Diary of a Boho Bride – Kirra and Tim, Entry 3: Finding The Right Suppliers

Happy Friday everyone! How are you all today? For many of you I imagine it is the last day before you break up for the Christmas holidays, so I imagine you are in a pretty good mood! For others you may not be breaking up yet, or you may even be working though the holidays, so hats off to you! It seems our Boho brides are getting into the Christmas spirit! I always tell my brides to leave December free of planning jobs and enjoy Christmas and re group in the new year, which seems to be just what Kirra is doing in todays diary entry! We join her in Australia where she is having a family holiday as she tells us all about her experiences finding the right wedding supplier.

I’d love to hear if you are planning on doing any wedding planning over the festive holidays? Or are you planing on a massive surge in the new year instead?

I’ll pass the blog over to Kirra………….

Ah time has flown, can’t believe Christmas is almost here and then the Year Of Our Wedding will be upon us, happy days! Wedding planning is slightly on the back burner for us this month as we are currently in sunny Australia where we are having Christmas with my family. It is a well-earned rest and very exciting as I haven’t been home in 4 years so there is loads of catching up to do. Everyone is very excited about our wedding and several relatives and friends are making the trip over to the UK for it, so there is lots of excited chatting about plans going on, it always feels so nice to get excited with friends about what our plans are and seeing people looking forward to coming to celebrate with us.

In amongst the break from official planning there is one potentially exciting bit of news… Whilst looking for a wedding dress within budget I have started also looking into online boutiques such as BHLDN (sooo many beautiful dresses) and recently stumbled upon a dress online by an American designer called Nicole Miller that I LOVE the look of! Not going to post a picture of it here just in case it turns out to be the one for me. It isn’t stocked in the UK so would have to be ordered online which makes me a bit nervous, but by chance is stocked at one boutique in Sydney, so I am going to go and try it on whilst we are here. Will keep you posted on how it goes!

As I attempt to catch up on emails and stay organised whilst away it has struck me how involved the whole thing of communicating with potential wedding suppliers is. The amount of emails that have gone back and forth already as we look at photographers, venues, flowers, cake, food, equipment hire, tent etc is, well, a LOT, and at times (particularly with a fuzzy head from life with a small v energetic baby) I have found it difficult to stay on top of who I have emailed/replied to and where we are at with everything. Having sometimes poo pooed the concept of wedding planners in the past I now totally understand why people hire them and what a huge job they actually do! 

This introduction to the world of wedding suppliers has been so interesting. It’s such a massive industry that you kind of don’t really realise is there until you start looking at planning your wedding. I’ve been struck by the realisation that this is an industry that has so many really lovely people out there who work in weddings because they genuinely love what they do, but there are also suppliers that seem to be more about vastly overcharging the moment the word ‘wedding’ is attached to any product. Going through the process of not only finding what it is that we want, but also finding the right supplier to get what we want from (!) in each instance has been really interesting and at times it has been really tough to decide. Sometimes I have liked the product but found the supplier rude or unhelpful which puts me off having them involved with what should be a totally positive experience for us, and conversely sometimes it’s been sad not to go with a particular supplier having had numerous emails and built a rapport but the product turned out to be not quite what we were after or it wasn’t suitable for our budget. I know it sounds a bit silly, but I never realised how much the tone of people’s emails would influence my decision to go ahead with a particular supplier until organising this wedding. I used to play for weddings with my college string quartet and I know how easy it is to be courteous and sensitive to the bride & groom when dealing with their enquiries. If my answer to them was that I wouldn’t be able to work for them for budgetary or other reasons, I always pointed them in the direction of someone that might be able to help them and sometimes still exchanged emails to answer other questions they had even though they weren’t hiring us. I mean, why not, it doesn’t cost me anything and you want to help them find what they need. In a few instances (photography in particular) as a result of our email exchanges I am now trying to work out ways that I might be able to work with them for another project at some point as we couldn’t use all of the amazing photographers out there for the wedding (if only!) so it shows how much having a positive, enthusiastic and above all genuine approach to your work is sometimes as important as the product itself, particularly when it is going to be a part of one of the most special days of someone’s life.

Anyway, sorry this post isn’t really about specific planning developments but now that we have all the biggies booked it feels nice to be having a little breather and enjoying some time in the sun as a new family.

Lots of Christmas love

Kirra xx