‘I was beaten up in the prison service – it prepared me for my job as a wedding planner’

Many couples with blow-out budgets will turn to a wedding planner to plan their special day. But what's it like to be a planner working with demanding brides and mothers? Photo / Getty Images

A wedding planner anonymously reveals what it’s like to work with the wealthy, and why a traumatic event in a former job has set her up for success

I’m a wedding planner but my first job was in the prison service.

I was a prison chaperone and I would help with the transportation of prisoners with mental health problems or learning difficulties to court for sentencing. But I got badly beaten up by one of them – it felt like a lifetime but it was about seven minutes until an officer pulled him off me. My front teeth were gone, my ribs were broken, I had two black eyes, a broken nose and a fractured cheekbone. I thought: “You do not pay me enough to do this”.

Sometimes I joke that my experience in that job helps me deal with brides. But really, brides have never been my problem. The real issue is the mother of the bride.

After I gave up prison work, my husband and I decided to build a house and I took an interior design course because I wanted to be fully involved in creating our home. During that time, a friend who was a florist worked on a really big wedding and she asked me for some creative ideas. I worked with her part-time, helping her design bespoke weddings with tablescapes, colour palettes and unique ways of displaying florals in venues.

I’ve got a bit of an engineering brain and I want to make things look different. I am always thinking outside of the box. I won’t copy and paste. I won’t mimic a Pinterest picture. I want to make something completely different.

Eventually, someone suggested I should strike out on my own and I did, predominantly doing wedding styling. But then Covid hit and I teamed up with a friend who also worked in weddings. We combined forces to create a business offering floristry, wedding planning, support, styling and design – brides can pick whichever service they need.

The brides we work with tend to have an overall budget of £100,000 to £150,000 ($211,000 to $316,000) for their wedding. At that price, they’re looking at stately homes for venues– which will be about £30,000 ($63,000) to hire, including corkage. The caterer will take a similar amount. The rest goes on the styling, planning, flowers, music, stationery and entertainment.

After leaving the prison service, Isobel pursued interior design and later transitioned into wedding planning and styling. Photo / 123rf

With flowers and styling included, our services are usually around the £15,000 to £20,000 ($31,000 to $42,000) mark, and that will be for a 150-guest wedding at one of my regular venues. Then if they want supportive planning on top, that’s an extra £6,000 ($12,700) and I’ll support them with every decision, book the right suppliers and delegate where their budget will go.

My clients are a mixture of very successful people who are paying for their wedding themselves and those where Mum and Dad are paying. We have a lot of lawyers, investment bankers and Americans. You’ll have a lovely American bride with a British groom and the Americans love the idea of coming over and experiencing the quintessential English wedding.

The weddings I’m most proud of are the ones when the bride has come to me and given me very little direction and I pull off something incredible. I love a fusion wedding. A couple of years ago, I had an English bride and an Indian groom and that was one of my best. It was the wedding I drove away from thinking: “I b----- loved every minute of that!”

The bride gave me the budget and she said: “I just want fun”.

And fun is what we gave her. We had it all – we had glitter bars [stations where make-up artists apply glitter on guests], Indian dancers, illustrators, indoor fireworks and dry ice. By the end of the night, all the guests were covered in glitter and I had Indian drummers playing alongside Ibiza chill tracks because the bride loved Ibiza. It was just amazing.

The bride trusted me so much and I built such a great relationship with her that I felt as though I were her bridesmaid without the dress.

‘A mother-of-the-bride screamed in my face’

I’ve also had some nightmares.

I’ve had a mother-of-the-bride scream in my face because bell ringers parked in view of the guests. I’ve had bridesmaids give the mother-of-the-bride a valium the morning of the wedding because she was hysterical – so I had a drugged mother-of-the-bride on my hands all afternoon.

I have had a groom get very drunk and tell everyone to f--- off on the day. The bride barricaded herself in her bedroom and he was jumping on her wedding dress on the gravel outside. Somehow, they’re still together.

You wouldn’t expect a wedding planner to say this but: I think the wedding industry is out of hand. I think TikTok and Instagram have led to the pressure to have an ever-bigger, ever-more photogenic wedding. I get 70% of my business through Instagram so I know it’s odd me saying this. But I can honestly say if I was getting married now, I would chuck out the wedding handbook and I’d have a wedding that was completely true to me.

I organise weddings that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds but I got married for £500 ($1100) years ago in a registry office with one bridal bouquet, one button hole and some confetti. I’m still married to that man now.

With my brides, I won’t go over my budget at all and I do things that are relevant to a wedding day, not things that social media is telling us to have. The key elements of a wedding are: the ceremony, the saying “I do”, the vows – this is the most important part – then you have some dinner and a party.

But I’ve had brides who are obviously stretching themselves, sitting in front of me plucking at credit cards. I always say: “You do not want to wake up the morning after your wedding with big regrets. Getting into debt to marry the person you love is not ideal”.

I will have those conversations with brides right from the beginning. “Tell me the budget you are comfortable with and I am not going to let you go over it”.

I just can’t watch these men and women trying to keep up with the Kardashians.

Isobel takes pride in successfully executing weddings where the bride gives minimal direction. Photo / 123rf

We do between 40 and 50 weddings a year. Obviously we’re very busy in the summer months but we also do a lot of winter weddings and I’ve noticed autumnal weddings are getting popular too.

My salary varies year-on-year but it’s no less than £50,000 ($106,000). If I was a sole trader, working from home, I could make a lot more money but I have a limited business that has to pay corporation tax and VAT. And we also pay for our premises.

The worst parts of the job are the anti-social hours, the entitlement of clients (they sometimes think they should be able to speak to you 24/7), the lack of understanding from clients about everything I’m doing behind the scenes and not seeing the summer because I’m working every weekend.

‘Lovely families having lovely days’

But there are lots of wonderful things about the job, too.

I get to see lovely families having lovely days. I adore it when we come up with something really unique and see the bride on her wedding day after I’ve spent 12 months building a relationship with her. Or pulling something incredible off – such as the time I organised a wedding in four weeks because the bride wanted her sick father to be there. He died four days later but I knew we’d pulled it out of the bag and delivered a beautiful wedding – and he got to see her get married.

I am more professional now than when I first got into the business 15 years ago. When I was younger, I absolutely loved the “wedding-ness” of the work; now I look at it more as a job, rather than a passion. I think that’s age and menopause. My clients still get the same result but I’ve lost my fluffiness.

I used to love the romance of weddings but my mindset has changed: the job pays my mortgage and I am more business-minded now.