What does a Wedding Stylist do?

We often get asked “What do you actually do?” at A Beautiful Occasion, and while the answer is simple and clear to us, to others it might seem a little grey, so we’ll try and clear up some things for you.

Today there has been a major shift from those weddings in the past that focused mainly on ‘cookie cutter’ type days, where one size fit most, to now becoming completely personalised, customised and bespoke events, tailored to the couple getting married.  If the brides favourite colour is pineapple yellow, in the past it might not have been able to be incorporated, or not to a huge extent.  Fast forward to now, and we use pineapples as vases, have the beautiful leaves featuring in bouquets and incorporate the yellow throughout the overall theme to make sure her favourite colour has been used in a tasteful way.

As wedding and event stylists, we do a lot when it comes to your wedding.  Of course, it depends on how much you want to do yourself, but we are finding that most brides that come to us would rather be sipping champagne with their bridesmaids getting their hair and makeup done on their wedding day, rather than erecting arbours, putting out name places or up a ladder installing lighting.

To us, a wedding stylist doesn’t have the same meaning for every couple, but as a general rule, we will do the following:

-          We will meet with you (hopefully both of you) to talk through your ideas, how you want the wedding to feel, and any specific inclusions you want.

-          We will make suggestions for the venue you have chosen and create a personalised proposal for your wedding.

-          We will hire out to you specific items we have within our inventory, and if we don’t have it, we will either outsource it, or depending on the item, buy it for future use within our inventory.

-          We will set up your wedding and pack it down afterwards.

Then of course there are extra things we can do for you including doing all of your weddings flowers  in house with our floral designer, organising our in house graphic design team to design bespoke stationary for you, assist with recommending amazing vendors that we work with and liaise with your vendors to make sure that you day runs smoothly.

Of course there are advantages to hiring a stylist, the main one being is that your wedding is stress free! Imagine you were doing it all yourself, and being told a few days out from your wedding that there is a conference at your venue during the morning, and you only have 2 hours to turn the room around from a blank canvas to your dream wedding.  Insert worried face!  This happens more than you would know, but we have a team of staff on hand, who have been working on your wedding for 80+ hours in the lead up, have everything packed, organised and scheduled.  Can we turn a room around in under an hour; YES we can!

And after your wedding, we come in, pack it all down and disappear into the night.  Of course, if you wanted to spend your wedding night packing up vases, go for it, but we think you might have better things to be doing!

There are of course other advantages including the fact that we love weddings and generally live and breathe them, so have insider knowledge and tips to execute the perfect day for you.  We are creatives and constantly on the lookout for new trends; we are problem solvers; we are designers and we are perfectionists.  To us, working with cable ties and twine are a huge part of our job, and able to fix most problems!

There are things that we do that you probably weren’t aware of.  Did you know, that the time from when your enquiry first comes in, to when your event is all packed down, items returned to our warehouse and packed away, we’ve spent over 80+ hours on your wedding!  We spend hours brainstorming, discussing your wedding amongst the team, planning everything so it is all feasable and getting proposals and changes out to you ; we go to flower market at 5am the week of your wedding to source your flowers, making sure we are only using the best quality; we liaise with your vendors to make sure we are all on the same page; we sometimes are at your reception at 11.30pm seeing you all sipping your champagne waiting for the final song to play, so we can start packing down your wedding; that each vase we used has to be cleaned, wax removed, and packed away; that sometimes we have to make decisions on the fly to make sure things work; that beach weddings look amazing, but really worry us due to so many outside factors that we can’t control and that overall, we really love our job. 

Yes our job is really labour intensive, but by having A Beautiful Occasion onboard, it takes the stress, labour and worry out of your wedding.  We’ve executed over 900 weddings and events in the last 7 years, so we have our processes and procedures down to a fine art. You really do get experts in the field when you engage us, but not just that, we’re passionate too.  We love your wedding just as much as you, and can remember almost all of our weddings off the top of our head.

So in a nutshell, that’s us! 

If you want to engage us for your wedding, send us an enquiry so we can start the planning process.

Amy + Sara x