I got married this summer, and hiring ESTOccasions to help plan and coordinate my wedding was the…read morebest gift I could have given myself as a bride. Around this time last year, my then fiancé/now husband and I had a decent amount of our wedding planned and booked, but I was starting to stress about the schedule and how we'd be able to handle everything the day of. We decided to get married at Edgerton Park in New Haven because it's across the street from our first apartment together, and it's very special to us. We rented the carriage house, which has a bathroom and some usable space inside, but because it's not a banquet hall kind of venue, we had to bring everything else in ourselves. We wanted our wedding to be fun and feel like a festival at our favorite park, so we rented a big tent and had food trucks instead of standard catering.
One day, while walking our dog through the park and scoping out another wedding for ideas, we saw a bride putting flowers on tables and directing food trucks where to go. My husband and I knew that I could not do this the day of our wedding - that's when we should be getting ready and taking pictures - so we started looking into hiring a day of coordinator. Some friends of ours had ESTOccasions plan their wedding, so I asked them about it, and they could not say enough good things about Kia. They said that in the end, she felt like their friend, not just their wedding planner, and by the time our wedding came around, I felt the same way.
Kia and her team were amazing from the beginning. One of the first things she asked was, what was I stressed about. It was great to channel what I was worried about into a plan, and Kia had a solution for everything. We went with the day of coordination package, but this included more than just coordinating the day (which they did impeccably). We also got planning meetings, a walk-through of our ceremony and reception area, put in touch with a second food truck and help planning our menu, and several emails and phone calls, including a phone call the day before our wedding when I had a slight meltdown about a potential issue with our tent rental, which ended up working out just fine. The walk-through alone was worth the package price. My husband and I had been struggling with where to have the ceremony in this park we went to almost every day, and Kia figured out the perfect spot right away. We had a natural flow from ceremony to reception, and Kia also found the best spots to put all of our food trucks (we ended up having the Naples Pizza truck, Lizzie's Curbside, the Mobile Pub, and Elm City Kettle Corn, and that's not including our wedding cupcakes from Sweet Mary's in New Haven and coolers of water and seltzer.) Kia and her team were there bright and early to set up the ceremony site and reception decorations, and everything was perfect. They were also there to bring us water when we were taking pictures (it was a hot June day), and they even handled our dog during pictures so that our little best friend could be in some of them. They were the point of contact for all of our vendors, and they made sure everything ran smoothly. They let us know when it would be a good time to cut the cake, when it made sense to do the father/daughter dance, and when it was the perfect time for my brother's band, the Funky Dawgz Brass Band, to top the party off. They packed up our leftover cupcakes and got everything set for us to pick up in the morning, and they were always there with drinks for me and my husband when we needed them.
Our wedding was really the best day ever, and we owe a lot of that to Kia and her team.
