The Complete Guide to Luxury Full-Service Wedding Planning in Chicago
As passionate native Chicagoans, we’re proud to create and facilitate our clients’ most elevated celebrations in and around our city (though we also work further afield, on destination weddings carrying us all the way over the Atlantic to heritage houses in England and Scotland).
Working for clients at a luxury level, we often get asked to explain what elevates wedding planning into the luxury realm. In this article, we’ll explain all of the elements of luxury full-service wedding planning which we consider non-negotiables in our service offering.
What is Luxury Full-service Wedding Planning?
At a luxury level, full-service wedding planning goes well beyond the essential tenets of organization, structure, and design.
There’s so much more.
For us, psychology, intuition, and emotional fluency are crucial facets of the job, and absolute non-negotiables for qualities a luxury wedding planner must carry.
It’s about knowing and reading you the client, as well as the needs of all service providers involved in your celebrations, in order to create the vision you dream of with the minimum of friction.
It’s not just about creating beauty, but about creating atmospheres from that beauty. It’s about thoughtful creative and artistic direction which has purpose. Of course there is the administrative side of the role - the foundational logistics, timelines, and budgets that no wedding planner can succeed without. But it moves up to a luxury level when you consider all this and more - the deep work that leads to real magic.
Luxury full-service wedding planning stretches beyond the logistical, into a delicate process that requires clarity, sensitivity, problem solving, and the kind of deep knowledge that comes only from experience.
Here’s what to expect from a luxury, full-service wedding planner in Chicago:
Design & Concept Planning
Your luxury wedding planner should take your inspiration and run with it. They should have a solid foundation in design and aesthetic knowledge, and color palettes. They should understand nuance - that white could be a hundred shades, but the one you want is a blushing white with peach undertones, or an antique lace white to complement cool dark greens. The elevation is in that nuance.
Concept-wise, there’s a working knowledge of events. Understanding ‘flow’ helps to make a guest’s day feel natural and spontaneous, where it has actually been well planned out, considering floor plans, seating plans, and timelines as they flow through your space.
Artistic Direction
Our clients usually come to us with a dream, inspiration, or vision of their celebrations. But a luxury wedding planner doesn’t simply replicate their client’s dream.
We take everything a client has dreamt of and craft a cohesive visual and emotional narrative from it. Your wedding planner should ensure your celebrations tell a visual story of your personal history, and create the detailing, smaller increments, and specificism which brings together the diverse ideas you had and makes them completely natural, coherent, beautiful, and unique.
Curation & Contracting
Industry knowledge makes a luxury wedding planner priceless. Perhaps you have the vision of exactly how you would love to celebrate - but can you find and bring together the best vendors to do the job?
Sourcing and managing creative partners is of indispensable value, especially when the planner has these names in a ‘Little Black Book’ - a list of the highest level vendors which they already have great relationships with, and are used to working with. It irons out so many misunderstandings and slimlines so many interactions when a supplier is someone you’ve worked with before, and know well.
Invisible Precision
The best luxury wedding planners look like swans; serene figures who blend in with guests, smiling. Beneath the surface they are watching every minute detail and keeping everything running exactly on schedule, but you should never see any behavior that implies everything isn’t running exactly to plan.
They will be managing the complex (and often shifting) timelines of you, the client, as well as your vendors and venue, prioritising and creatively rethinking as they go, constantly on their feet and looking ahead to the next part of the schedule to ensure everything is running efficiently. During the planning process they will be working budgets behind the scenes too, ensuring you maximise your budget for the spend available whilst ensuring they respect the artistry of your suppliers.
Total Stewardship
Above all else, a wedding planner should be an obstacle between you and the process. They should protect your time and peace of mind, ensuring you needn’t be troubled by all basic admin yet making sure every significant decision is the one you wanted.
They will know that you value your time, so want to make sure every moment you spend on the planning itself is enjoyable, and important. They will protect your aesthetic integrity at every single step, ensuring the quality and detailing of your design choices are of the highest standard.
Logistical Planning & Production
A luxury wedding planner doesn’t just accumulate the right vendors and note their schedule. They will build a minute-by-minute production schedule of your celebration which every vendor can adhere to, as well as organising floor plans, timelines, and load-in logistics.
On-Site Execution
To the celebrations themselves. A luxury wedding planner will be there, directing a full production team on the wedding day to ensure seamless, quiet perfection.
There should be no shouting and ordering but quietly solving any problems before they happen, pivoting quickly with creative solutions where needed, and delegating to a valued and trusted team to ensure everyone is in control of their own offering, and yet a coherent team delivers exactly what you had dreamt of, and more, for your celebrations.
What does a Luxury Wedding Planner cost in Chicago?
Fee structures can vary greatly depending on the experience level of the Planner and their service offering, but overall it’s important to understand that a luxury Wedding Planner’s fees will be - and should be - a significant portion of your budget.
Your guest count and your priorities will take the lead in shaping that budget.
In Chicago, you can expect a luxury full service Wedding Planner’s fee to be anywhere between 15%-20% of your overall wedding budget - and this includes a minimum flat fee.
Our minimum flat fee begins at $18,000.
That might seem high to some, but if you consider the amount of time and responsibility required, you will quickly understand that a Planner should cost more than the band, the photographer, indeed more than most other vendor services put together. If you’re hosting a luxury wedding, a Planner of the right caliber is a tremendous asset to have in your corner. At the end of the day, no single other vendor or entity will pour more time, thought, expertise, or hard work into your wedding celebration than your luxury Planner will, and nobody else can possibly be as effective an advocate for you or your overall vision, uniting the skill sets of all the other vendors you have and heightening them all as their combined offering becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Here is a Budget Breakdown of a Luxury Wedding in Chicago
Budgets vary city to city and country to country, so we thought it’d be useful to present a breakdown for a current, Chicago-based wedding:
WEDDING PLANNER: 15%-20% of the overall budget, with a minimum fee that applies.
VENUE: $11,000-$20,000.
CHURCH CEREMONY: It is common for churches in Chicago not to charge a fee, but a donation to the church is highly encouraged.
CATERING: $275-$350 per person.
FLORAL & DECOR: Plenty of floral and decor vendors don’t have a minimum threshold, but services typically begin around $25,000.
PHOTOGRAPHER: $14,000-$20,000.
VIDEOGRAPHER: $9,000-$15,000.
STATIONERY: $10,000-$15,000.
BEAUTY: $3,000-$15,000.
TRANSPORTATION: $3,000-$10,000.
How to Choose the Right Planner
In a world where there is an abundance of Wedding Planners, connection and alignment has never mattered more.
Always spend time looking into a Wedding Planner’s portfolio, and make sure that you align with their brand and their aesthetic. Their portfolio should present aesthetically different events (showing they are responding to their client’s inspiration and vision), but there should be something uniquely ‘them’ which begins to show itself when you browse through a portfolio of their events - whether that’s a level of finesse, and repeated priority, or a personality evident in the detailing.
Do you see yourself in their work? Do you feel like you know them through their work? Are you inspired by their work? You should be able to answer yes to all three of these questions! If you can - perhaps you’ve found your Wedding Planner!
Is it us? Get in touch to start an inquiry!
