Today’s an exciting day as I have the opportunity to share with you a recent interview between myself and my mentor and friend, Stephanie Teague, owner of Teague Events. Join me in welcoming Stephanie to An Exciting Day Blog as our first ever Vendor Spotlight!

Spotlight Summary
Meet Stephanie Teague, a wedding planner and designer based in Davis, California. In this interview, Stephanie emphasizes her passion for full-service planning and design, with a heavy focus on client experience. Stephanie stresses the importance of trust, familiarity and shared values when working with other industry professionals, noting long-term collaborations often lead to better outcomes. We discuss design preferences, advice for budding entrepreneurs and challenges faced in the wedding business today. Enjoy my conversation with Stephanie, owner of Teague Events.


Vendor Spotlight: Teague Events
Q: Welcome here! Please begin with telling us who you are, what you do & where we can find you!
A: My name is Stephanie Teague and I am a wedding planner and designer. So I’m based in Davis, but operate generally in Northern California from the Bay Area, over into wine country, and then all the way up to Tahoe and everything in between. I’m active on Instagram and Threads @teaguevents, and I have a website, teagueevents.com.

Q: On your website you highlight three different wedding services. Can you elaborate on these offerings?
A: Right now I’m mainly trying to focus on full service planning and design. So that’s obviously everything from full design to helping my clients plan every part of the wedding. I am also doing what I call event management, which is basically like a day-of coordinator or a month-of coordinator. I’m stepping in about four to six weeks before, learning everything about their wedding, so I can help manage it on event day. I am doing add-ons to event management as well, like design services, or they can add on hourly planning calls. Almost nobody does that, if I’m being perfectly honest. I’ve maybe done a few hourly planning call add-ons, but it’s pretty rare. Most people either do just day-of and they’re on a budget, or they’re doing the full service planning and design. And I almost forgot, but I was actually hired last year to do a wedding where I was just the designer. I literally only did design, went to set-up, made sure everything looked pretty and that was it. I didn’t do any planning or coordination. I’m good at timelines, I’m good at thinking about details and logistics, but realistically I thrive in design.


Q: What’s the first piece of advice you wish every newly engaged couple to know?
A: You have to hire a wedding planner, and that’s not just because I am a wedding planner. Just in terms of when you are planning a wedding, it’s like another full-time job. It can be overwhelming with so much work, communication, logistics… it is just so much. And I feel like when you hire a wedding planner, and you look back on your wedding, not just the wedding day but the whole time leading up to it, that it just feels good. Feels like “Wow, that was really fun!” and “It was so easy.” Of course there are things I cannot do for my clients, like I can’t do their seating chart. I can’t decide who is going to sit next to who. I can’t build their address list for them, they have to reach out to their friends and family to get their addresses. But generally speaking, for my clients now and the way that I operate my business, my clients pick their favorite things, approve things, approve their vendors. And I take so much of the legwork out of it for them, that they can look back on it and say “Oh yeah, that was fun and wasn’t hard at all.” Next I would say you need to set your guest list because that totally determines what venue you can choose. You need to generally know what your budget is and how much you are willing to spend. Because one of the first things you want to do, even if you don’t hire a wedding planner, is book your venue because that sets the date. But you can’t even book your venue if you don’t know how much you are going to spend and how many guests you are going to have.

Q: Lots of people get stumped with how to establish a wedding budget. Do you have any advice to share on this topic?
A: If you are looking at what is on my website and social media, and wanting what’s offered there, I share with them what my clients typically spend. My clients are generally investing about $75k or more on their wedding, and that’s for a wedding of around 100 to 150 guests. But a budget will vary from wedding to wedding. Maybe you’re not going to book a typical venue, and you’re not going to have a super high end photographer and upgraded rentals. You could have something small at a community center with the rentals they include and a food truck. But generally speaking, if you want what you see when you look at my website, there’s a certain cost level involved for me to get you there.


Q: Are there any missteps that can happen when a couple doesn’t hire a wedding planner from the start?
A: Its important to have high-quality vendors you can trust, otherwise the client experience and end results aren’t where they should be. And the client experience is incredibly important to me. So when I have a day-of coordination couple that selected their own vendors, sometimes I have to babysit the vendors to ensure nothing gets missed, versus being able to trust vendors I have worked with before that I know without a doubt will do their job well.

Q: In your opinion, what makes a good vendor? What’s your vetting process for hiring new vendors?
A: This is a tough one. I just had lunch with Liz Zimbelman (NorCal Wedding Photographer) last Friday and we were talking about this. Liz was saying she was having difficulties with other planners not talking to her and she can’t meet new ones. She was talking about how, generally speaking, planners have their favorite vendors, and they don’t branch out from that. And she’s one of mine, so at the same time I get it. I tend to stick with the same photographers, the same DJs, the same florist. Most of the vendors that are my favorites, and they’re the ones I work with the most, they’ve kind of become friends. And it’s not just like, “Oh, I like them as a person.” It’s more about that we care about each other, and we’re equally invested in making sure not only that the event is a success, but that we’re looking out for each other. Like Liz knows I’m a details person, so I want lots of details photos. She knows I like landscape photos for my website, so she will take extra landscape detail photos for me and I don’t have to ask her. With Liz, or any of my favorite photographers, I never have to go and be like “Have you done this yet? Did you get these shots?” I don’t have to micromanage them and I can focus on setup or whatever else needs to get done. So having experience on the job is huge, and also having similar core values. If your core values are too different from mine, I don’t know that we can work together.


Q: Okay, so kind of going back to the fun stuff you love, which is design. What are some of your favorite design or wedding details you’ve done?
A: I like really saturated, deeper, moody colors. In general, I think whites and ivories and pinks are number one, boring; and two, they’re just way overdone. I always tell people, I like flowers that look vintage, with like a shadowy, grayish tone. Surprisingly, there are a lot of flowers that kind of do come in those shades. If you actually source from the San Francisco flower market, you can find that stuff. But I generally just like things with depth and dimension, and I like texture.

Q: What’s some design details that you’ve been chomping at the bit to do? Perhaps a certain flower installation or similar?
A: Well, what’s really big right now is glass atriums. So I’d love to do an atrium wedding. And I would really like to do a wedding where the reception feels more like a restaurant, with high-end banquet seating on one side of a table and chairs on the other. I would like to continue doing super elaborate florals. Every wedding I’ve done lately just keeps getting a little bit better.


Q: How has the wedding industry changed for you over the years?
A: Zoom changed everything. I never did a single client meeting on Zoom before the shutdown, everything was in person. Now, all my new client meetings are on Zoom. I hardly ever meet anyone in person anymore. We used to do vendor appointments in person, like we would meet the DJs in person and the florist, and go to their studios. But everyone just kind of stopped doing that. For me, what I always go back to is the client experience. I want to spoon-feed the best things and exactly what they are looking for. I used to think it was crazy that people would plan a wedding where the client would so kept out of the loop, and just show up on wedding day and be like “Oh my God, it is beautiful and amazing!” Like a grand reveal. My clients still know generally visually what it is going to look like, it is different from before with me doing all the design communication with the vendors.

Q: What advice would you give a budding entrepreneur or people working from home?
A: I just did a call today with a girl who wants to come be an intern with me, and I’ll say this, I probably said it to you too, that I think in general hands-on experience by far is the number one thing. Doing it in person, talking to people, meeting people, networking with them, that’s where I feel like you learn the most. And that’s why I still do that internship program because you need hands-on, you need to do it and learn it. Know your worth and invest in yourself as well as your business. And it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re starting out because a lot of people think they know everything. I remember the first couple years of my business thinking I knew everything about it, and then you look back on it and you’re like, “No. I have gained a lot of knowledge in the last 15 years.”


Q: Let’s end with this one. How do you approach work-life balance?
A: For me, my work-life balance is work when I can, which is basically when my kids are busy. And if my kids aren’t busy, I don’t work. Yeah, every once in a while my son will have a baseball tournament, and I’ll miss some of his tournament. Like, I will have a wedding on the Saturday of the tournament, but I’ll be able to go on Sunday. Family obviously comes first for me and nothing matters more than being with them. I feel like I didn’t get work-life balance until my kids were in school. It was really hard when my kids were at home. Now, I drop them both off at school and go work at Starbucks. I am there usually from 8:30 in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon. Honestly, everything is on Zoom now like I said, which has really transformed my whole business. So I do a lot of client appointments during that time. I’ll go see a venue, or the in person vendor appointments I do, it’s usually like going to lunch with a friend.

Conclusion
Thank you for joining me on getting to know Stephanie and learning more about weddings from an experienced planner’s perspective. Please visit her website for more information and to reach out with any questions you might have!
I hope there is something you were able to take away from this Vendor Spotlight with Teague Events. Remember to Pin this post for when you are ready for next steps.




I am looking for couples ready to share their wedding day story. Please nominate someone in the comment section below, or email me at jenni@anexcitingday.com, to be featured in my next REAL WEDDING post!
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Amazing interview! I’ve learned a lot already!
I love a good spotlight! What an interesting and informative interview. I think I gained a better appreciation for wedding and design planning.
This interview presents so much helpful advice for young couples! I enjoy looking at all the stunning photos, too.
What a great interview, and stunning venue!!