How to manage expectations with vendors

Planning a wedding can be stressful. It’s a huge investment and a day that carries a lot of emotional weight- happy emotions, but emotional nonetheless. It can be super anxiety inducing to relinquish control and trust your wedding vendors to do their job the way you imagined. This anxiety can be emphasized if you feel like your vendors are falling short on what you expected from them. Losing confidence in the team you’ve chosen to execute your wedding day is a sure fire way to increase stress and make for a not so smooth wedding day. We will explain steps you can take during planning to ensure you’re on the same page.

Read your contracts

Read your contracts prior to signing them. Make sure you understand any clauses about communication- some vendors may not be very responsive until you’re closer to your day. Understand the payment schedule. Lastly, make double sure that anything this vendor told you was included in your pricing is in writing. If something was mentioned during your consultation, make sure it’s included in your contract. This will ensure that you and your vendor are on the same page regarding services or products for your wedding day. Lastly, make sure you know when final details need to be relayed or changed. When hiring vendors a year or so before your wedding, details may shift and change, which is expected but make sure you know when to relay that information.

Keep it to email

Again, review anything your contract says about communication, but keep communication to email. If a vendor gives you their cell phone number do not text them unless they have explicitly said this is a preferred method of communication. This isn’t only because texting is a bit unprofessional, but because texts get lost. I don’t know about you but I have multiple group texts, family texts and spam texts. If clients send me pertinent information via text there’s a high chance of that information being lost. Allow a couple days for vendors to respond- especially if your email was sent closer to the end of the week when wedding vendors are often at events.

Follow them on social media

This may not be agreed on by all vendors but a large majority of wedding vendors are super active on social media- especially instagram. Often, vendors will post updates such as photographers saying what galleries they’re working on, potentially post that they are going out of the office or even post that they are sick and a bit behind. It’s a quick way for them to relay information to their customers and may give insight into why they haven’t responded to your email yet.

Really consider their recommendations

Your wedding vendors know how to do their job (likely pretty well since something made you want to hire them). They may have suggestions ad recommendations for your day or their services to make things run smoother. This may be your photographer suggesting doing certain photos at a certain time due to sunlight or suggesting that you opt for a first look because there won’t be daylight after the ceremony. It may be your hair stylist recommending modifications to your hairstyle due to your length and texture being different from your inspiration photo. We as vendors understand you may not be on board with taking suggestions or changing your vision- which is totally fine, but make sure you understand the possible implications.

Understand getting what you pay for…

Weddings are expensive. Just like with everything else in life, to some degree, “you get what you pay for.” Your experience with a $500 photographer is going to be VASTLY different from your experience with a $5,000 photographer. Before you do ANYTHING really discuss what is important to you and allocate your budget inline with your priorities. If you care more about photos than flowers, then don’t blow a huge portion of your budget on florals and focus more on photography expenses.

If at the end of the day, you feel your hired vendor is dropping the ball, look into ending your contract and replacing that vendor. Reasons I would recommend this route for a couple would be if a vendor is ghosting you, not being responsive or backing out of services included in your contract. Losing out on a deposit is less stressful than being unhappy with your wedding day.

If you’d like guidance on navigating vendor communication or anything with planning, reach out today for a complimentary consultation for planning or event management services.

We also offer virtual planning sessions to kickstart planning on the right foot, these are being offered for a limited time, learn more about them here.