What I learned from planning a wedding

My wife Chessa and I got married in Long Beach, CA in August 2023. Despite only having attended one wedding together before ours we managed to pull off an incredible weekend that was basically perfect in every way. What I'm most proud of is that our guests had a great time, which was a goal from the very beginning.

Here's a collection of tips and advice we learned along the way. These aren't in any particular order, and there's plenty of opinionated commentary in here. Most importantly: remember that no two weddings are alike, and what worked for us might not be best for you. 🙂

The first piece of advice we read was to write a mission statement for your wedding that you can return to when you're feeling overwhelmed or needing to make big decisions. Why are you throwing this party? What is your goal for the day? What do you want your guests to feel? What do you want yourselves to feel?

A wedding is many things: a celebration; a reason to get dressed up and have a nice meal; a rare opportunity to get friends and family together in the same place and introduce people who haven't met; a snapshot in time that you'll look back on many years from now.

Knowing that many of our guests would be traveling - including my friends and family from the east coast - we wanted to make sure they felt welcome and appreciated, so we thought a lot about our guests' preferences alongside our own.

Know your friends, know your guests, and know yourselves. There's a ton of advice out there - including this post! - and very little of it is one-size-fits-all. Most of our guests didn't have young children, liked to drink, would be traveling, enjoyed socializing, and would happily join additional events outside of the ceremony. My family would be traveling from PA and most hadn't been to LA before so we wanted the weekend to feel like a vacation. Chessa and I were OK with doing some upfront work ourselves but ultimately wanted the day in the hands of good, capable people. We made a lot of decisions based on those factors.

We used Notion to keep track of everything - vendors, budget, guest list, inspiration, links, meeting notes, contact info, and more. I chose Notion because I could easily share everything with Chessa and access our notes from my phone and computer. I also like that it has spreadsheets, which made things like guest list and budget tracking easy.

We also used Pinterest to find and bookmark inspiration, Dropbox to create shareable folders of photos, Miro to create a mood board, and Zola for our registry.

Unless you're a very strict budgeter you will almost certainly go over your budget, especially in a high-cost-of-living city. Add 20% to whatever you expect to spend. The expenses in the final month especially add up! (hotel rooms, gifts, desserts, meals, outfits, tips, rentals, etc.)

Pick a few things that you're OK with spending money on, and pick some things where you'll look to save money. We splurged on our venue, but it came with a terrific staff and catering team that saved us a lot of work, and it had a ton of character so we didn't have to do much decorating. We also bought a cheap cake and hired a private driver we found through Instagram to cut our transportation costs in half.

If you're doing a hotel block, absolutely use Kleinfeld Hotel Blocks. You'll tell them where/when your wedding is and they'll get back to you with an exhaustive spreadsheet of every hotel in the area with things like price, distance, deals/discounts, number of rooms, event space, whether renovations are happening on your dates, etc. And it's 100% free; they make a small commission on whichever hotel you choose.

We prioritized two cash funds, a Honeymoon Fund and a Puppy Fund. If you do cash funds I highly recommend adding at least 10 physical items to your registry at different price points. Some people strongly prefer giving physical gifts. Almost every item we put on our list ended up getting purchased.

We got a TON of recommendations through Instagram. Look at vendors' and photographers' websites and Instagrams and see where they've done weddings. Most posts will tag the venue and other vendors.

We found our venue through Pinterest while making a mood board. Go to your venue's Instagram page, browse their photos and photos they're tagged in, and check out the vendors that are usually tagged in the description.

Venues that frequently do weddings and parties will be a safer bet than, say, an empty field (but also more expensive). You might like the adventure; we wanted zero uncertainty.

Almost all of our vendors frequently worked at our venue which led to the night going extremely smoothly. Depending on your venue you might prioritize this.

Logistically, the best thing about the venue we chose is that it came with an A+ catering & bartending team. Their staff does weddings at that venue every single weekend so they're very good at service. Aside from choosing our menu we basically had to do zero work thinking about food and drink service. If we were throwing a smaller party I think we would have been similarly happy with renting out a restaurant for an evening.

Be prepared with folders of visual inspiration for your vendors. Pinterest, Instagram, photographer portfolios, and Google are great places to find inspiration. We had folders for our engagement shoot aesthetic, stationary design, specific shots we wanted (especially some specifically in Ebell), overall design & aesthetic, and wedding party style. Looking back it's crazy how close we came to our mood boards. Tell your vendors what you want!

Here's the Dropbox folder we gave our vendors.

Thank your vendors by name in your speech! They're working hard to make your day special and it's a nice gesture to give them a mention.

Initially we weren't too focused on our ceremony but our coordinator reminded us that it is, after all, a wedding, and people love feeling inspired by a great ceremony. It's a deeply personal moment between the two of you, yes, but there's nothing wrong with treating it as a bit of a performance for your guests, too.

So we asked our officiant to write an intro, we added two readings, we made our vows longer, we looked through a ton of piano covers of EDM songs to find the perfect tear-jerkers, and we found ways to add laughs.

On our guest book cards we asked for guests' favorite part of the day, and "the vows" and "the ceremony" ended up being the top answers.

We found a lot of great advice for the vows that basically comes down to not having them be a surprise. You want your vows to match in tone and length; it's awkward if one person's is heartfelt and the other's is jokey and sarcastic. We shared our first drafts with each other a week before the ceremony and edited the final versions together. They had a similar structure but were still authentic to each of us.

A good tip for structure: 1) how I felt before I met you, 2) how I felt when I met you, 3) how I've changed since meeting you, 4) promises to each other.

Start working on them early. Get a first draft on paper and revise it in your head for a while - in the shower, cooking dinner, driving to work. Do not use ChatGPT.

We gave the wedding party a color scheme and general vibe and let them choose their own attire. Bride/groom still got final approval but it let everyone choose an outfit they felt great in and I think it really came through in the photos and videos. Keep in mind that not everyone will feel comfortable in the same dress. (your bridesmaids will be in this dress all day!)

Initially we were worried that the party wouldn't look coordinated but that wasn't an issue at all. Everyone looked amazing.

We hosted a "welcome dinner" at the hotel the evening before instead of a rehearsal dinner and it was a perfect way to start the weekend. It gave us a chance to greet and catch up with everyone before the big day instead of trying to squeeze in a bunch of conversations on the wedding day, plus it was a great ice-breaker for our guests. We also did this because almost all of our guests were from out of town and would be arriving the night before; might as well give people another chance to get together.

Surprisingly, almost 90% of our guests ended up coming and the night was a blast. We ended up doing a pasta buffet to keep the cost low. If buying almost all of your guests a second meal isn't in the budget, another option is to do a small dinner with the wedding party & immediate family followed by a happy hour for all of your guests.

In general I think having an open-invite social the night before is a great idea.

Restaurant buy-outs tend to be expensive but are worth checking. Ask your hotel, too - hotels will often have a $0 venue fee and only charge for food/drink/labor; that's what we did.

We spent about 30 minutes "rehearsing" before the dinner with our coordinator. That's all you need. I don't think we remembered most of it anyway.

Because our friends love dancing into the night we also threw an after party. I found a venue on Peerspace that was within walking distance of the hotel and worked with the owner to let us set up the morning of. We rented speakers and lights, filled some coolers with drinks, ordered some pizzas, put the address on our programs, and had our shuttle driver take anyone who wanted to go. Chessa and I showed up at midnight and each played a DJ set. It was a ton of work and added some extra day-of stress but was probably the coolest part of the entire weekend.

Since all of our guests were traveling we put a guide on our website with some things to do, and people loved this. I took most of it from a "welcome to Long Beach" brochure in a hotel we stayed at over the summer. I included some things to do, attractions to see, neighborhoods to visit, and some food/drink options, plus suggestions on how to get around. TikTok and local tourism sites are other good sources of info.

A few of our more ambitious guests did almost everything on the list and said they had the best weekend ever. 🥰

Memories are one thing you won't be able to hold on to for as long as you'd like. The day will fly by. Try to take some moments to pause and take in the sights, sounds, and feelings. I literally had a note in my vows to pause and take a mental picture. Same for photos, dinner, dancing, and the after party. A few months later these moments are the most vivid. I also spent an hour writing a 5,000-word brain dump of the entire weekend after we got home; I imagine I'll appreciate having that someday.

I'll hand the mic over to Chessa for this section 👰‍♀️

Wedding dress shopping can be super stressful and overwhelming. For the first time you try on dresses, I suggest going with a small group or even one person, so you can gauge what you like without too many opinions. (pick someone who will cheer you on and make you feel good about yourself!)

Know your budget before you go. Be super upfront about it with the people who help you at the bridal store. I tried on my dress before I knew how much it was, and after I had fallen in love with it, I learned that it was MUCH more expensive than I wanted.

No matter how much research you do with styles, you won't know what you like until you try on dresses. For your first time, try on every style, even the ones that seem extra or not very you. I went in expecting to like slim-fitted dresses but I ended up with an A-line dress.

Veils can get pricey. I didn't want to spend extra money on it, so I cut the train of my dress and used it as my veil.

Know that you have final say on your dress. I ended up cutting the whole train off and trimming the length to right above the end of my heels so that I could dance freely without stepping on my dress and I was SO happy I did that.

Strapless dresses: you can get detachable straps sewn into the inside of your dress in case you need extra support. I never wear strapless anything, so it helped me feel comfortable while I danced and I wasn't having to pull up my dress every five seconds.

Try not to get caught up in what a “bride” needs to look like on the day. I wore pink platform boots because it was super ME and was what I was most comfortable in.

On hair & makeup:

I don't wear a lot of makeup and repel foundation, but it does look amazing in your photos. I fought hard against it, but I hired someone I trusted and told them exactly what I wanted. It was important to me that I looked and felt like myself on my wedding day.
Don't require your bridesmaids to have their hair/makeup done unless you help pay for it - it can get super expensive. (this is a good thing to give as a gift!)

Photo of a stack of 'guest book cards' we left for guests to fill out

For our "guest book" we designed Mad Libs-style cards that guests could complete, with questions like where you traveled from, what your favorite part of the day was, and what we should name our future puppy.

Reddit is a treasure trove of info about weddings from a wide range of perspectives, customs, and budgets. Posts are a good starting point but the comments are where the best info is at.

Put site:reddit.com in your Google searches and search for phrases like:

site:reddit.com hcol wedding budget
site:reddit.com wedding budget
site:reddit.com wedding things you did differently
site:reddit.com bridesmaid tips
site:reddit.com wedding regrets
site:reddit.com favorite weddings
site:reddit.com [city name] wedding
site:reddit.com wedding [vendor type] tips

Open all of the top results and read. After a while you'll notice patterns and common themes and figure out where your wedding fits in. (This is good advice for any topic you're researching on Reddit.)

Examples:

Random tips I collected from Reddit:

Ask one of your bridesmaids/groomsmen with a good eye for detail to be a 'spotter' for you (is your tie straight, does your dress need adjusted, etc).
Hiring a day-of coordinator is almost universally agreed upon as a good investment. Most DoC's come in several weeks beforehand and take over all communication with vendors.
Work with your coordinator to make the evening flow well so it doesn't feel like guests are being herded around.
Definitely have your photographer bring a second shooter if your budget allows.
Make a list of specific shots you want and give it to your photographer. I wanted photos of things like the building exterior, our invitations/rings/shoes, and specific shots around the building. Make a list of family portraits ahead of time too, it'll make that process go much faster and leave more time to socialize.
Be courteous of your wedding party's financial and PTO situations and try not to ask more of your friends than they can handle. ("know your guests" especially applies here - every group is different! We did a blowout weekend in Miami but also covered most of the costs.)
Your MC really makes the evening; don't ask a friend to officiate your wedding who isn't comfortable in front of a crowd.
Two tips that really helped us with gift-giving: people tend to appreciate experiences more than objects (with exceptions of course), and "bridesmaid"/"groomsman" are not your friends' identities outside of your wedding day.
- We gifted the wedding party a trip to Miami in the spring as our bachelor/bachelorette weekend.
- We didn't do welcome gifts at the hotels, but we did give all of our guests beautiful Mexican tile coasters that were a huge hit. They were well-made, easy to take home, and they only had a small inscription about the wedding on the underside so people were more likely to use them at home. I love visiting friends/family and seeing them in a place where they're obviously being used.
Some people like giving physical gifts so make sure your registry has products at various price points even if you're doing cash funds.
Have a welcome table with a card box, some photos, some flowers, and something for people to sign. (search "wedding welcome table" for ideas)
Your photographer probably only needs ~30 minutes to capture your dance party so don't feel like you need them to stay super late.
If asked “what's your budget?” answer, “we're building our budget around our most important vendors so we don't have a number yet.”
If needed, remember to ask about meal choice on your RSVPs.
Don't have a pond that someone can fall into.

Venue: Ebell Long Beach / Photo: Jeff Thatcher Photography / Video: Cole Johnston / Planner: Pop the Champagne / Florals: The Little Branch / DJ: Rob from Second Song / Stationary & Design: Christina Myal / Hair & Makeup: Jennifer Cancino