Finding Your Wedding Vendors: 5 Tips for Making the Process Painless

5 tips for finding your wedding vendors

Congrats! You’re engaged!

Or maybe you’re not and you’re just really good at getting ahead with planning, which I was not (at first).

Photo by K. Engel Photography

Either way, you’re getting a head start and that’s good news all around for you. One of the first things we did was work on finding our wedding vendors, and I thought I’d share some tips from our own experience with wedding planning.

There are some vendors you need to hire earlier in the process rather than later – like your venue, a wedding planner/designer/coordinator, and your caterers. We also booked our floral designer SO early on in the process – we actually booked her before we even confirmed our venue and date, ah! It all worked out though; we knew we wanted to work with her because she’s the best of the best and she books up far in advance. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that whole thing soon!

5 Tips for finding your wedding vendors

1. Ask around. Word of mouth is still SO powerful, y’all. You’ll get honest, candid reviews from those close to you because they want the best for you. That’s the hope at least, right? Ask around to find out who they loved working with for their own weddings, who they didn’t love working with, what they loved about their vendor team, what they would do the same and what they wouldn’t if they could go back in time and do it all over again. Ask your friends then move to online reviews. The Knot is a great resource for real reviews and so worth spending the time looking through them.
2. Hold out. I’m not saying hold out on responding to your vendors because that just prolongs the process. Hold out for the perfect vendor. For example, we initially thought we found the caterers for us (their food looks divine and they got thumbs up from everyone who’s has their food!), but when we stumbled upon Moveable Feast here in Atlanta, we knew it was meant to be. Working with Paula and Ollie was just wonderful – don’t worry, lots more on that later! 
3. Be honest. Be honest both with your potential vendors and yourself. If a vendor is way out of your budget, don’t try to stretch too far to make it happen. Weddings seem to get more expensive as the planning progresses because there are so many expenses that are hard to account for (e.g., parking for day-of vendors, rush shipping for items that won’t arrive in time – the list goes on and on), so you don’t want to be spending more than you can realistically pay back.
4. Get yourself a stellar coordinator/planner. Whether you’re going with a full wedding designer and planner or hiring a month-of coordinator, just hire one. We worked with Christine from Detailed I Do’s and let me just tell you she is a MIRACLE worker. She anticipated every question we had before we even thought of it. You want to feel like a guest at your wedding and she made that happen for us. I didn’t worry about a thing – well only once when our bus driver tried to drop us off at the train tracks instead of our venue, but that’s a story for another day. In any case, find yourself an amazing coordinator/planner and use their experience! That’s what you’re hiring them for! Ask them for their preferred vendor list (if they have one) or suggestions on who they love working with. They’ll know best.
5. Prioritize 3. Last but not least – my talented, brilliant friend and wedding designer extraordinaire, Kelly Golia, shared this tip with me early on in my own wedding planning process: Pick your top three most important elements for the day and prioritize those. For us, it was food, photography, and music. So we went with our top pick for photography (I always knew it would be Emily Tebbetts), a 7-piece band for music, and a local duo who are beyond talented in the kitchen for food. As you’re planning your own big day, sit down with your fiancé/fiancée and list out your must-haves for the big day. It’ll take some time, but you’ll eventually settle on which 3 vendors you’d like to prioritize. Then hire them before they get booked up!

Hopefully this is helpful as you’re working on finding your wedding vendors! If you have any other questions, let me know! I’ll be working on a whole wedding series now that we’ve made it through the big day 🙂

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