Wedding Planning Q & A with Borrowed and Blue

We recently teamed up with Borrowed and Blue, a locally-focused online wedding resource, to give couples some insight into our perspective on wedding planning.

Here’s our Q&A with Borrowed and Blue. All questions by B&B, all answers by Jubilee of Jubilee Lau Events:

1. If you could possibly narrow it down, what would be your favorite moment of a wedding day?

It would be the moment before the bride walks down the aisle. I love positioning her in place, fluffing her train, and giving her final words of encouragement right before sending her down the aisle.

Photo by Gary Ashley of The Wedding Collective

2. Describe your event aesthetic in three words.

Refined, sophisticated elegance

Photo by Kevin Chin Photography

3. The first thing you ask when you sit down with a couple?

Where are you from? I love hearing about people’s history!

Photo by Augie Chang

4. Top three pieces of advice for couples who just got engaged?

Hire a planner so you can enjoy the process.

Choose bridesmaids/groomsmen that will help alleviate (not add to) your stress on the wedding day.

Be true to who you are when planning the details of your wedding, even if that means tossing out certain traditions or rejecting your best friend’s ideas.

Photo by Rylee Hitchner

5. Most important detail of wedding decor?

Lighting! Truly, lighting makes a tremendous impact on the overall event design. Not only does it create the mood that you want, but it highlights all the beautiful elements of your design and hides the areas that you don’t want to show. If you despise the carpet at your venue, but don’t have the budget to re-carpet the entire space, lighting can do miracles to hide it.

Photo by Augie Chang

Photo by Rylee Hitchner

Photo by Chung Li

6. Your thoughts on DIY weddings?

Be very selective on what you decide to DIY, because some things are just meant to be produced by the pros! Pick the smaller projects, like wedding favors, for your DIY project. That way, you won’t be spending an overwhelming amount of time on it and if it doesn’t go as well as you planned, the impact on the overall wedding would be minimal.

7. What would your ideal tablescape look like?

I love a simple, elegant table and I’m bias to long tables as they always look better in photos and on a practical level, long tables allow guests to converse with more people at the table. My ideal tablescape would have simple low floral arrangements flanked by taper candles. Lots of candles! I tend to like solid, neutral colored linens in fabric like dupionique or shantung.

Photo by Lisa Lefkowitz

8. Your favorite of all the San Francisco wedding venues?

Asian Art Museum! It’s so rich in its history (Samsung Hall used to be the old card catalogue room of the S.F. Public Library!) and the architecture is stunning. It’s marble interior makes for a very neutral setting for any design!

Photo by Lisa Lefkowitz

9. The most important part of wedding planning?

When it comes to planning a wedding, there are a lot of decisions to be made collectively as a couple, or as a family, and the process can be stressful at times when there are challenging family dynamics involved. Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture, which is the love and happiness behind this celebration that you are planning. It is truly a celebration, and a rare occasion where all your loved ones will travel far and near to be in one place for you. Don’t lose the broader perspective by being fixated on the little details!

Photo by Gary Ashley of The Wedding Collective

10. Describe your dream wedding.

My dream wedding would be to have my closest family and friends on a remote island with us, celebrating for several days. People are so much more fun and relaxed when they’re on vacation, so I would want our guests to make a vacation out of our wedding! Every detail would be well thought out to ensure they feel pampered and taken care of, from the welcome amenities that will be waiting for them in their rooms upon arrival to the facial masks that will be sitting on their pillows after a day in the sun, to all the other little surprises that I would plan for them throughout their stay. It would be a weekend full of festivities to give us plenty of quality time with our guests!

Photo by Jeanne Chan 

All photos above are weddings/events by Jubilee Lau Events. Thanks again to Borrowed & Blue for the Q&A!

Cheers,

HOW TO SEAT GUESTS AT A WEDDING

I've always loved attending weddings as a guest. Not only is it wonderful to celebrate the union of people you care about, but it often is a fun reunion of some sort. I get to spend time with family or friends or former colleagues or college buddies whom I may not get to see regularly outside of Facebook.

Many years ago, my husband and I were invited to a wedding of an acquaintance. To be quite honest, we were both shocked and a little confused when we received the invite, as we couldn't even remember the last time we spoke with the couple. Still, we appreciated that they invited us and decided to accept the invitation.

We saw many friends at the wedding whom we did know very well, and enjoyed catching up with everyone during the cocktail hour. However, when it came time for dinner and we got to the table we were assigned to, we were disappointed to see that none of our friends were in close proximity to us. We were assigned to a table with 8 teenagers, and they were completely glued to their iphones the entire time. They showed no interest in carrying on any type of conversation even though I did make an effort to try. Though my husband and I kept each other company during the course of the 2 hour dinner, I realized how disappointing it can feel as guest when you are assigned to a table that does not offer good company and conversation. It can be downright miserable, especially as you see and hear the loud laughter coming from all the other tables.

So, as you prepare to work on your seating assignments for the wedding, here are our top 5 tips for you:

1. Assign everyone to a seat, not just a table. This gives you full control over the guest seating, which is a great thing because you know each of your guest best!

2. You don't necessarily need to seat everyone next to their best friend, but rather, think about whom each person would enjoy conversing with. If you seat two incredibly shy, reserved guests together who shares no common topic, it could be pretty boring for them both.

3. Provide some ice breakers for your guests! For example, you can name your tables instead of numbering them and behind the table name card, you can include a short story on the significance of the name. If you named the table Amsterdam, tell guests why this place is significant to your relationship. If you are incorporating a special family recipe into the menu, note that on the printed menus so guests at the table have something to talk about to break the ice!

4. Long tables and square tables are best for conversations. At a 48" square table, you can pretty much converse with every person at the table. At a long table, you can easily converse with at least 5 other people around you. If you decide to do rounds (least desirable for conversations), your venue or caterer will most likely suggest a 60" or a 72". We definitely recommend going with the 60", which would allow guests to easily converse with at least 3-4 people around them. In our opinion, a 72" simply feels way too big and does not encourage the intimacy most couples would want for their wedding.

5. Consider putting young kids in a separate room where they can be free to be kids. It's very hard for young kids to sit still for a 2 hour dinner, and it can be a pressure for parents to try to enforce that at a wedding in order to be polite and respectful. Ask your wedding venue if they can provide a separate room close by where you can hire professional babysitters from a licensed childcare service to watch them. These licensed childcare services that cater to events will often send sitters fully equipped with books, art and craft projects, and other things to entertain the children. This allow the kids to run around and do what they like, while their parents can also enjoy a lovely dinner with uninterrupted conversations.

Photo by Kevin Chin Photography 

Photo by Kevin Chin Photography

Photo by Beaux Arts

Photo by Viv Chen Photography

Cheers,

WHY YOU SHOULD HIRE A WEDDING PLANNER

Happy 2016!! With the holiday season being the most popular time of the year to be popping THE question, lots of people are ringing into the new year with a shiny new rock on their finger.

Congrats to all you lovebirds out there who are ready to plan your wedding! One of the first questions you'll probably ask yourselves is whether or not you need a Wedding Planner to help you out.

Our advice? A definite yes!  Unless you regularly plan parties for over 100 people with a 5 ,6, or 7 figure budget, you're going to want to bring in a professional Wedding Planner to make sure you're doing it right. The Wall Street Journal have compiled their list of the 10 most stressful jobs in the world, and Event Planner ranks #5, right behind soldiers and firefighters. That sounds about right to those of us who plan events for a living. Now why would anyone who is inexperienced in this area want to be planning one of the most monumental events of their lives without an expert alongside them? It's like building a house without an architect or performing as an orchestra without a conductor.

We get it. You're super excited to dive into the planning. You're imagining fun dress fitting sessions with your closest girlfriends, over the top food tastings with an unlimited supply of wine and bubbly, hand picking the most gorgeous linens to go with the pretty flowers you chose, and continually adding as many beautiful photos to your Pinterest boards as possible along the way. Yes, these are all a part of the wedding planning, but what about figuring out how to get 12 vendor trucks to load in a single dock in 2 hours, concocting a clever transportation schedule that can allow you to use only 2 shuttle buses for 5 hotel pick ups, and devising a grand plan to flip the ballroom from ceremony to reception in 1 hour? What about learning to understand a vendor contract or the band's 10 page rider?
By hiring a really good planner, you will get to fulfill that lovely dream of yours and be involved in mostly the fun parts of the planning, while leaving the not-so-fun-but-extremely-crucial logistics to your planner's capable hands.

There's a reason why we have so many docs for even the simplest of events. Our array of internal docs help us to stay organized despite the massive amount of details for every wedding.

You may be convinced that you're going to be just fine being your own Wedding Planner, because you've planned a few parties before and you've hired some kick-a** vendors who can help guide you along the way. There's your knowledgeable venue manager, informative caterer, and eager photographer....all available and willing to give you their best advice. And they will be, to you, and all 30-50-100 of the other couples that they will be working with simultaneously. They may have hundreds of weddings under their belt, and I have no doubt that they've "seen it all" and can really offer you great advice. But there's just one problem....

Context.

The advice that anyone and everyone will give you during your wedding planning journey (solicited and unsolicited, from vendors, friends, families, and even strangers) will all be outside the true context of YOUR individual, unique, special-to-yours wedding. That's where your Wedding Planner is most valuable.

When clients hire a planner, they've hired a confidante, a project manager, and a creative artist all in one. Similar to a general contractor's role in the architecture world, we're the ones who can effectively manage all the vendors because we have both the macro and micro view of the wedding.
No, not just any wedding. Your wedding. Every piece of advice we give you along the way will be tailored to the context of your wedding, because that's the only way that makes sense. What worked for Jane's 50 person outdoor wedding in June will likely not work for your 250 person winter affair in a museum. And that gorgeous, jaw-dropping, swoon-worthy tabletop image that you pinned on pinterest? How do you fit that within the context of your wedding budget, venue, and other factors?

A wedding is like one of those 1000 pieces of puzzles. It takes a lot of time, careful precision and accuracy to piece it all together. It's hundreds of hours of planning and pages and pages of schematics, spreadsheets, and contracts. Without a certain level of experience and expertise, you risk making costly mistakes along the way. Your planner is your trusted advisor who not only helps you avoid such mistakes, but can effectively help you to problem solve when unforeseen issues surface (and trust us, there will be unforeseen issues with any event!). We comb through every last detail behind the scenes, go over extensive notes with each vendor, and triple check everything to ensure every i has been dotted, and every t has been crossed. We focus on the preventive, so our master check list includes things like:

--Check for local activities that may impact road closures or detours
--Check time of sunset on wedding day (this is important for photography purposes!)
--Check wheelchair access for all event spaces

....and about a million more things

A collage of some behind the scene shots of our team as we prepare for weddings (taken by my iPhone, so apologies for the quality of the images!)

So, while your florist is an expert at her craft, she has no clue what the band, or the caterer, or the photographer are contracted for at your wedding. She also has no idea when grandma plans to arrive, and whom should be there to greet her and to pin on her corsage. Yet, her production schedule and logistics will somehow be linked to everyone else's. That's where your planner comes in.  We'll help you figure out all this hard stuff. And when you have a stellar planner, it not only alleviates your stress level, but it allows all your vendors to focus on what they do best.

We're not trying to burst your bubble, but we just want to give you a dose of reality that wedding planning goes far beyond the pretty stuff. There's a lot of unglamorous details on the backend that needs to be well thought out and properly executed, and that's not a role that you, or any of your guests, should be taking on. We believe that wedding planning should be fun for you and your families and that's why we're encouraging you to hire a planner so that you can focus on the pretty stuff.

Still have doubts about hiring a planner? Consider this. In Northern California, an average wedding costs as much as a fancy sports car, a hefty down payment on a house, and sometimes, it's the cost of an actual house. Given the investment into this important, once-in-a-lifetime event, doesn't it make sense to invest in a bit of insurance to make sure you're doing things right? Hiring a reputable, experienced planner is that piece of insurance.

Wishing every engaged couple a wonderful, fun, splendid journey in their wedding planning!

Cheers,