I got married on November 1st!! Yay! 

And somewhere between the seating charts, the dress fittings, trips to Michaels for cool DIY finds, and approximately forty-seven open browser tabs, I realized something: planning a wedding is just running a marketing campaign. With better food.

The principles are identical. Know your audience. Work your budget like it has a point of view. Stay flexible. Hire the right people. And for the love of everything, stop chasing trends.

Here’s what eleven months of wedding planning taught me about doing business well.

Built Your Framework, and Work Backwards From The End Goal

Every successful in-person event I’ve built and every virtual one always starts with the end goal in mind – why would my wedding be any different? 

Most North American weddings either start at 3pm or 4pm, and can go as late as 1am! I am not about that late-night life anymore; and my now husband isn’t either. We also wanted a more “English country wedding” feel. If we could have, we’d have had a Wedding breakfast but our venue didn’t offer that. So instead we said…what time do we want this to reasonably end? 10PM sounded ideal. We worked back from that. When does the reception need to start, when does dinner need to be served, when does cocktail hour need to start and then the wedding. 

That means hair and makeup starts at 8:30, photography at 9:30 am and so on. The day built itself after we figured out the goals and the endpoint. 

Start your campaigns the same way. What do you want the end goal to be? What are the necessary bits and what can  you be flexible about? Go from there, build backwards, checklist and recheck and you’re going to be good. 

Spend Where It Matters. Save Where It Doesn’t.

Every business owner I know has blown the budget on something that looked important but wasn’t. Wedding planning does the same thing to you only fast and with the added guilt of disappointing family. It’s actually an insane industry when you look behind the scenes. Ask any couple who had to plan one. 

My first florist quote came in at $5,000 minimum. The second wasn’t much better. I sat with that number for about a week before I realized we were about to spend five thousand dollars on things that would be dead in three days.

So we didn’t.

Instead, we spent $630 between Michaels, IKEA and Amazon. Faux autumn leaves. Fake flowers that photograph beautifully in candlelight. Candle holders and candles.. Chiffon runners draped loosely down farmhouse tables. LED votives we borrowed that we tucked into greenery for a really romantic feel.

Nobody will know. Nobody will care. And the photos are going to be gorgeous.

Where did the money actually go? 

We 100% spent the money on the venue, on the food, in creating an experience. The things that were hugely important to us and that people will remember walking out the door at 10pm. That’s where we put the real dollars! Imagine a breathtaking historic stone mill in Elora, Ontario, a three course dinner that sounds like a restaurant you’d save for a special occasion, a great DJ and open bar for those who wish to drink. All ending nice and early because we didn’t want to “party” until 1am lol. 

The lesson for business: your marketing budget has a job. Spend it where people feel it. Not where it looks impressive in a line item.

Trends Will Date You. Vision Won’t.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time on wedding Pinterest before I realized I was looking at the same twelve images recycled across a thousand boards. Pampas grass everywhere. Dried flowers. Minimalist serif fonts on everything. Macro greenery. All of it screams a specific year. 

Also don’t get me started with all the totally horrible AI generated images that are so far from real life you can’t use them for any planning. 

We made a decision early on: we wanted our wedding to look like us, not like a trend report.

So Jason and I asked ourselves a different question. How do we want people to feel when they walk in? Warm. Cared for. Like they’re at an incredibly elegant dinner party thrown by people who really love each other.

Everything flowed from that.

The same thing happens in marketing constantly. Brands chase the current format, the trending audio, the aesthetic of the moment, and a year later it’s dated and disconnected from anything they actually stand for. They constantly have to reinvent themselves The brands that age well are built from identity, not trend.

Know what you stand for. Build from there. The tactics can flex. The vision should be rock solid.

The Dress Did Not Come From a Bridal Boutique

I did the full bridal salon experience. I tried on dresses. I stood on a pedestal. A consultant told me what looked beautiful. 

I hated almost all of it.

The dresses were stunning in theory and wrong for me in practice. Too structured. Too satin. Too much. I left with a lot of photos on my phone and a distinct sense that the dress I wanted didn’t exist in that building.

So I did what I always do when the obvious path isn’t working. I went looking for the non-obvious one.

I found my dress through an online retailer. I found my seamstress through a Reddit wedding community full of people who were either just married or in the thick of it! Exactly the right source for unfiltered, recent, experience-based advice. She came so highly recommended I didn’t even shop around.

The dress arrived. It needed alterations. My seamstress made it perfect. It cost a fraction of what the salon options would have, and it is genuinely, completely, exactly right for me.

The lesson: the traditional path exists because it works for most people. If it’s not working for you, stop forcing it. The answer is usually somewhere less obvious and significantly less expensive.

Almost Every Vendor Is Someone We Already Knew, or Someone We Knew Through Someone We Trusted

This one is the most marketing-adjacent thing I can share.

Our photographer, Nathalie, shot a client project for us a few years back. I was stunned at the quality of her shots. Then she did my personal brand shoot in September 2025. Within 2 months of that shoot, I reached out to her, asked if she’s consider being our wedding photographer. Hiring her wasn’t a hard decision, it was the obvious one. We knew her work, her energy, her eye. She made me feel like myself in front of a camera, which is harder than it sounds.

Our DJ is the brother-in-law of a friend at the SIM Golf club where Jason plays all winter. He DJ’d a party there. We loved his vibe. Done. Hired him a week later. 

Our wedding cake is being made by Rayann, she’s the cousin of my best friend and Maid of Honour Ingrid, who had already wowed us at Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving with her baking. When it came time to find a cake, the search lasted approximately thirty seconds.

My hair and makeup artist did my brand shoot with Nathalie that day in September. She made me feel beautiful in a way that was effortless and real. There was never any other option. I asked her for a quote while still in the chair getting my makeup done that day. 

Our venue, Elora Mill, is a place our family has visited for years. And then Jason and I had a very specific, very special experience there in 2025 that made it the only answer.

Even my engagement ring, and our wedding rings, came from an online diamond wholesaler with no physical storefront. Just extraordinary customer service, competitive pricing, and a product we loved. We went back to them for the wedding bands without a second thought.

See the pattern?

Every single vendor came through trust. Through experience. Through referral. Through someone who had already proven themselves to us in a different context.

This is exactly how the best client relationships work in our business too. The people who hire us rarely found us cold. They heard about us from someone. They watched us work. They experienced something we made. And when the moment came that they needed what we do, we were already the obvious answer. 

Warm referrals convert. Battle-tested relationships hold. People who get your vibe deliver for your vibe.

Flexibility Is A Skill, Not A Compromise

Plans change. Vendors fall through. Timelines shift. A photographer’s playbook needs updating. A dress needs to be sourced differently. A florist budget needs to be completely rethought.

I did not handle every pivot with grace. Some of them I handled with a much needed cup of tea (I don’t drink) and a very long conversation with Jason. But we handled them. We stayed attached to the vision and loose on the execution. That’s the only way to get to the other side of a project this complex without losing your mind.

Same in any campaign, any launch, any deliverable. The strategy holds. The tactics flex. The people who get stuck are the ones who can’t tell the difference between the two.

The Real ROI Is How People Feel

When November 1st comes and our guests walk into a candlelit stone mill in Elora, sit down at a farmhouse table with a glass of white and a generous plate of food and feel genuinely, completely, cared for – nobody is going to be thinking about whether the flowers were real.

They’re going to feel the love we put into every decision.

That’s the return. That’s always the return.

In marketing. In weddings. In any experience you create for another person.

The details are in service of the feeling. Get the feeling right and the details take care of themselves.