Episode 6: Planners, Designers + Production Houses Defined

Episode Summary

Hello friends, this one is for our lovely couples. On today’s episode, we define the following terms that you will hear throughout the planning process and their respective roles: What is a planner’s role? What’s a designer’s role? What’s a florist responsible for vs a production house? Most importantly, we talk through how we do things at Julian Leaver Events and how we approach our vendor partnerships dependent on the scope and desires of your event.

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Full Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. This week we are gonna talk a little bit about this whole idea of planners and designers and planner designers and where everybody kind of fits into the mix because there’s a lot of chatter within the whole space from clients and from other vendors. Who does what? Who’s on first, who’s on second, and who’s playing shortstop.

So let’s just start with our friends, the planners because that’s the most basic, easy explanation. You are a wedding planner and you really don’t do design. You sub design out to a design firm or you sub design out to more of a floral firm or more of a production firm.

A designer is usually also a florist, is usually also a production firm. The difference really between those three is: you do floral only, you’re really just a florist. But you do more than floral—you do floral, you do decor, maybe you do linens, maybe you do some tabletop here and there on the side—that’s more of a production operation.

In this scenario, you have two people sitting next to each other—the planner and the designer. The planner is helping set the vibe and then the designer is coming in to design the vibe. What is it gonna actually look like? How are we gonna interact with the space?

Then you get to the third category, which really is planner-designer in the same firm. Some planners are just very logistically minded. They only handle logistics. They don’t do any of the design at all. And then sometimes the planners also love design, so they want to be involved in that process.

What we found in the advantage of being a planner-designer is that we are with our client so much more than every other vendor, and so we get to be a party to all of these kind of little conversations. We hear another little nugget about how they like to entertain, or how they do it at home, or how they celebrate the holidays. And so we get to glean all of that information.

At Julian Leaver Events, we separate this into two categories. In a designer, you have to have someone who wants to research, who wants to go down a deep hole of like, how many different types of ribbon can I find and I’m not gonna rest until I find the perfect one.

We always say that we find the yeses through the nos because we have a million ideas. This is our 300th, 400th, 500th wedding, right? But it’s your first wedding. So we are okay with you saying no because maybe this doesn’t fit for you and we’re gonna put it back in our pocket and we’re gonna bring it out for somebody else who really loves that idea.

The other element of being a planner-designer when you’re doing destination events is that we understand very clearly your expectations. How to show the other vendors who are going to be working with us, whether they’re in France or whether they’re in Italy, or whether they’re in somewhere in the Caribbean—we understand exactly how to translate your vision into their product.

None of these ways is wrong. None of these ways is right. It’s what’s about what’s right for you and what works for you and for your family, and for what you guys are trying to achieve.