46. A Wedding Week That Feels So Calm It Should Be Illegal

The Aligned Florist Podcast

Host Sarah Wahab breaks down her systematic approach to transforming chaotic wedding production weeks into calm, highly controlled operation

Key takeaways

• Sarah Wahab triggers pre-production planning immediately upon receiving final payment, typically 30 days before the event.
• Physical prep includes unboxing, labeling racks by wedding, cleaning glass, and prepping mechanics like tape and foam well in advance.

Main topics

• Wedding production week planning
• Mental load management for creative directors

Notable quotes

"I'm trying to protect as much of my mental capacity during production week as I possibly can because I know there will be plenty of things that genuinely are going to require my brain in real time."

Conclusion

The episode provides florists with actionable frameworks for shifting from reactive

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi friends, welcome back to the Align Florist podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Wahab. Today I want to talk about wedding week and specifically the difference between a wedding week that feels completely chaotic and one where even though you're really busy and there are a million things happening, everything just feels surprisingly under control. I've titled this episode, A Wedding Week That Feels So Calm It Should Be Illegal, because there's something that I've noticed over the last few years, especially as our weddings have gotten bigger and more complicated, which is that some of the weddings that should probably feel the most stressful actually have ended up being the ones where I get in my car at the end of setup and I think to myself, that was surprisingly smooth. And I don't think that's an accident anymore. I think over the years, I've gotten really intentional about designing my entire workflow around how I want production week to feel. And obviously I want us to be efficient and I want the wedding to be executed really well, but I'm also thinking about myself during production week. I'm thinking about my team. I'm thinking about how many decisions I want to be making that week, how many questions I want people asking me, how they could be answered without me having to physically be there explaining it. What do I actually want to be doing during those three to five days of production? And where do I actually want my brain and my energy going? I think when we talk about preparing for a wedding, we tend to think about the really obvious stuff. Pull your hard goods, make sure you have your candles, double check your flower order, print your recipes. And yes, obviously all of that matters a lot, but I think that that is really only the tip of the iceberg of what it means to set yourself up for an easier production week. For me, it goes back much further than that. I'm actually thinking about production week me when I'm building the proposal. I'm thinking about her when I'm designing the wedding. I'm thinking about her when I decide whether something needs to be complicated or whether there's a much simpler way to get the same impact. And over time, I think what myself and my team have built is basically a process that is designed to create a sense of calm for all of us during wedding week. not in a way that nothing goes wrong. Things are absolutely going to go wrong. We're working with flowers and weddings and people, so obviously things are going to happen, but I think that's exactly why I want to create as much mental and physical space as possible so that I can make room for those things that are inevitably going to come up. By the time the flowers arrive, I basically want there to be as little unnecessary thinking left for me to do as humanly possible. And so this is a train of thought that I'd love to share and pass on to you because I do think it's a big reason why our weddings go so smooth almost consistently now. And I think maybe those of you listening might be able to find some takeaways from me sharing the way we do things and the way I approach getting prepared for an event. of any size, but especially the bigger, really detailed ones. So whether you have a massive wedding coming up that feels slightly terrifying, or you have a wedding this weekend that you could practically produce in your sleep, I want to walk you through the things I'm thinking about before production week that make the week feel so much easier. once we're actually in it and the first place i would look at is the physical workload this is the obvious part because i think this is probably the easiest place to start There is so much work that happens around a wedding that has absolutely nothing to do with actually designing flowers. And in the days and weeks leading up to a wedding, I want as much of that out of the way as possible before wedding week and before flowers start arriving in the studio. Basically, once the mock-up is done, the final revisions have been made, and the full payment has arrived safely in my bank account, to me, that is a trigger that it's go time. I usually receive the final payment around 30 days out, so I'm not waiting around until the week prior to start thinking about this stuff. That 30 days gives me just enough time to order any inventory I still need, especially things that require some lead time for shipping, and then gradually start pulling items off the shelf to match the final counts listed in the proposal and getting all of my hard goods organized. If we have multiple weddings happening within the same month, sometimes we're pulling inventory for multiple weddings at the same time. So in that case, we'll color code them and designate one rack or one corner of the studio to keep everything separate and organized. My basic process is to start with the proposal itself and basically turn it into a checklist. I go down the proposal and make a list of every hard good item required for each piece. And then that becomes the list that my shop assistant can start gradually pulling over the next few days. As I run into items that still need to be ordered, I'm making a separate list of what I still need to buy. And that becomes also one of my highest priorities. So basically within one or two days of receiving the final payment, I've essentially made a master checklist of what needs to get pulled and placed in order for anything that's missing. So now at this point, we're maybe 20 days out. The ordered product has arrived by now. So the candles, missing vases or votives, whatever we still needed. And so at this point, I want everything unboxed, pulled, stickers off, and everything neatly organized on a rack tagged with the name of that upcoming wedding. The rack is tagged. Then we can start cleaning any glass that needs to be cleaned. After that, we can start prepping vases with tape, chicken wire, or foam. If we're reusing cages, my assistants can put fresh foam into them, reinforce them with tape, pre-thread the zip ties, whatever we can do ahead of time that doesn't involve anything perishable. If we're doing an aisle, we can prep all those vessels and mechanics as far as we can possibly go, basically right up until the point where we would need to introduce water. If we're going to be working off-site, like from a wholesale warehouse or an Airbnb, then there's an additional layer because now we're also prepping and packing everything that needs to travel with us for production week. Now, I get that all of this is pretty basic stuff that I think most of us know, in theory, can be done ahead of time, but when you don't actually build a system around it and make it a top priority, That is when I think we find ourselves in the middle of production paying a talented freelancer $40 an hour to unbox votives and put tea lights in them or peel stickers off of vases. So for me, these things are not, oh yeah, it would be nice if we get to that. They're part of the process. And that process begins the day I receive the final payment. So once you have that final payment in hand, look at your wedding and first ask, what physical work am I currently saving for production week or maybe the week before that does not actually need to happen during production week? Get as much of that out of the way as you reasonably can. And once that's underway, here's where I think it gets even more interesting. I basically want to go through the whole wedding again, but this time I'm looking at it from the perspective of mental load. I think one of the biggest shifts I've made over the years is I am constantly