Guides

Written for the twelve to fifteen businesses who work a wedding day, rather than for the couple planning it. Every one of these answers a question that needs either arithmetic or somebody who has stood in the room — which is why there is no piece here called ten tips for your wedding day.

• Four wedding day timelines, and what decides between them

  Not one template with blanks in it. Four, because the shape of a wedding day is decided by three answers, and every combination of them produces a genuinely different document.

• What a first look actually does to the timeline

  It is usually argued about as a tradition question. It is a scheduling question with a tradition attached, and on some dates the arithmetic decides it for you.

• Sunset moves ninety minutes across a wedding season

  The one input to a wedding timeline that nobody can negotiate, tabulated for three cities so you can see the size of the problem before you pick a date.

• Why family formals always overrun, and the list that fixes it

  Twenty-five minutes on the timeline, forty in reality, and the difference comes out of the couple's own cocktail hour. Here is why, and what actually prevents it.

• How many vendors actually work a wedding day

  Couples count suppliers by invoice. The number that decides whether a day runs well is different: how many separate businesses have to be looking at the same timeline.

• The load-in conflicts that show up on nearly every wedding

  Load-in is where a wedding day goes wrong before anybody has arrived, and it goes wrong the same five ways almost every time.

• One room, two events: how the flip actually gets staffed

  The most commonly unassigned job on a wedding day, and the one with the least room to recover if it is discovered late.

• What each vendor actually needs from the run of show

  Twelve businesses read the same document looking for twelve different things. Knowing which line each of them is looking for is most of the job of writing it.

• The COI: what the venue is actually asking for

  Every venue asks for one, most vendors send the wrong one, and the difference is discovered in the week of the wedding.

• Writing a rain call into the run of show

  'We'll see how it looks' is not a plan. It is a decision made forty minutes after the last moment it could have been acted on.

• What a wedding photographer costs, and what the range hides

  Most cost guides invent precision they do not have. This one states the range we publish, says exactly where it came from, and is explicit about what we do not know.