Turning a sad circumstance into a joyful memory.
Image by Shelley Montovani
*Splendid Note: You can read the previous updates and FAQs on Coronavirus and your wedding business here.
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with wedding pros from 94 countries over my career and I’ve heard from a ton of them this past month – all with similar questions, stories of lost business, uncertainties of what to say to clients who are completely stressed.
We’re all in this together. If you have questions on Coronavirus and your wedding business, please email me at hello@thinksplendid.com. I’ll be sharing my answers here on the Think Splendid blog so that everyone can benefit. I’ll also keep your name anonymous. Totally free, no strings attached – I truly do not care if you never hire me.
Focus on the Splendid
We're an industry that makes our living by celebrating life's milestones, so I'm going to start each of these update posts with a few positive COVID-19 things we can all smile about:
TOTAL GLOBAL RECOVERIES
The number of global recoveries is now more than 165,000 people, up from 124,000 on Friday.
GETTING (OR KEEPING) YOUR S*&% TOGETHER
I wrote a Twitter thread yesterday on ways you can create a calming space for your family while everyone is at home. Here is the supporting #StayHome board on Pinterest I mention in the thread as well.
A “Sensible Social Distancing Celebration”
I’ve received a lot of emails and messages from wedding pros over the last several weeks regarding postponements.
In addition to navigating the logistical and financial aspects wedding postponements place on their business, many wedding professionals are also feeling somewhat helpless as to how to best support their clients who are deeply saddened about having to postpone a dream and the unfairness of a situation outside everyone’s control.
Today I want to pass along a solution that may work for you:
Last week, Annabel at Love My Dress shared a video sent to her by UK-based destination wedding photographer Shelly Montovani.
While discussing the postponed wedding with her clients Paula and Loc, their celebrant, Zena Birch, came up with an idea to mark the occasion of the original wedding date and create a joyful, lifelong memory.
Zena planned a “sensible social distancing celebration” live via Zoom. Paula and Loc’s guests from 38 different households joined in to celebrate the new pre-wedding ceremony on what would have been the couple’s original wedding day.
“Paula and Loc got engaged back in 2014, but they have made sure their children, their business, their home and their family came first for years. So when it looked like Covid19 was definitely shutting down their wedding today, the day they had finally allowed themselves to have, my brain started whirring.
How can we honour their original date, a date so filled with anticipation, the date the kids knew something special was happening? So I said, let’s do it anyway . . . we know all of your guests are free.
So we invented a ritual. We took their wedding rings and we placed them in a jar. As part of their home schooling this week their children L&T made coloured rice and in front of us all they poured it over the top of the rings to keep them safe until we get to retrieve them in their proper ceremony next year.
Public declarations are important and so are witnesses, which is why everyone was invited to still be part of it.
Our communities are essential, so Paula and Loc still made promissory statements they will stand by as a family until I get to pronounce them husband and wife next year.
Even L&T made promises - they are going to promise to do their best to be good and kind and keep the rings safe until we need them next year.”
The Zoom ceremony was recorded and their photographer Shelley edited it into this 5 minute video:
Good ideas are meant to be borrowed and to spark new ideas, so I encourage you to consider how you might be able to support your clients emotionally whose weddings have been postponed.
How can you create something to mark their original wedding date in a way that redeems it with a positive memory?
This shouldn’t be seen as a way to create an add-on sale or additional stream of income, but rather as a free value add you can give your clients during this time to make the emotional aspect of postponing a wedding a little less painful.
More questions?
When I say we’re all in this together, I mean we are all in this together. I am not a blogger, I am a business consultant and speaker. This blog is not sponsored nor ad supported and is not how I make my income. Since we are all in this together, I am not charging consulting fees to answer questions related to COVID-19.
I will continue answering Coronavirus-related wedding business questions from ANY wedding, event, or hospitality professional, located anywhere in the world, here on the blog over the next few weeks and possibly longer, so that anyone, anywhere in the world can access the information they may need for their business at any time.
I’ll be continuing to work through the questions sent in so far here on the blog so that we can all navigate this together as best we can. Please send any questions you have to hello@thinksplendid.com and remember there is no such thing as a dumb question.
I’ll be keeping the names anonymous so you don’t have to worry about being attached to a question in a Google search or in case you don’t want a colleague or competitor to know what’s on your mind.
Written by
LIENE STEVENS
Liene Stevens, the founder and CEO of Think Splendid, is an author, speaker, and award-winning business strategist. Armed with $2000, a healthy work ethic, and an undeserved dose of privilege, Liene bootstrapped Think Splendid from a scribble in a notebook to a successful wedding business consulting firm with a client list spanning 94 countries.
