You’re engaged and you picked your date, now all you hard work starts…  Choosing the right vendors is a very important and somewhat daunting task.  I always tell my planning clients that we need to make sure you “love” each of your vendor choices because they are the ones that are going to pull all your hard work together.  So here are a few suggestions to make to help with this task.

Suggestion 1: Do the research

Researching for the best vendors for you is a very important task that should be completed once you have determined a budget.  Research can be done through the web, friend’s recommendations or bridal shows.  Once you have determined a few you like start email communication with them and set up some meetings

Suggestion 2: Look past the Website

Anyone that knows us at EOE knows that we love a good website and are constantly changing our own.  But our team also realizes a great website doesn’t mean we are going to “click” with everyone that calls upon us for service.  With that being said, we HIGHLY suggest that you meet with the vendor before just signing the dotted line.  And meeting has many different meaning in our world today.  We work with lots of clients that we have done all our meetings via phone or Skype because they are not local to West Michigan.

Suggestion 3: Cost awareness

Inexpensive doesn’t always mean less service nor does expensive mean you mean you are getting something better.  We realize that couples have budgets and that they need to stay within that budget.  So when looking at vendors you should price point them out for what you can afford.  Example: If you have a budget of $3000 for a photographer then meeting with a $5000 photographer you are not comparing apples to oranges.  With that being said and you can’t find what you want at $3000 we suggest that you take a look at you budget and see if there are other areas that you can move monies around to get the vendor that you want

Suggestion 4: Interview a select number of vendors

We have lots of brides that ask us “How many is too many when it comes to interviewing vendors?”  Our answer is between 3 but no more than 5 companies per vendor category.  What we see happening when couples interview multiple companies is things start to get confusing for them.  Make it easy on yourself and do the research up front and narrow it down.

Suggestion 5: Connect with them and be upfront with expectations

Your vendors are the people that are pulling together your well thought out plans so it’s important that you really trust them.  Don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions and take the time to get to know them before making that decision.  Lay it out what you will be asking of them for service but also ask what they expect from you.  Open communication from the very beginning is excellent!

There is hundreds of tips we can give but these basic five will get you started.  Happy Planning!

Holly

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 4:24 am and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.