Let me preface this review by saying if you are thinking about getting a wedding planner in the…read moreNJ/NY area, definitely reach out to Lindsay! She is absolutely amazing and will help craft an event that is better than you could have imagined. She has been such a pleasure to work with, and would highly recommend her. Let me back up and give you some context. My husband and I knew we wanted to get married in NJ on my uncle's farm. The only problems with that were that we lived across the country in Portland and we didn't have a building to have the ceremony in. My husband and I also both worked full time jobs. We began to realize that we'd have some time constraints on our hands and hiring a wedding planner might not be a bad idea.
After reading some reviews online, I reached out to a few planners and set up a couple of introductory calls to hear about their services and experiences. When I started talking to different wedding planner, every one of them started off by telling me about all of their packages and what was included in their service. Lindsay was different. Unlike the other planners who immediately went into their sales pitch, Lindsay wanted to hear our story and what we wanted in our wedding. It seemed like she genuinely wanted to help us create our special day, not just give us a cookie cutter list of services. This was such a refreshing and personal way of approaching wedding planning. I knew from that minute that I wanted her to plan my wedding.
Lindsay of Simply Sunshine Events is an amazing events planner, coordinator, and event designer. She covers a wide array of events, from wedding and baby showers to corporate events and fundraisers. And every single review that I read about the company was simply glowing. Not only is she professional, candid, creative, and helpful, but she just seemed like someone who I would work well with. Ironically we both grew up super close to one another, so we instantly clicked on that part of our past. Even without that connection, I knew that we would get along well.
We decided to get help on both the design portion as well as the planning portion of our wedding. I'm really not the most creative person in the world and I felt like we needed help putting together the overall vision. We were presented with a personalize design brief with a couple of different options. Once we decided on a vision, Lindsay was able to pick out vendor options that she thought would work well with the venue and overall theme. It was so much less overwhelming being able to choose out of a couple of highly recommended vendors than to have to choose from everyone in the area.
Which leads me to another important thing that Lindsay brought to the table: experience. Not only has she worked with all of these people before, but she has seen all the ins and outs of doing a wedding at a "home" venue. Initially, we thought it would be more cost efficient and easier to have an at home wedding. However, it turns out that this makes the whole planning process much more difficult since we had to not only style a wedding but actually create a venue. Lindsay instantly knew all the things we needed to look into - a tent, flooring, a generator, bathrooms, the list goes on and on. She provided us super detail specific timelines of when we should do each task, as well as supplemental tools to assist us along the way.
With Lindsay's help, my husband and I made a lot of the big decisions pretty early on in the planning process. I completely trusted Lindsay's opinion on vendors and that really worked out well for us. We had amazing food and cake tastings, had a florist meeting on site that was spot on, and have a Chaplain who gave me chills when going through ceremony options. The best part about the whole deal is that Lindsay can sometimes get her clients special discounts with vendors that she works with regularly, and passes those deals directly to her clients. Some planners will take those discounts as profits, but Lindsay has an awesome system where she charged us one flat fee for everything listed in her contract and helped us save money elsewhere. She was a huge help in constructing our budget and sticking to it.
Overall, I'm so glad we worked with Simply Sunshine for both the planning and design part of our wedding. The wedding went off beautifully and I was so glad I could just relax and be fully present on the wedding day. Even though there was threat of rain all the way up to the actual day, we were able to execute a plan B (extra tents for the ceremony and cocktail hour) that most people had no idea was actually not what we originally intended. I was so thankful to have such an amazing team of vendors backing me up through the preparation and actual day, even when we threw curve balls at them. Simply Sunshine Events has made this whole planning process less stressful than I was initially expecting, and made our wedding day more amazing than I ever could have hoped for.
