I was curious on how I will pen down my special tips on organizing a wedding when there are a million tools and websites available everywhere, and the answer was pretty simple: make it personal. This was also one of the mottos of planning our wedding, to focus on the personal experience of guests and the family. As we say it in the "not-west" a marriage is a communion of not just two souls but two families.
This brings me to the very first tip of how to plan a wedding, DELEGATE. I once read a very beautifully written book on "How to become a manager" by Julie Zhuo and surprisingly the lessons were not confined to professional workspace, it said something like this; in order to multiply, you need to learn how to let go of tasks that would be taken over by someone else, this will allow you to take on more. So, the very first step before you start planning is to identify the best team players in your family and friends who would support you and give them a piece to plan. Use those negotiation skills of a consultant, the designing skills of a designer, the person with best choice in music for your background score and so on.
Now, that you have your A team ready, the next step would be to do your due diligence and research. This includes, getting quotations from vendors, venues, narrowing down on your musts, looking at your individual budget not a wholesome number but how much would you allocate for each task, ask yourself these three questions and prioritize your budget accordingly.
1. What is a non-negotiable for you and your partner? (e.g. expensive clothes, or a seasoned photographer)
2. What is something that you would be willing to compromise on? (e.g. expensive clothes or a seasoned photographer)
3. What is something that you would be ok to let go all together?
Categorizing each expense in these three would be the best bet to know what and how much you are willing to spend, as there is absolutely no dearth of vendors in a country that celebrates weddings like festivals.
The third advice is especially for the audience that enjoy the last-minute thrill. The idea would be to pen down details of the wedding events in order to have everything (your outfit, accessories, make up, everything for the rituals) ready before the D-day. Now, this list can go on and on, but to have a seamless wedding, without the usual delays from Indian Standard Time, the best idea is to have and collect things as you find them instead of waiting for the perfect moment or time slot to purchase everything. As long as you have a wedding date, do not hesitate and keep that item in your cart.
The primary focus for our wedding planning was our choice of venue and food throughout the wedding extravaganza which made the wedding quite a charming experience all together overshadowing every little imperfection only we (the A-team) knew about. Liasing it back to the beginning of this blog, a personal experience primarily includes, good hospitality, and good food. This is your queue to have the most weightage for these two items in your planning and think about everything else as secondary.
Every successful merchandise or consumer goods business in the world, has one thing in common, yes, it's a very efficient supply chain and logistics. How do you think ZARA is able to deliver the latest fashion to the entire world at one go? Well, taking inspiration from the big fishes, I would suggest you figure out your entire "logistics" with meticulous details. Let's start with basics, simple things like pick-up and drop from the Airport or stations to the venue, would you be facilitating? if not, communicate in advance. How will all your gift items and give away bags reach the venue? What are the extras that you would want to keep in rooms for snacks, etc. Mapping and delegating your logistics would help you have a smooth event, rather than last minute grocery shopping for those extra soft drink bottles.
One of the items I had on my must haves was an ace photographer for the main events, capturing every little detail with all their heart. Personally, choosing the right photographer will definitely mould the way you look back at this day. While fixing the perfect team, it is essential to do your due diligence and market research before you hire, which means checking their previous portfolios, finding out market rates with other artists and enquiries, have a chat with them personally on how you envision your pictures, discuss any extra requirement that you may have in advance. The real work may begin after you have hired them already, you need to do some grunt work on finding out timelines for shoot, communicating about lighting on all events, hand out a list of close friends and family to make sure they are captured (also depends on the size of guests), share some references with the photographer team regarding the portraits you are looking for etc.
Now that you have a holistic idea of how to plan a wedding, in another blog I would like to create an inexhaustive checklist of things you might want to look at while choosing outfits, venue, vendors, invites, itinerary and most importantly budget. Finally, following this I will share some of the best personal ideas we gathered and managed to execute for our wedding making it pleasant experience for our friends and family.
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