Wedding Planning: A Special Events Manager Turned Bride

Amy Cope is also a Quick Candles Bride! To see her Q & A about the wedding and the wedding planning click here.

It never fails, when meeting people for the first time and telling them what you do for a living, I am always greeted with generally the same thought, “Oh! That must be so much fun!” Well, in short, it likely is more fun than a lot of ‘jobs’…but it is still my job!There are a lot of details that go into making someone’s day as perfect as they could possibly hope for! A lot of time and energy is spent to make sure that each little detail happens. Needless enough to say, I have a lot of gray hairs (professionally colored to my normal red shade) to show for my hard work! But because of my work, I know how important all of those little details are…and I know which details really aren’t -that- important. Which is why I knew exactly where to focus my energies when planning my own wedding.

As a self-professed Disney fanatic, I had the perfect proposal (for me). We were vacationing at Walt Disney World (my favorite place in the whole world) and my fiancé proposed under the fireworks at Cinderella’s castle in Magic Kingdom. It was everything that I could have hoped for.Evidently friends and family knew that that night was ‘the’ night, so they were all anxiously waiting for the news on social media. The questions were immediate: When are you getting married? Where are you getting married? How is the wedding planning coming along? We had a long engagement, so I truly lost count of how many times people asked about the wedding plans. I should be used to this, right? I literally plan events for a living.

So we started considering our options. I will be honest, as a Special Events Manager, I kinda wanted to elope. The notion of just bringing along a few people to share in that truly intimate moment really sounded nice. We could travel some place, make it into a vacation for everyone. Heck! We could even do it at Walt Disney World!! All of those details that I have to work through for my clients, I could just push wedding planning to someone else to handle! It truly was tempting.

But eloping wasn’t in the cards for us. We had too many people that ‘had’ to be there, so we started looking at options near where we lived. Luckily, I know a lot of really good people in the industry, so I definitely had a home field advantage. As I always tell my clients, find the venue first, and everything else will fall into place. So that is where we started.

We looked at all of the places that I had worked before. They were all beautiful in different aspects, but something still wasn’t clicking. Eventually we found our venue: Camp Buckhorn at Paris Mountain State Park. We knew we wanted the fall, but we wanted some time to save up to afford everything. There was plans to pay for everything ourselves (which we mostly did, but thank you to the parents that chipped in!), so we had to time out all of our normal living expenses and the cost of the wedding. Actually we had to wait a little bit to actually book our venue (government ran, specific rules), so we had a bit more time than what we had originally anticipated.

In the meantime, I started working out the details of the wedding planning. We discussed his wants (like an 8-tiered chocolate wedding cake...um, no.) vs. my wants (tops 50 people, also didn’t happen) and started to meet in the middle for our plans. Like I had mentioned earlier, I really did have an advantage doing this back home instead of eloping: I had industry friends!From my experiences at work, I had a lot of industry friends, so it was actually quite difficult to pick which ones I would use for my big day. I have faith that any of the people that I would suggest to a client would have been a good choice, but I normally give my clients a few options during wedding planning…I had the hard job of having to pick just one for each category!

One category that was very easy to choose from was the . There are many events I have decorated in varying budgets, but one place that can always handle everything that I want is Quick Candles / Quick Décor. They truly have everything, from to . Not only do they have an incredible selection, but they have incredible prices! There's really can’t go wrong with choosing them. Customer service is phenomenal! So don’t let all of the choices (there are MANY!) confuse you, just give them a call.

Needless enough to say, with the help of many of my events industry friends, my wedding day was perfect. Yes, there were hiccups (like the fireplace flue not working properly, so the entire reception hall filled with smoke during my ceremony!), but I had professionals there to help me. If there is one piece of advice that I can give a future bride, it is this: HIRE PROFESSIONALS! Professionals know how to handle all types of issues. From the Quick Candles people being able to rush out a last minute order to me to my coordinator having enough calm under pressure to know how to handle that fireplace situation, this is their job…and they are good at it.