How to Coordinate Your Vendors

A great wedding is a group effort. You’ll be working with a venue, a caterer, a florist, an officiant, and a whole host of other wedding vendors. To ensure that everything comes together as you want it to, you’ll need to know how to coordinate your vendors.

Many vendors’ work will begin to overlap as you get into your planning. If you have decided on fresh flowers to decorate your wedding cake, for example, you’ll need to make sure your florist and caterer are communicating with each other to make this happen. Every vendor will need to be in contact with your venue, if only to find out when and where they will need to set up on the day.

Coordinating vendors can be tricky, and if you are hiring a wedding planner, they will be able to help with the coordination. If you aren’t, it can be helpful to choose vendors who have worked together in the past.

One way of doing this is to get a list of recommended vendors from your venue. Another great way of coordinating your wedding vendors to meet and book them at one of our Southern California bridal shows. You’ll get a chance to meet SoCal’s best wedding vendors all in one place, which can be a great first step towards coordinating their work.

Come to one of our upcoming shows to find out more:

October 6 -- Buena Park, Knott’s Berry Farm Resort Hotel

November 3 -- Pasadena, Hilton Hotel

Three Ways to Be a Great Wedding Guest

If you're planning your own wedding, you might be focused on your nuptials. When you're also invited to other weddings, it can be a struggle to turn off the wedding planning part of your brain. Here are three ways to be a great wedding guest.

1. Don't compare! When you attend a friend's wedding, you might want to compare what she's done with what you have planned. Try to leave the comparisons for when you get home, though. Instead, just enjoy the day.
2. Don't talk about your wedding! Focus on the couple of the day, the same way you'd want to be the focus on your big day. Even if you'll have guests in common, keep the day focused on the newlyweds.
3. Learn what you can about the guest experience. You want to make your wedding as great for your guests as possible. When you attend other weddings, take note of what made you feel special, welcome, and a part of the day. After the wedding, think about how you can build these elements into your wedding.

Of course, the best way to be an excellent wedding guest while planning your own wedding is to get all your planning done with Southern California's best wedding vendors. A great way to do this is to come to one of our upcoming bridal shows!

What Are Your Wedding Must Haves?

Every bride has a few things that she won't compromise on when it comes to her wedding day. Whether it's something big, like the venue, or something small, like serving drinks in Mason jars, these are her must haves.

Creating a wedding day must have list can be a big help for your planning. Whether you're doing it all yourself or working with a wedding planner, knowing the most important elements can help you prioritize everything else.

For example, if your venue is a must have, but your preferred band doesn't have any available dates in common with it, you will know which to be flexible on. This is much easier to do at the start of your planning, when you'll be less stressed about it all, than it will be as you approach the big day.

Of course, it's easy to get carried away and turn everything into a must have. Try limiting yourself to five or ten must haves, and rank these in order of importance to you. This can help your sanity and your budget.

Another way to help make your wedding planning less stressful is to meet with vendors at an upcoming Bridal Showplace event. You'll be able to meet some of Southern California's best wedding professionals all in one place!

Celebrity Weddings To Inspire California Brides

It's shaping up to be a busy year for celebrity weddings, and we're only a month into the main wedding season! With some big names set to get married this year, we're looking forward to a lot of big trends being set, too. For now, let's take a look at who has already said their I Dos.

• Michael Jordan and Yvette Prieto were married in a Florida ceremony. The couple held their reception in a whopping 40,000 square foot tent on the golf course next to their mansion. We expect to see a few more large tent weddings over the year.
• Keira Knightley and James Righton went extra small for their wedding, with only 11 people joining the couple for the ceremony. They followed it with a reception at a family country house, and the bride seemed to wear a recycled dress. We wonder if this kind of budget wedding might be a new celebrity trend.
• Melissa Gilbert and Timothy Busfield chose a Wednesday for their wedding in San Ysidro. Both had been previously married and the couple opted for an intimate wedding. The bride might be a trend-setter, though, as she chose to wear a deep red gown for the occasion.
• Shenae Grimes and Josh Beech were married this week in England. They went very non-traditional, with the bride reportedly walking down the aisle to house music. The stand-out part of their wedding has to be her dress, though. She wore a glamorous black and blush wedding gown!

What do you think of these celebrity weddings? Will they influence or inspire you for your big day?

If you're looking for plenty of inspiration, come to our next show! You'll get to meet loads of great wedding vendors and have a great time!

Upcoming Bridal Showplace Shows:

May 19 - Hyatt Regency, Long Beach

July 28 - Hyatt Resort & Spa, Huntington Beach

Aug. 11 - The Queen Mary, Long Beach

Sept. 8 - LA Marriott, Burbank

Sept. 22 - Marriott, Long Beach

Oct. 6 - Knott's Resort Hotel, Buena Park

Nov. 3 - Hilton Hotel, Pasadena

www.bridalshowplace.net

Do You Have Your Tickets: Garden Grove Show

Our next show is just over a week away, and it's shaping up to be a great one! Do you have your tickets yet? If not, buy them now!

Garden Grove is a lovely place to have a wedding, and the Crowne Plaza Anaheim Resort is an amazing venue. If you're planning a wedding in Orange County, or planning a wedding anywhere in Southern California, you'll want to get to this show.

In addition to seeing the Crowne Plaza, you'll be able to meet with plenty of other wedding vendors. Each of our shows has 100+ companies to meet with, and many can be booked there and then. Attending a wedding show is a great day out for you and your bridal party. It's also a really easy way to get a lot of your wedding planning done in one day.

To find out more about the exhibitors at the March 10 show in Garden Grove, or to find out more about any of our shows, visit our Exhibitor directory.

The World's Most Expensive Wedding Cake

This week, a British jeweler unveiled the world's most expensive wedding cake. With a price tag of $50 million, it more than doubled the past holder of the title.

The cake, which will be on display at the National Gay Wedding Show in Liverpool, England, includes over 2,000 diamonds.

While most brides think about how many carats their ring is, this cake sparkles with 2,046 carats. The creators, Russell and Case, are based in Liverpool. They worked with CAKE, a bakery in nearby Chester, to bring their vision to life.

With such a high price tag attached to the cake, it's not likely to be the centerpiece at many weddings this year. If you're looking for a more reasonably priced, though certainly still fantastic, wedding cake, check out the bakeries in our exhibitor directory.

Of course, if you want to have an even better way of meeting bakeries, come to one of our upcoming shows. There, you'll be able to taste cakes and get plenty of other wedding planning done in one day.

Wedding Professional Spotlight: BrideBox

If you're coming to our Knott's Berry Farm Show on Saturday, you'll get a chance to meet lots of great wedding vendors. BrideBox is set to be one of the excellent companies on hand, so you'll get a chance to talk to them about the great service they offer. In the meantime, we thought we'd tell you a bit about what they do.

BrideBox creates wedding albums and photobooks, giving you a wonderful memory of your special day. Saving you from a massive folder of digital photo files you never get to enjoy, BrideBox takes your wedding photos and turns them into a keepsake.

The photo albums and books they create are incredible quality. They offer professional printing, which gives you the higher quality than you might get from other photo prints. The books themselves are bound in a stunning way, with a choice of covers, including a leather option.

We also love that BrideBox is proudly based in California. Unlike some sites that produce albums overseas, BrideBox produces its photo albums in Palo Alto.

If you want to find out more about what BrideBox can offer you, and to see samples of their amazing wedding photo albums, come to our next show! If you can't make it, you can get in touch with BrideBox through our exhibitor list.