As you know, you’re wedding is a complex event. There are lots of people who need to be in certain places at certain times doing certain things. And in most cases, there are also lots of professionals who have some hand in those certainties. Over the years, we’ve come to find that the better we can get to know our event co-workers, the better we all seem to participate together on the wedding day.
With all the moving parts involved in running a company, it took us some time to figure out how important this was. But now, we make this part of our own efforts to get information about all your other wedding vendors and go out of our way to try and connect with them. But, since we can’t work with every couple, I want to take this moment to suggest you make it your point to introduce all your wedding vendors to one another.
This doesn’t have to be complicated, of course. A simple email addressed to all the wedding vendors and asking them to introduce themselves would do the trick! Really good vendors will take that opportunity to reach out each other, share timelines, or even collaborate in some surprising ways.
When wedding vendors aren’t just meeting each other for the first time on your wedding day, there’s less chance that timeline’s will go awry. You will likely get timelines from your DJ, your planner and your photographer. It’s not safe to assume that all these different timelines just line up, unless you make an effort to tweak them and make sure they align correctly. In the past, we’ve been to weddings where the DJ thinks we’re late, and we think we’re early. This is unfortunate because surely the DJ’s frustration with the photographer, or the other way around, is going to come out in some way. It’s not just photographers and dj’s though, your wedding vendor’s needs brush up against each other in a lot of different ways.
When you introduce your vendors to one another, there’s a good chance that they can smooth out timeline incongruencies largely on their own and all you’ll need to do is sign off on the whole thing. To a large degree, the closer we are invited into the planning aspects of the wedding day, the more thoroughly, accurately and meaningfully we can portray the wedding day in our images.
Expectations that your vendors will work well together are par for the course if you have hired well experienced professionals with a good track record. However, if you can’t afford higher quality services on your wedding day, you should still ask you prospective vendors how they work with others. Some vendors, especially those without a lot of experience, may be so fixated on their customer (you), that they inadvertently cause problems for the other vendors, which in turn negatively affects you. Try to gauge how comfortable your prospective wedding vendor is (especially your photographer) with open communication directly between your vendors.
Wedding vendors with a team-spirit are going to be better suited to help you get the wedding day you want.