Your engaged! Firstly huge congratulations, I really hope you are overjoyed and have taken some time to soak up all the love. Now that the dust has settled and you are thinking about planning your wedding I have put together a few tips on where to start on your wedding planning journey!

Decide on your budget and guest numbers
Before you consider bringing on board your wedding planner or other suppliers it is important to have a clear understanding on how much you have to spend on your wedding. Everyone has an ideal budget to work with, whether it’s £40,000 or £100,000.
I would also strongly recommend that you sit down and write out a rough guest list for your wedding, the more guests you have, the higher the cost per head and more budget you will need for your wedding. Your guest number will determine everything from venue, marquee size, catering requirements, how many floral centrepiece arrangements you need and so much more.
Either your guest list or your budget may need to have some flexibility to accommodate the other if they are not inline.

Kelsie Scully Photography. Bride shows family member her ring.

2. Discuss your priorities

Keeping in mind the above, it’s a good idea to talk about your wedding priorities next.

Knowing what is really important to you and your day will help you and your wedding planner to assign your budget in order of priority. For example, if you are big foodies, then high spec catering is going to be important to you and therefore more of your budget will need to be spent in this area.

3. Determine your style

Even if you are not sure what your personal or wedding style is, I am sure there would be some images that you lean towards. If not, think about other weddings or events that you have been to before and pick out aspects that you loved or didn’t.

Working with a stylist or wedding planner can be very helpful to work through styles of decor, photography, and marrying your experiential priorities with the style.

I would recommend listing everything you want to include in your day, how you would like your guests to experience and feel during the day and what’s important in your personalities to include. If you have seen any inspiration online then use this as a starting point to discuss with your wedding planner what is possible to achieve and who the best supplier to approach would be.

Lilac and gold wedding table inspiration for outdoor wedding

4. Get Organised

The average wedding can take anywhere from 200 - 500 hours of researching, planning, calls, and various administrative tasks. Wedding Planning can be a lot more fun than regular life admin, but it is still a huge undertaking for anyone to take on, especially if it’s not something you have worked on before.

A Wedding Planner will be able to alleviate a lot of this stress by taking on the majority of this administrative work by creating a styling concept for your wedding based on your ideas. They will then go away to complete the research work and recommend expert suppliers which work with your style and budget.

If you don’t have a Wedding Planner or you have an On-the-day coordinator then being organised is going to be very important to you. I would recommend setting up a spreadsheet or other form of organisation which includes:

Prospect and research for suppliers
Budget
Mood board / design concept to keep you on track stylistically
Confirmed suppliers, contact details, requirements & payment schedule
Timeline for planning your wedding so that you keep on track in the months leading up to your day
Schedule for your wedding day that all suppliers and venue can contribute to

5. Begin to research

As discussed above a large part of planning a wedding is research and finding great suppliers to work with. You want to work with suppliers who are excited to be part of your day, suppliers that you trust and also have a great reputation.

A Wedding Planner will have suppliers that they know very well, people that they have worked with before and can highly recommend them. They also have the time and expertise to research and quality check any new suppliers for you before recommending them onwards.

If you are planning your own wedding and are not sure where to start with finding trustworthy, experienced and creative suppliers who are also within your budget then here are a few tips:

Use Pinterest as inspiration only! Be open to flexibility and changing ideas to either fit you better personally or to fit your budget and skill set of suppliers better.
Search on Google, but also check your suppliers out across other wedding directories and instagram - remember to check their reviews! Often your venue will have a list of trusted suppliers that they can reccommend.
Choose suppliers who have similar work available to view on their platforms to what you are trying to achieve.
Send potential suppliers inspirational images and as much information as you can so that they can give you the most accurate quote possible.
Enquire with a couple of options, and then set up no obligation calls with your top two suppliers in a category, ask lots of questions and make sure you get a really good vibe with them.