We hired Kelly for our wedding as a day of coordinator as well as support for the surrounding weekend and gift bag assembly. I started off really loving our relationship, but things took a turn, and ultimately, I cannot recommend her. I belie...ve that Kelly’s heart is in the right place and she has a good soul / intentions for her clients, but she seemed to take too much on, leading to a stressed and not good version of herself at the actual wedding (and to some extent leading up to it). There were some major mishaps, including the temporary loss of my grandparents’ wedding bands, that caused stress. Perhaps due to such stress, she and her assistant brought a negative energy that multiple people commented on and that my husband and I felt. As a result, we did not feel that she fulfilled her primary role to us as emotional support and a trusted confidant on a very important and vulnerable day. Although we really enjoyed our wedding day, it feels like it was despite the challenges caused by LJE. Weighing LJE’s contributions with the challenges that we experienced, I would not make the same choice again. In my opinion, we did not see the calm and composed version of Kelly on the wedding day that we had expected to see based on our initial meetings. This was not an easy review to write, but I feel it is only fair to write the review I wish I had read before making a hiring decision.
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The positives - we had a great time at our wedding and felt Kelly added something to our day with her very detailed timeline, her thoughtful ideas for signature items and her help executing certain things. She cares very much. In the planning process, she remained focused on the substance/meaning of the day. Until about a month and a half before the wedding, we enjoyed our interactions and felt she didn’t add stress. She did a good job creating the schedule and putting together welcome bags for us for the weekend, and she did a beautiful job setting up the room for us for our weekend events. If I had to sum up what happened, I would say there was a mishap (more below) and she lost her cool and couldn’t quite recover equanimity. We enjoyed her support during the weekend and the energy that she brought to our weekend events, and if she had carried that through to the wedding itself, we might have been able to overlook some of the downsides in the pre-wedding planning period or even the mishaps on the morning of the wedding. I felt the costs were reasonable for the services provided and the time Kelly gave us. We had a Jewish wedding and Kelly acknowledge a lack of familiarity with the customs, but then took great initiative to buy and read a book about it. We appreciated this and felt it showed a real investment in being there for us on our day. Kelly provided good time management of our vendors on the day of the wedding.
The challenges - there were key ways in which I felt communication breakdowns negatively impacted the day, particularly in light of my expectations/ hopes out of the relationship (essentially, management of the day and a calming, supportive presence). It would have gone a long way if she had recovered a better attitude towards us and our guests on the day of, or to apologize / take ownership for some of the mistakes we felt she made (perhaps she did not feel responsible, which is where we would disagree).
⁃ Leading up to the wedding, things took a downhill turn a few weeks before the wedding, when we realized there had been a mishap with the flowers. Kelly had handled a final design meeting with our florist; somehow there was a major miscommunication and color/other preferences were not communicated. We still don’t know what happened, as when we showed the florist exactly the communications we shared with Kelly, she understood that the color scheme we wanted was not what she had designed. It took a few days and conversations before we got back to a good place with her, and give what we felt was a second chance. In terms of the florist, we ended up having to pay over ~$600 more to add additional flowers and although objectively beautiful, it was still not what I had envisioned.
⁃ There were several major issues on the wedding day. The biggest one was probably that Kelly and her assistant took ceremony items from the hotel suite (where I was staying and getting ready) before the wedding but did not perform any inventory (although I asked if she wanted to run through everything, she or maybe her assistant said “oh we’ll figure it out”). As a result, they couldn’t find the wedding rings (family heirlooms) for a few hours - they turned out to be exactly where my fiancé has said they would be (in a box) but it set us up for a morning of stress, and falling behind schedule that we didn’t recover from until the ceremony. It seemed like a simple check list of all ceremonial items removed from the room would have resolved this and I’m surprised this didn’t occur, nor was there any acknowledgment of responsibility of how this was handled (her assistant basically ran into the room while I was in the hair and makeup chair and exclaimed “we can’t find the rings!”). My bridesmaids felt she was snippy and rude to them, as they ran around the hotel trying to help her find the rings. I was trying to get ready with my hair and make-up while Kelly and her assistant were running around my suite looking for the ring - which she had in her possession. As a result, I was not present emotionally for that part of my day, and I really regret it. I tried to recover from the moment once the rings were found, but I felt our relationship went downhill from there, to the degree that she decided not to come with us to the photos saying “I was going to come for moral support and it’s clear you have other people for this.” I believe this was intended to be helpful/ give space, but I was surprised by the comment and it set a certain tone for the rest of the day, at least through the ceremony.
⁃ There were other small ways in which she under delivered or didn’t take the initiative I would have hoped to ask us questions to get us to the right place, including regarding the wedding ceremony (she sent me down the aisle at a moment when my fiancé was putting on a ritual robe, and so he did not see me walk down the aisle - we should have discussed this ahead of time). She had discussed with us how she would take us aside before the wedding ceremony and remind us to re-center. This was very important to us and I knew we wouldn’t remember to do this ourselves. This moment didn’t happen as in my opinion, Kelly was even more stressed than we were.
⁃ Overall, Kelly seemed stressed and overwhelmed with our wedding in the weeks ahead and in my opinion, took on more than she could deliver, noting a few times that she had a lot going on and asking us for relatively last minute design decisions that contributed stress and unnecessary time pressure to our planning (for things we felt could have been planned much further ahead, like signature cocktail napkins). We ended up catching certain errors on things like duplicate names on table chart or mismatched font sizes or, on cocktail napkins, failure of vendors to use the text we provided - all ultimately fixed but in our opinion, things that should have been caught by LJE and not us. This general approach extended the time it took to handle such tasks and reduced our confidence in LJE’s attention to detail, leading us to micro-manage more than we intended.
If you decide to hire Kelly, I would stay more involved to ensure you get exactly what you want. Given weddings are her area of expertise, in my opinion, there are additional questions that she should have asked to understand our preferences (e.g. we should have talked more about the ceremony and other pre wedding details). Kelly spared us logistical challenges and helped make the day special, however her team also added a level of stress that was upsetting to us. I do not doubt that her heart is in making these days special for clients and she gives it her all, which is probably why she took us on so much. I am grateful to her for all that. But I felt disconnected and upset with our relationship by the end of the day and stressed leading up to the wedding by the last minute questions from her about things we could have resolved weeks ahead (i.e. table numbers). I can’t forget that I didn’t have any time getting ready when there weren’t people frantically running around the room looking for a ring that Kelly herself took out of the room. And my husband and I harbor some regrets about how key moments of the day went (i.e. ceremony), things we would have stayed on top off if we hadn’t delegated them out.
I would hesitate to recommend her without ensuring that you have many more conversations about details and realistic ability to deliver on what you need. I know Kelly worked hard for us, but not necessarily in the ways that we needed to reduce our overall stress leading up to and on the wedding day.