and I don’t think I liked weddings much either. I associated them with big dresses, outdated traditions, wasting money and horrendous expo halls!

Fast forward 5 years and multiple marketing and event roles later and there I was, planning my own wedding in Italy. We’d chosen a villa that we’d stayed in on holiday. The day we imagined was a big, relaxed celebration with all of our friends and family, after a traditional Italian civil ceremony – that was the criteria for our simple wedding. I started out by trying to plan the wedding myself. We had a small budget and I didn’t think a planner was something that could fit in it.

A few months later, while trying to plan our wedding we realised we needed some help and it was at this time that I was introduced to Danielle as a caterer/planner. It was clear from the moment we met that Danielle loved her job. She loved to find things, fix things, to share her love and knowledge of Italy and to create these important experiences for people. Most of all she loved to make people happy. Danielle’s passion was contagious and after my wedding (literally the day after!) she suggested we set up Wiskow & White.

Danielle chats to my husband Ben, before the ceremony.

After a little while in dis-belief, I realised that I love everything about the role that I’d seen Danielle do and I was sold.

It was over the next 5 years that I learnt what being the wedding planners that we are, actually means. I learnt on the job and thankfully my background stood me in good stead, but there were aspects I had to learn quickly and it was a steep learning curve, especially with cultural and language difficulties!

There are so many things I love about the role, from being able to invent everything we do and the way we do it, to working with suppliers and getting to know their craft, learning Italian and the culture of getting things done in Italy. To working with such a huge range of people and playing (for a while) an important and trusted role in their life, managing the ‘project’ of a wedding (got to love a spreadsheet), designing the whole experience, the styling. And using our intuition to understand what will and won’t work for the couple, for the event and for everyone involved. On the day, seeing the location transformed, the behind the scenes moments, the guests experiencing the day, the couple in dis-belief that the day can be this good - that’s it for us, the best bit. Being the person responsible for fixing everything sounds scary, but it’s the best role in the world.

Everything we do is driven by a central purpose of wanting to help people experience what we did. After all Danielle got married in Italy too. I had the best wedding weekend I could have hoped for and an enjoyable, transparent planning experience. Obviously we’ve taken things to the next level now and after years of experience and development of our signature planning process our weddings are fun, relaxed, organised and style focused.

We adore our jobs, even in covid times. It’s a mix of all our favourite things and best of all, we get to do it together.