Booking Your Wedding Suppliers
Once you’ve secured your venue, it’s time to surround yourselves with the team that are going to help bring your wedding day to life – the wedding suppliers. If you’ve booked a wedding planner then I’m sure they will have presented you with lots of contacts and options to realise your vision. If you’ve invested in a wedding planner book, then there will be a step by step / month by month guide to how to approach your planning.
Make sure that you identify what’s really important to you, and take the appropriate steps to securing them for your wedding day. We wanted a group of suppliers who were going to be reliable, trustworthy and communicative.
Finding Your Wedding Dream Team
Work With Your Wedding Venue
Once you’ve secured your venue, you will probably find that they will have a list of recommended suppliers for everything related to your wedding; Photographers, Florists, Wedding Bands / DJs, Venue Dressing, Hair and Make Up Artists, Wedding Cars, Wedding Cake Suppliers and Stationers. It’s definitely worth looking through these options as the suppliers will already be familiar with the venue and comfortable working with the team.
Check Out Social Media
Social Media offers a valuable tool for researching and finding suitable wedding suppliers for your wedding. Using hashtags is a great way to refine your search, and you’ll soon become aware of the best hashtags to enter into the search criteria.
Visit Wedding Fairs and Exhibitions
Wedding Fairs and Exhibitions can be excellent ways of meeting local suppliers and seeing the ways in which they can work with you. By meeting the supplier in-person you will be able to get an idea of how they work and if this is going to match your plans.
Ask For Recommendations
Ask your friends, social circle, work colleagues for suitable recommendations. This is a fantastic way of finding suppliers, and in some cases you may have already seen their work at a wedding that you have attended.
Wedding Supplier Communication Is Key
The Importance Of Reliable and Trustworthy Wedding Suppliers
Having reliable, responsive and trustworthy wedding suppliers is so important. I would highly recommend paying attention to your initial contact with suppliers, do you get a good vibe from them? If a supplier is considerably slow in responding to your initial query, this may be an indicator of how their communication will be throughout your wedding planning.
Read The Small Print / Terms and Conditions
Before paying any deposits, make sure that you have read the terms and conditions and small print. This is where there might be further information about additional mileage charges, or information on non refundable deposits.
Don’t Ignore Red Flags, Trust Your Gut Feeling
If you don’t get a good vibe from a supplier then please trust your gut. We only had one bad experience with one initial supplier, but this situation led us to booking a much better supplier in the end. In hindsight, I got a bad feeling when this particular supplier was very slow at replying to correspondence and took ages to confirm our deposit had been received. You can give the benefit of the doubt, but when it’s someone who’s going to be instrumental to the day, it’s not worth the stress!
Our Wedding Day Suppliers
We were so lucky to be surrounded by a group of talented, reliable and trustworthy suppliers throughout our wedding experience. Here’s a list of all the fantastic Cheshire-based wedding suppliers that contributed towards our momentous wedding day. My Wedding Suppliers
MY WEDDING WISDOM
THE WEDDING SUPPLIERS HINTS AND TIPS
Book A Taste Testing
If you get the chance, I would highly recommend booking a wedding breakfast taste testing at your venue. For us, this was a really enjoyable experience right before our wedding. We got to see the presentation of the food and make our final decision on our wedding breakfast.
Think About The Environment
How can you be sustainable at your wedding.
Get Drinks Requirements
It can be surprising how many people decide to / have to drive to weddings. If you’re aware of there being a significant number of your guests who will require soft drinks, then you can make arrangements. Quite often, drinks packages only include the alcoholic drinks being catered for at the tables, and not the soft drinks, (other than water). This is also important for the wedding toast so that a non-alcoholic option can be offered too.
Have Consultations / Trials
Try and make the time to have in-person consultations and trials. This can be especially important for hair and make up, floristry and venue dressing as it allows you to discuss your vision, and the supplier to give you their advice, recommendations and experience.