Booming Wedding Business Keeps Local Vendors Busy
They’re part-psychologist, part-designer and part-stage manager. They’re visionaries, assistants and detail-oriented. Their job is to plan the events that many consider the biggest in their lives.
It’s the busiest time of year for wedding planners, photographers, florists and other vendors. And some of those wedding workers are calling this the busiest year ever.
The average couple spends $30,000 on their wedding and they invite a little more than 120 guests, according to The Knot 2014 Real Weddings Study. That includes the price of photographers ($2,500) florists ($2,100) and disk jockeys ($1,100) or bands ($3,500).
The planners try to make the day perfect despite everything that can go wrong.
Nancy Jeffries-Dwyer, the owner of N-Joy Weddings and Events in Stowe, organizes a number of Woodstock weddings every year. She drives to each one of them in what she calls the “N-Joy Mobile” — the van she’s equipped with anything she might need, from a saw to cut down tree branches impeding on ceremony sites, to shovels and rakes and other garden tools, bug spray, candles to dress up a dull bathroom and a sewing machine.
Sometimes there’s nothing she can do. Jeffries-Dwyer planned a wedding that was scheduled the day before Tropical Storm Irene hit on a Saturday night in 2011.
It rained harder and harder as the night went on, she said. A 54-passenger coach bus got stuck in the mud that night and couldn’t move to take guests home until a tractor pulled it free. Guests that stayed overnight were stuck for several days, she said.
“You have to be prepared for everything,” she said.
She even carries a chalk kit, which has been handy in taking out bloodstains.
She recalls a bridesmaid who shaved her legs in a bathroom on the wedding day. A trickle of blood that ran down her leg smeared against the bride’s shiny white gown a halfhour before the ceremony, she said. The chalk absorbed most of the blood and left only a minor stain.
Sabrina Brown the owner of Woodstock Productions is seeing the same rush. She’s in the midst of planning 15 weddings.
‘Going Like Gangbusters’
Once a May-June endeavor, wedding vendors are now seeing an interest in year-round weddings in this state. VT Enchanted Events in Hyde Park has turned away about a dozen brides this year.
“It’s definitely going like gangbusters,” said Jackie Watson, the owner of VT Enchanted Events and a board member of the Vermont Association of Wedding Professionals.
“Vermont has become a big destination hot spot,” she said.
Although many vendors are seeing an increase in the number of weddings they see, some have seen no change. One common trend is people booking weddings well in advanced.
The Woodstock Inn and Resort has scheduled about 41 weddings so far for 2016, which is already five more than this year.
Inquiries about weddings are up roughly 20 percent at the inn, according to Director of Sales and Marketing Courtney Lowe.
Nearly all the weddings are destination weddings. The inn started pushing weddings six years ago, when destination weddings were starting to grow.
“Now it’s almost like a norm,” Lowe said.
The Best Job In The World
Ellen Snyder, a Barnard-based florist, is working on 25 weddings this year. She’s also seen an increase in inquiries.
“It’s exhilarating, exhausting, stressful, but it’s worth it,” said Snyder of weddings. “You’re always holding your breath; happily holding your breath.”
Her job is also unpredictable. Snyder can order hundreds of flowers that she sometimes can’t use at all.
She recently had a package of flowers shipped overnight from a supplier in California. The flight was delayed due to a thunderstorm and the box took two days to arrive. Everything was completely unusable, she said.
She always has to have a second plan for flowers. Sometimes she has to make do with the flowers she can find locally in Vermont’s short growing season.
Kathy and Rick Terwelp, the owners of the Jackson House Inn, watch the weather “like hawks” during this time of the year.
“We’re very concerned about making sure the property is in shape,” Kathy said.
The Jackson House Inn does four weddings a year.
Each wedding is unique and each comes with its own challenges.
“It’s like painting a new painting each time,” Jeffries-Dwyer said.
Each wedding has its own story.
“In a way it’s like the best theater. It’s like we’re a traveling troupe in a way,” Brown said. “The set gets designed and the event happens and it plays out. There’s a script, but they go off script. The stage gets swapped at the end and the lights go out.”
Vendors are wiped by the end of the wedding day, which is usually an 18-hour day for Brown, yet she declares: “I have one of the best jobs in the world.”Read more at:www.marieprom.co.uk/vintage-prom-dresses
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