Why You Need a Wedding Planner | From a Single + Twentysomething New to the Wedding Business
Dear All,
Hey there! I’m Riley, Taylor’s new intern and this is my first official debut on the Taylor Dawn website.
It’s a little hard to describe what I do in this role because it’s a little bit of everything. However, the biggest thing I’ve been able to gain from this role is to get the inside scoop on all the hundreds of thousands of things, that may be an exaggeration but seriously it’s a lot, that goes into planning and executing a wedding.
For a college student who has only briefly been in love once, I’ve put a lot of thought into my wedding {insert literally any reference to my Pinterest account}. After countless conversations with my best friends, and a few strangers, I’ve found I’m pretty much in the norm. Our wedding days have been romanticized by our own creativity and pop culture since we were little and getting married to the cutest boy in the preschool class during playtime ( shoutout to Jake my preschool husband).
I have an idea of just about every aspect of my wedding from the flowers to the dress to the venue planned out and waiting to be brought to life. However, with all the thought I’ve given to my big day, hiring a wedding planner never crossed my mind. I always figured getting married was one of those things that just about everyone does so how hard could planning and executing a wedding be?
After meeting Taylor and assisting her with some weddings and getting an inside view of everything she does as a wedding planner and designer, I’ve come to compare the need for a wedding planner to my own education. This wasn’t too difficult since college occupies most of my brain space currently. There are ways to get an education without school, ignoring the legality issue to help prove my point. There are a million resources on the internet that will teach you just about anything you could ever want to learn. However, it’s a whole lot easier to have someone who is already an expert on the subject, a professor, pull and organize all the resources you need for them to share their knowledge. It’s still personalized, I chose my major and chose the classes that interest me, but its also opening me up to a million different things I never would have given a second thought to until someone else exposed me to the ideas. I see hiring a wedding planner in a similar way. Sure there are countless resources on how to plan your wedding and lists of everything that needs to get done before the big day, but having a planner who is already full of that knowledge and connections makes everything so much easier. We are all busy people; life is crazy and things fall to the back burners and having someone whose job it is to assist you with all craziness of wedding planning is an invaluable resource that most people don’t even think about.
Another thing that opened my eyes to the wonder of wedding planners was actually assisting at my first wedding. There are so many little things that have to happen and be organized the day of that shouldn’t have to fall on guests or mother of the brides or especially brides! I kid you not, my arm was sore the next day from pointing around the room SO MANY TIMES as I instructed vendors where to put things or people where to report for pictures. Regardless of how well-planned out and rehearsed a wedding is prior to event day, people still have a million questions and someone needs to be there to answer them. Taylor and I got to debrief on our drive home from my first wedding and the part of that conversation that stuck out to me the most was telling her “ my biggest fear is my mom or sister or friends being too busy organizing people or answering questions at my wedding to enjoy it,” and her response was, “ wedding planners are typically those things you don’t know you needed until it’s over.”
In typical Taylor fashion, she exposed me to something I never even knew I needed and I will forever be grateful for that. For my future Pinterest-ing and hypothetical dreaming of my future perfect big day, I will never again discount the immense preparation it takes for weddings to come together and the wonderful planners that make it happen.
Yours Truly,
Riley Scruggs (A Single + 20-Something New to the Wedding Business)
