“Their wedding was so them!” To me, that’s always one of the greatest sentiments I can overhear guests say at a wedding we’ve been a part of. Bespoke celebrations are not anything new, but helping a couple to have a wedding that is true to them, and cohesive at the same time can be more of a challenge. It may seem as though it’s obvious that a couple’s wedding should be about them, but often couples can get so caught up in the details that they lose sight of what makes them as a couple special.
When a client hires you it is generally because they need help and also consider you an expert in your field. Couples can typically tell you the style that they want, but it’s part of your job to extract which parts they’ve chosen because it’s significant to them and which ones they just think are popular or they saw at someone else’s wedding that they’re trying to emulate. As a wedding designer you have to help them to prioritize what is most important to them, discover why they chose the venue, what the story of them as a couple is as well as special family memories that may be something that you can translate into their design. By learning all of these tidbits about your couple you are not only bonding with them and getting to know them better, but you’re also hearing things that will help you to know how to incorporate those special details into their overall wedding look.
Infusing couple’s personalities into their wedding design will help a wedding not to feel generic or, worse, like anyone else could have this same wedding. It breaths life into one of the most intimate times of a couple’s lives and creates new traditions that they can continue in their own future families. One of the most important reasons to make a couple’s wedding as personal as possible is that it’s going to ensure that they don’t want to change anything the closer to the wedding it gets and that when they look back at their wedding years or decades later it’s still going to feel special and significant to them.
Incorporating family: This recent couple from a few months ago got married in a meadow next to a barn that the bride had grown up with a backdrop of and that her father had been deeply enamored with. While the venue/her hometown was hours away from the big city where her fiancé and her lived, the fact that her now- departed father could not be here, the barn was the next best thing. I helped create paper products that not only explained her dad’s love of this space, but a little history of it and a custom illustration so that the guests could take home a little piece of this heavenly place. (Program design and illustration by: Bright Room Studio, Photography Meghan Mehan)
A few of their favorite things: This couple loved cocktails and having just the right ones were one of the more important details to them for their reception. The bride and groom each had their own favorite cocktail and even found a way to honor the mother-of-the-bride by naming one of the cocktails after her and having it be the way she likes it. (Design and illustration by: Bright Room Studio, Photography Meghan Mehan)
Incorporating the space: With the barn being so significant to our couple, finding ways to highlight how special it is was key. We created huge escort display scrolls with a massive floral arrangement that let us show the scale of the barn as well as another opportunity to tie the florals (with foraged dogwood from near the venue) and calligraphy throughout. (Calligraphy by Bright Room Studio, Florals by Mandolin Flowers, Photography by Meghan Mehan)
Photography: Megan Mehan
