Now that I’ve been in the wedding industry for a few years, I’d like to share some “pro-tips” from my perspective for any of my friends that are in the middle of planning their wedding day and just the world in general. Here are the first 5 tips for today!

Pro-tip #1 - Decide which is more important to you: “when” or “where” for your wedding. There’s no wrong choice, but whichever you choose will immediately narrow the options for the other.

Pro-tip #2 - Work the details from “big” to “small”. Your guests won’t care about how nice the invitations were or that they got a gold plated koozie as a favor, if dinner was only cheese and crackers.

Pro-tip #3 - Plan on booking “bigger” services 8-12 months in advance. Venues are pretty obvious as popular spots go quickly, but less obvious services can book up crazy early (no joke, there’s a Saturday in October that booked up in January).

Pro-tip #4 - Figure out how to bustle your dress (if it needs to) before the wedding day. There have been a number of weddings I’ve done where everyone’s waiting on your intro or first dance for an awkwardly long time while your mom or bridesmaids fumble around under your dress looking for hoops, hooks, number ties, etc

Pro tip #5 - Create an online guest request list. Asking guests for songs they’ll want to dance to is a great way to help the DJ plan ahead and lets you cross out any unwanted song choices. Doing it on a community document online either from your DJs online “playlist builder” or through a shared google doc/sheet will save you hours of reading bad handwriting and repetitive data entry.