Happiness if seeing my brides faces light up at our final design meetings. This is something that is exclusively for my full planning brides and it’s just the best. About a month before a wedding day, my brides get a visual mock up of their table-scapes including sample floral centerpieces, exact place settings and fine details. It is a wonderfully remarkable meeting where months and months of design work and details fall into place. Today I’m sharing why I make it a requirement to have this type of meeting with every full planning bride.
client experience
It is my belief that your planning journey should be just as magical as your wedding day. Here at One Sweet Day in May we follow custom timelines tailored to each individual couple to allow the process to be enjoyable, streamlined, and honestly-super fun! About one month from event day I invite my couple and who ever they’d like to bring and we dedicate a whole day to a final design meeting that includes a table mockup. Months and months of curating and nailing down our color palette, florals, and a very detailed design. As a planner and floral designer (and silk ribbon maker-hah) for my bride’s event we house several services under one roof allowing this final meeting to be cohesive. Our mockups include the following.
Rental items including tables and chairs, table settings, and linens.
Stationary
Candles
Mockups of exact centerpieces
I also get a few surprise items (can’t tell you, sorry!) to really make this meeting a sweet ending to the design part of the planning journey. Overall, this mockup meeting allows me to elevate my client experience and really showcase how One Sweet Day in May is an all inclusive boutique wedding planning and floral design house.
Along with going over all the visual aspects of our design, this meeting is laid back and allows my bride and her family time to breathe and just chat. My brides become really sweet friends of mine during planning and I love to have this day where business is mixed with commradirty.
2. troubleshooting
Another huge reason for this final meeting is to troubleshoot. Sometimes rental items like linens don’t look as good in person as we thought they would. This gives us an opportunity to switch anything to achieve the final look. We have exact centerpieces that will adorn our guest tables so the bride can give her ok on the flowers and size of the pieces. Again, this meeting is about one month before, giving us plenty of time to adjust anything without being stressed. I look at mockups as I look at stationary designers sending over invitation proofs, caterers holding tastings, and hair and makeup trials. Mockups are non negotiable for me as a planner and florist. Being on the same page visually is imperative to giving a bride her dream day.
3. it’s business savvy
Mockups allow me to have exact numbers of everything we need (glassware, silverware, candles ect.) so I don’t order too many which costs the bride more money or worse ordering too little or something sending me scrambling. For flowers, knowing a stem count for each centerpiece will allow me to tweak a floral order so again, I’m not ordering too little or too many of something. Numbers are exactly the most glamorous part of my job, but they are darn important and mock up meetings are a great tool for nailing them down!
