How + Why Tapestry Makes Vendor Recommendations
Making wedding and elopement vendor recommendations is one of our favorite parts of our jobs. The thing to know about wedding planners is that we are community builders. We have a constant orbit of artists and creatives swirling in our universe. If you’ve spent any time on the internet researching your options, chances are that you’ve noticed a plethora (or, depending on your location, a dearth) of options available to you. How do you find the right matches for your needs? And how do you sort through the options without spending the equivalent of a part time job on Google’s search engine and pricing pages and contact forms? Well, that is exactly what your handy dandy wedding planning team is for. Let’s break down how and WHY the Tapestry team makes vendor recommendations for our clients.
THE TAPESTRY PLANNING PORTAL.
Remember that fun planetary analogy from the first paragraph? Yep, we’re rocketing full speed ahead with it.
First, it will be incredibly helpful for you to understand the context of our Tapestry planet. When we work with clients, we build them a custom planning portal in an online software called Notion. Our Tapestry Planning Portal is the equivalent of eight brains and all our years of experience in the industry combined to make an optimized online planning experience. This portal has a variety of tools to support our couples through their planning journey. The portal also provides a space for us to stay connected and share conversations between our pillar planning meetings. In short, it helps keep us organized, connected, and energetically efficient.
One of the tools inside of the Planning Portal exists to support our clients in their vendor selection process. We create informational cards for each vendor we recommend, inclusive of their values, pricing, photos of their work, contact information, and firsthand accounts of what it was like to work together. While each card provides a full profile of the vendor, the cards also allow clients to compare across their options, mark their level of interest, and layer in comments or ask questions. What used to take an entire week of after-work Google searches, contact forms, email exchanges, consultations, and proposals for a single vendor category now takes 20 minutes spent on a set of vendor cards in our planning portal. You heard that right! We like to be efficient that way. From there, it becomes a joyous process of connecting 90%+ matches with one another, facilitating a conversation, and finessing proposals before making a final decision to bring a vendor on board the project.
PREFERRED VENDOR LISTS.
But enough about the tech for now. Let’s talk about the artists themselves. In your wedding planning travels, you may have come across something called a Preferred Vendor List. Depending on the context, this list is often a list of vendors that a venue, planner, or photographer prefers or requires you to work with in order to use their services. These lists represent vendors in their inner orbit: people who share similar values, complementary price points, cohesive work and communication styles, and who value the same traits in their clients. While Preferred Vendor Lists can feel constraining or elitist to some, they can also be viewed as a way of tapping into a trusted vendor community who can reliably deliver on what you want, especially if it comes from a vendor you feel passionate about working with. Chances are that if you jive with a particular artist, their Preferred Vendor List will be full of vendors worthy of your consideration. We have yet to come across a Preferred Vendor List that was not carefully considered and informed over many years of experience.
Tapestry has its own version of a preferred vendor list in our Planning Portal. Vendors can make it on to our preferred list as a wedding or elopement vendor. In some situations, where they fit both sides of the spectrum and the intimate wedding space between, we will approve them for both lists. Preferred vendors are vetted and valued for their communication, quality of experience, values, and authenticity. Our vendor cards for each preferred vendor are created and updated regularly to ensure their world is well-represented. Tapestry requires that all of our clients, from coordination through full planning, hire half or more of their vendor team from our Preferred Vendor List. This ensures that the experience our clients crave in their consultations, and the experience they hire Tapestry to realize, is supported by their whole vendor team from the planning through event execution.
OTHER TYPES OF VENDOR RECOMMENDATIONS.
Tapestry also has a method of highlighting whether a vendor is a “Tapestry Top Rec,” “Second Rec,” or “Backup” option for our clients. We have a robust community in our orbit and, often, our client’s values are the difference between a vendor being a top recommendation over a secondary recommendation. For example, we might recommend four florists for a particular client. Three of them are preferred vendors in our Planning Portal. If our clients value sustainability and connection within their given floral budget, we will designate the two florists who best check those boxes as the Top Recs, and the other two florists as Second Recs. The benefit of having a robust community is that we often have many options who are a 90%+ match for our clients, and our job becomes helping them pick from the very best creatives and business owners who align most with their values.
In knowing that we have already done the pre-work of vetting your vendors and presenting the very best options, our clients just get the delightful job of connecting with the humans and artists behind the business. Consultation conversations become richer and more people-focused. The scope of work is already well known, and you get to discuss fun details and creative options instead. The way we have organized our process produces a beautiful interplanetary dance where the right people find each other and produce beautiful working relationships for the day they declare their marriage.
Photos courtesy of Kate Miller Photography
Go ahead. Call us matchmakers. We won’t argue with you. ;)