Taylor is the best wedding planner in Iowa, possibly the world.
My fiance and I live in New York but were planning our wedding in Iowa. When I interviewed planners, Taylor immediately stood out to me. She asked all of the right questions and ...understood my vision for the wedding. I am also very particular/detail oriented, so having a wedding planner that was equally neurotic (in a good way!) was key.
To make Taylor's job harder, we were planning a whole weekend worth of events and our guests were flying in from literally every corner of the US and world. She and her team handled every aspect of the weekend. We never had to deal with any logistics or guest questions/issues. Our guests were equally impressed with how responsive Taylor was.
In terms of planning and design, we wanted some rather unconventional things. I'll give you two examples to showcase how creative Taylor is.
Our venue (ISU Memorial Union) reminded me of the dining hall from Harry Potter (one of my favorite book series), but we didn't want a "themed" wedding. So, Taylor came up with a lighting idea that was a nod to the floating candles from the movies. But, the venue would not allow us to hang anything, so she ended up using 2000 LED candles placed one by one along a high ledge. It looked stunning. We also love disco balls but again, the venue wouldn't allow us to hang anything. So, Taylor came up with an designed a free standing disco ball backdrop to our band that had over 200 disco balls on it.
Taylor is also great under pressure. The weather was threatening rain the entire wedding weekend. Our welcome party was to be held on a farm, outside. The day of, Taylor made the decision to move into the farm's horse arena, but she knew I was not originally happy with the way the horse arena looked. In the couple of hours before the rain call was made, Taylor completely transformed it. She had asked a neighbor for his 18 wheeler flatbed, had it driven into the horse arena and had the band set up on it with all of their lights. It looked incredible, like an outdoor music festival.
Then, the day of the wedding, it rained again (after the team had put all of our chairs out), so Taylor had to again think quickly and re-arrange, and again everything looked like it had always been planned that way from the beginning.
Taylor also gave recommendations for all of our vendors and we could not have been happier with the team she put together. She has relationships with the best of the best in the wedding business in Iowa and I can tell you that they rival the talent you can find in New York or anywhere in the world. The only vendor we had sourced before we hired Taylor was the venue (ISU Memorial Union). We picked the MU because my fiance and my parents are ISU alums. And although the MU is beautiful and the wedding turned out spectacularly, there are soooo many hurdles and rules when getting married at a University. And of course, we wanted to break all of the rules. Taylor worked tirelessly with the venue to get us as much as she could. She also coordinated between the venue and our other vendors as they had requests the venue was not ok with. We actually didn't even know of some of these issues until months after the wedding when we recapped with some of our other vendors because Taylor took care of all of that without us even knowing.
So, I think you get the gist :). She is the best, you should definitely hire her!