Mindy Weiss has been throwing parties for 17 years. She runs Party Consultants in Beverly Hills, which charges $10,000 and up for her coordinating and design services, depending on the site and events involved. She spoke to Jolie Gorchov about the business and the challenges of party planning.
The majority of our business is weddings. We also do bar mitzvahs, birthdays and anniversaries we just did a 70th wedding anniversary.
Essentially, hiring an event coordinator is a luxury. You’re eliminating 75 percent of the stress. Once the client sets the date, we help them choose the vendors, such as the caterer, photographer, videographer, florist. Then we present them with a proposal and a time schedule. We take it from the first step of planning until they leave the party. We coordinate the design of the party, the toast, the mother-father dance, the menu planning, songs we’ll even decorate the honeymoon suite.
A lot of parties are at their homes. If it’s outdoors and they have enough room, they’ll put up tents. If it’s in a hotel, you don’t have to do as many rentals because the plates and glasses are there. But we try to warm the rooms up so you don’t feel like you’re in a mall room. We’re known for intimate d & #233;cor and details; we rent antique furniture, couches, chairs, old chandeliers things like that to make the setting more intimate.
We’ll also do parties in unusual locations like the zoo or Union Station, where you have to bring in rentals, which can make it more costly. We also use warehouses and make them look like Moroccan or Venetian ballrooms, or disco balls.
The hardest things are the emotional challenges that come up. We tell people, “Leave your agenda at the door before you walk in.” They’re hanging onto you for the perfect wedding, and for emotional advice.
My favorite bit of advice for brides is, “No matter what happens, you will end up walking down the aisle.” No matter if it rains or snows, they will get married. They start worrying: “How will I fight each obstacle, how will I get the flowers, what if the cake doesn’t show up, what if everyone hates the bridesmaid dresses?”
One situation we see coming up more and more often is when two families don’t get along.
We just did a Muslim/Jewish wedding. We tried to combine the Muslim tradition of the wedding with the Jewish tradition, and we found that a lot of the traditions are similar. Both eat bread in the ceremony and toast with wine. So we were able to provide them with both.
If they really don’t get along, we become the mediators. We had one wedding where one side of the family was vegetarians, the other side was meat eaters. They wouldn’t budge. I had to sit there and tell them, “The compromise is to offer a vegetarian and a meat dish, because not everyone is a vegetarian.” That was tough, but they ended up listening to me.
