Weddings have seen some amazing and creative changes over the years. What once was a standard wedding design with similar colors, decorations, and styles to those around you has evolved into gorgeous and next level productions you see all over the ‘gram. Planning such a luxury, unique event can seem daunting, so we’re here to help cut through the confusion and make building your wedding dream team a breeze.
A Vendor Dream Team
First, let’s chat about which vendor partners you’ll want on your creative team. Typically in designing a wedding, we include the planning, floral, rentals, stationery, signage, and dj/production categories in our “design crew.” Each category plays a different, yet interlocking, role to the other. Here is what each vendor brings to the table:
Wedding Planner
The glue that holds the team together! Your wedding planner will help guide you in taking your favorite Pinterest photos and turning that into a cohesive vibe and theme. They’ll then help seamlessly communicate that vision to all the other categories, ensuring your wants are heard throughout the process.
Florist
The “wow” factor. Your florist will handle not only the flowers but all the candles throughout the space, along with rental pieces like pedestals, vases, urns, and installation elements that really give the venue that wow factor.
Rentals
The foundation to an amazing wedding day design. Rentals can change the entire vibe and feel of a venue space by incorporating your unique spin through chairs, tablecloths, napkins, chargers, dinnerware, glassware, and flatware.
Stationery + Signage
The icing on the cake! We love how stationery and signage elevates the tablescapes and each area to cohesively brand your wedding and tell your love story. From welcome moments to shuttle and directional signage, seating chart displays, bar signs, table numbers, menus, placecards, and more, these vendors fill in all the pretty details to make your wedding uniquely yours.
DJ/Production
The “make it pop” vendor. The production team will cover lighting, staging, draping, dance floors, dance floor wraps, and more to completely transform the space into your dream wedding design. Oftentimes, this category comes closely connected with your DJ or entertainment vendor to provide one single yet elevated experience.
Next, let’s discuss the best order to book your vendor team in for the most seamless collaboration. Imagine we’re crafting the perfect ice cream sundae – you wouldn’t add the whipped cream before the hot fudge! So too is the crafting of your wedding vendor design team. In our experience, we recommend booking vendors in the following order:
Hiring a Dream Team
Wedding Planner
A quality wedding planner will not only help you define your vision and theme, they’ll also guide you to amazing vendors that best fit your budget, vibe, style, and personality for a cohesive wedding design team. Book your wedding planner first to make sourcing your dream team a breeze!
Florals
Establishing your floral vision sets the groundwork for the remainder of the vendor categories. Once you know what fills the center of your tables, you’ll be able to design out from there with rentals and stationery.
Rentals
Now that we have a vibe and vision and centerpieces designed, we can start adding layers of texture and depth through tablecloths, napkins, chargers, plates, glassware, and flatware ensuring each piece is complimentary to the design.
Stationery + Signage
Moving past color palette and tablescapes, we can start prioritizing all of the finishing touches including menus, place cards, table numbers, seating chart, bar signs, dessert signs, and more to bring the entirety of the design together as one cohesive story.
Production
Next, we can layer in production for draping, dance floors, staging, lighting, photo booths, video walls, holographic fog screens, C02 cannons, cold sparks, and anything that may fall under the lighting, audio, and visual scope of services.
Florals
Lastly, we’ll circle back to florals once more to provide updates to the proposal, accounting for signage and production pieces that we’ll need to accent. Much of this your planner provided as high level wants during the initial floral inquiry, but now that those pieces are confirmed is the best time to make edits and adjustments.
Dream Team Success
Have your details ready. Establishing key markers like guest count, wedding party count, venue, anticipated floorplan, high level timeline, and date are essential before moving into the wedding design phase.
Be clear and consistent in your communication, and ensure your voice is heard. Using vivid language in your vendor meetings allows everyone to move into each phase of design on the same page. Instead of broad feedback like, “I just want it to pop more”, be specific in your thoughts. Try “I’d love to see a more vibrant hue of pink in place of the blush” or “My eye is really drawn to the shape of these elevated floral arrangements in the inspiration; I’d love to incorporate more of these into the centerpieces”.
Bring inspiration! There are many elements that your design team will need to create, but having a starting point for what brings you joy will give them the best foundation for bringing to life something you’ll love. Start with high level elements – photos of ceremony spaces, reception tables, installations, and colors before moving into detail elements. Having booked with a wedding planner first allows the two of you the chance to create your theme, color palette, and overall vision to more clearly communicate that to the rest of the vendor partners.
Host your final vendor meetings in the venue space, and invite the entire design crew to join. If possible, opt to add on centerpiece examples and rental mock ups to allow you and your dream team one final chance to edit or adjust any of the design. Meeting with the design team together instead of individually allows the opportunity to cultivate a more creative environment, and ensures each vendor understands the role they’re playing within the overall design to eliminate any day-of miscommunications or mishaps.
Enjoy Building Your Wedding Dream Team? Ready to start finding vendors for your wedding? Check out our collection of Kansas City Wedding Vendors.
