Where to Start Planning When It’s Only Just Begun
It’s true, there’s just something about a holiday weekend that makes guys and girls planning to pop the question even more likely to pick one of those days to propose. And Memorial Day Weekend is definitely one of the most fun ones to walk away from with a brand new sparkler on that finger. There might have even been sparklers involved in the proposal, who knows?!!?
In any case, if you came out of MDW as a festive fiancée, you’ve probably already started thinking about “the day:” when and where you’ll have it, what you’ll wear, who you’ll invite - if not, you’ve definitely got a lot of wedding willpower (I can’t say that I really did way back when). Once everyone in your world knows about the news, it’s only a matter of time before you start getting coffee/lunch/dinner date invites; everyone will want to hear how the ask went down, what you’ve dreamed up for the day already, and, of course, what the ring looks like up close and personally!! So, you can be sure you’ll get at least one or two wedding planning books early on in the process.
But before your VIPs get involved, you find yourself viciously vetting venues, or even start to stress about vows and whether or not you’ll write them yourselves, pay us a visit. We just rolled out a brand new Wedding Chicks look, a whole new set of features, and fresh functionality - and we’re so excited to help you get started!
Ease into it with some light, easy reading.
First and foremost, as soon as you get engaged, you’ll probably feel obligated to get going right away. But unless you plan on getting married within six months, there’s truly no reason to propel yourself into high-impact planning too prematurely. Enjoy the new milestone a little bit first, get inspired by looking at some real weddings, and catch up on what’s trending in the wedding world RN. Our tips and advice are no different than they were before, but we’ll be honest, once you go from dating to engaged, you’re going to read things with a whole new radar and you might find yourself becoming obsessed by a particular palette, a non-traditional venue type, etc. Our real wedding features, as well as our wedding inspiration pages, will hopefully make some wheels start turning.
Orient yourself with a timeline.
This is always the next question every couple has: ummm what do I have to do first? That’ll obvi be different - case by case - but 9 times out of 10, you’re going to want to think about potential dates (and have some flexibility, because Saturdays in May, June, September, October, and November are typically very hot commodities) and start assembling a list of venues that you’re interested in. At this time, you’ll also want to come to terms with the size of your wedding and have a pretty high-level budget worked out, too; knowing who will be helping finance the wedding will also be huge. Once you have those things in order, then you’ll want a timeline to orient your entire planning process. And our wedding checklist will legit be your best friend, along with the accompanying budget tracker - to show you where you should be allocating certain percentages of your budget (based on your prioritized areas - be it venue, entertainment, fashion, photography, etc.). Our checklist breaks thing down by month and even more granularly, by week, to ensure you feel like you’re on target with ALL of your to-dos.
Make things about you.
Rarely in life will you be told you should make things ALL ABOUT YOU. But when it comes to your wedding, yah, you’re going to want to make sure it has your DNA, your stamp, your imprint written all over it. So, with that in mind, we’ve launched our own FREE wedding websites, which are all soooo adorable and so customizable. The templates range from beachy to glam, floral to modern, and you can filter by color as well. Oh! And one more thing: if you’re already thinking about save the dates and invitations, you can also enable the “has free printable” button and see which websites offer hard copy counterparts - so that EVERY piece of correspondence you send to your guests matches and makes sense, stylistically.
Add in details about your relationship, your proposal, your wedding party, any of the details you already know or imagine about your I Dos, and don’t leave anything that means something to you out of it.
And then make things realllllly about you, with a custom wedding gift registry that you feel awesome about. You can browse through our gorgeously-curated list of hand-picked gifts (from the BEST BRANDS out there in home, kitchen, cooking categories and THEN SOME), choose options from a plethora of places, set up tasteful cash or honeymoon funds, make group gifting easy peasy for your people, and then share the registry URL with everyone who loves you. Easily on that aforementioned wedding website…
Sooo... you'll want to register for FREE RN!!
Our planning tools are even more extensive, too, when you get further into planning - but we won’t overwhelm you in your first few weeks of planning. Just know that finding your vendors and managing your guest list won’t be giving you heart palpitations, we promise.
Soooo, happy planning new brides (and grooms!) - get planning with us!! SO EASY 👉 REGISTER AS A BRIDE RN!!