Planning your wedding - what our customers told us

How do you plan your wedding? What is useful and what isn't? Maybe you're just embarking on the long journey to your big day and you don't know where to turn for advice.

To save you wasting your time, the experiences of other couples who have been down this road before and come out the other side, married and unscathed, might be useful to you! We surveyed 56 of our happy couples last year and what they told us could prove really helpful to you.

Planning

How long does it take to plan a wedding? Just over half of our customers were planning their big day for between a year and two years. Just over a quarter planned the whole lot in six months to a year, 9% did it under six months (I bet they were exhausted!) and 7% really took their time and gave themselves two to three years.

Where do you turn to for advice? There's always lots of well-meaning friends and relatives around to help you out (whether you want it or not!) and, actually, recommendations were a very popular source of information with nearly half of our customers describing them as 'very useful'. Needless to say, nearly all of our customers (a whopping 53 out of 56) found the good old internet useful, very useful or even 'super dooper useful'.

But even though the internet is such a huge influence these days, there are few brides-to-be who can resist rushing out and buying a wedding magazine or two as soon as they announce their engagement. Yet only a third found them useful and just 16% found them 'super dooper useful'. Nearly one in five of our couples actually found them 'not useful at all'!

Budget

Of course, we want your wedding to go with a bang, and we know just how important entertainment is in making this happen. So how much thought did our couples give to their entertainment budgets? Weddings are an expensive business and 75% of our couples set a budget for their entertainment. One in  five of them said they managed to stick to it, but just over half said they had a budget until Adam Thomas & The Souljers came along!

A wedding should be a once in a lifetime experience. You want to look back on it with fond memories - and you hope your guests will too. You want to plan it carefully, but maybe there are some experiences which are worth blowing the budget for?

Overwhelmingly, our customers tell us about the fantastic experience we provided on their big day. They will remember it for the rest of their lives.

If you would like to talk to us about how Adam Thomas & The Souljers can give you a night to remember at your wedding, please get in touch with us for a quote on 0116 2790 146. The experience of the couples who have gone before you show you won't be disappointed!

Entertainment is critical to your big day!

Two thirds of couples look back on their wedding day and say that entertainment was critical to its success. In fact, they say it was THE most important factor in their big day. Of the remaining couples, nearly all of them said entertainment was very important, with just 2% describing it as important (and none at all describing it as quite important or not important!).

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, because these same couples felt that entertainment was less important than things like the dress and outfits during the planning stage. Before the wedding, just over half described entertainment as of 'critical' importance. 

Entertainment

So what makes them change their mind? Why is entertainment so important looking back and not so important looking ahead? It's all down to memories. A fabulous entertainer can really make your wedding and will be a memory shared not just by you, but by all of your guests. By the end of the day, the wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses will be grubby and a bit crumpled, the groom and his men will have shed their ties and jackets, but the memories of fantastic entertainment will live on.

Venue

Couples considered venues to be very important, both when planning the wedding and looking back on it. We know ourselves just how important a good venue can be in making your 'evening do' a night to remember. Bottom of people's priority lists, both before and after the wedding, were a wedding co-ordinator - which 60% of people described as 'not important at all' and the transport. A fancy car is nice, but it's just for a short time and for many people it's a good place to make a saving.

(PS As you might have guessed as you're looking at this website - wedding entertainment is really our thing, and we pride ourselves on making your special day the best ever. If entertainment is critical to the success of your wedding, get in touch with us and we'll see what we can do for you!)

The results were taken from a survey of 56 couples, carried out on behalf of Adam Thomas & The Souljers. Of those surveyed, 30 described the outfits as 'critical' while in the planning stages, with entertainment described as critical by 29, with 23 describing it as 'very important' and four as 'important'. Looking back on their weddings, entertainment was critical to 37 of the couples and outfits critical to 24. 

Gary @ SMD Photography Surprises Us All!

There isn’t anyone on this earth that enjoys having their photos taken and anyone that says they do is, quite simply, telling fibs!!

Gary setting up the shoot. He looks a bit lost doesn't he!?

It’s a truly painful experience for me with real moments of distress (mainly because you know that you look good, quite stunning perhaps, and yet the camera seems to see a distorted reality and makes you look nothing short of horrendous!!) Damn you cameras, lenses, tripods and other photographic tools and equipment!!


For most people this pain is (thankfully) restricted to their wedding day and the odd social gathering and, if the photo doesn’t reflect their beauty, they can simply delete it (or ask a friend to remove a tag!)

Adam appears to be measuring something? Gary finds it funny

Up until last Friday I had similar fears. As part of a new project that we’re launching (watch this space... secretive so-and-so’s aren’t we!) I was invited to join Adam, along with Tom Francis (a fellow dancer) at his latest photo shoot. I was overcome with dread. It’s OK for Adam… he has several great shoots under his belt already (check out his amazing photo shoot from last year with Michael Scorr and Martin Wright) and knowing how photogenic Adam is simply made me feel worse!


I wasn’t to know that the aforementioned fears were soon to be allayed…

Oh, very Hugo Boss

Dark and distinguised

In a disused industrial unit in the north of Leicester, as the rest of the Midlands basked in the freakish heat wave that we’ve been enjoying recently, something magical took place: Gary Summers of SMD Photography spent his Good Friday creating some of the most amazing images ever… really, WOW!

Adam Thomas Stylings!

Gary is the kind of photographer that is equally comfortable shooting a wedding as snapping live entertainment or fashion photography and he’s also our newly found best bud and a photographic genius! His honest, kind demeanour alongside his energy and passion for photography made the whole experience a real treat.

Tom never did learn how to walk properly.

The atmosphere was immediately relaxed and the three of us found our feet immediately. As well as shots of the three of us, Gary took some spectacular solo images of each of us and, keep it to yourselves but, he even made me look human! His ideas were really wacky and out of the box… luckily we are too and I think that’s why we get on! ;)

I can actually take a lovely photo, Yay!!
With such killer shots to show for the day, the next sets of images are already in the pipeline! Gary was absolutely fantastic and the pictures were so much more than we could have ever expected… thanks so much Gary, it was a real pleasure working with you, you’re the man!

Jude Law-esque??

You can follow Gary on Twitter @photographySMD, on Facebook or you can keep up to date with all his many happenings on his great blog

Ohhh!

And finally... a taste of things to come!!!!!!!! Geek chic?? Really!!

An Eric Morecombe Tribute show maybe?