Getting to Know - More Weddings - The Wedding Community

Company Name: More Weddings

Interview with: Jade Osborne

Location / Coverage: Based in Leicestershire, covering nationwide

What does More Weddings do?

More Weddings transforms venues and provides a full wedding venue dressing service. Offering creative solutions to transform any space using a combination of drapes, lighting, props and furniture; the possibilities for creating your dream wedding setting are endless!

How did More Weddings come about and how long has the business been going?

More Weddings was born relatively recently, in February this year, and is the new baby of its parent company More Production. More Production has been producing high end events for corporate and private parties for over 15 years. We decided to launch More Weddings due to an influx in requests from brides and grooms for us to decorate their weddings, and realised that we needed a dedicated platform to make it easier for our customers to understand what we can offer for their wedding.

Have you always been interested in weddings and wanted to be a wedding stylist?

Who doesn’t love a good wedding!? I wouldn’t say I have always wanted to be a wedding stylist; I don’t think I ever knew what I wanted to be, I just knew I was good at organising things and being imaginative. Who knew there was a job out there to combine these skills! It’s a wonderful feeling to watch an idea grow and seeing it look amazing when it’s finished.

Do you have a background in styling and design?

My personal background is in media production and marketing, so I have always been very creative, and I love any opportunity to make something pretty!

All of our team are very creative people and we even make a lot of our props and furniture in-house.

Which areas of the UK do you cover? Do you offer your services outside of the UK?

We are based in Leicestershire and most of our wedding work is located relatively nearby, but we do cover nationwide and Europe if required. We have done lots of corporate events abroad in the past and we would love to do a wedding.

Who works at More Weddings?

Our core team are our two Directors Clive and Michael Hinton (father and son) and me (I’m Michael’s wife) — so it’s a family run business.

We have 6 full-time creative crew members and even more based around the country on a contractual basis to help us out when times get busy.

What services can More Weddings offer to couples planning their wedding? What prices are your packages and what is included?

We have a lot to offer prospective bride and grooms to make their wedding look magnificent. Each wedding is completely unique to every couple and also to their choice of venue.

For example, if you have chosen a beautiful stately home as you wedding venue, you don’t want to cover it with draping, but we could supply our 6ft high illuminated LOVE letters, lanterns, dance floors and various styles of super sexy furniture, to name a few, to jazz the place up and make it more individual.

However, if you have hired a village hall or a plain hotel conference room, we can make a massive impression and can completely transform the space into something magical; we cover up those walls which have pictures of random old people on, even jazz it up with a fairy light curtain if required, and we can provide ceiling drapes in various styles which is a great way to achieve more of an intimate feeling.

Most of our draping installations are done with fabric off the roll, so we have full the capability to achieve a perfect finish and the drapes just don’t finish halfway up the wall.

With regards to pricing, this is completely dependent on what the bride and groom want to achieve and is tailored to them; we can do as little or as much as you want, and we try our utmost to work within a budget.

How does your service work? Do you plan the entire styling for the wedding, or does a couple tell you what they would like.

Sometimes couples have in their minds exactly what they want the space to look like and sometimes they have no idea. I love the design process! We can help guide with suggestions on how best to work with the practicalities of the venue, but the decision at the end of the day must be down to the bride and groom.

It’s sometimes best at the beginning of the process to send across pictures and dimensions of the venue as well as pictures of ideas they like, so we can get an idea on their personal taste and style — everyone likes different things, after all.

Some venues might require a site visit from us, to maybe fine tune requirements and be sure all the information we have is correct and there are no nasty surprises when it comes to installing.

Do all your styling props, lighting and other equipment belong to More Weddings or do you work with specific teams who provide these?

Yes, all of the equipment that we hire is our own. We have 10,000 sq. ft. of an Aladdin’s cave warehouse (some might say we are professional hoarders). However if we don’t have something that someone is looking for we can either make or source it for them. If not, as we have been in the industry for a number of years, we can usually recommend another suppler that might have it.

Why should a couple choose More Weddings to help them to style their wedding venue?

Our services are for those who demand “more” (see what I did there!) from their wedding décor; who don’t want run of the mill pre-fabricated wedding décor, and where perfection is required.

As we have worked within the corporate events industry for a number of years brides and grooms should also be confident in our high standard of work.

Which part of helping to style a wedding do you enjoy the most and why?

I wholeheartedly love the entire process from start to finish! From bouncing ideas around — l love some of the unique ideas that some of my couples come up with and seeing how we can make it work — right though to seeing it all up and finished and seeing the excitement on the couple’s faces when it’s better than they imagined it could be.

Do you have a specific style/theme of wedding that you like to help create?

I get so excited when somebody comes to me with a unique idea or a theme they would like to incorporate. As we do lots of themed events for our corporate side, I love it when I get to do a wedding and a theme at the same time.

One of my favourites was a circus/fairground themed wedding; they visited our warehouse and fell in love with our grizzly bear, and practically planned the rest of their wedding around him!

What has been the top trend for wedding styling in 2014?

In 2014 we saw a high demand for rustic chic and woodland style weddings, so lots of fairy lights, apple crates, barrels and our pallet furniture have been going out like hot cakes.

What is your most memorable experience of styling one of your clients’ weddings?

One wedding that sticks out in my mind we did last year at Ladywood Estate in Rutland. The couple romantically got engaged on the Eiffel Tower so they decided that’s what the wedding was to be ‘themed’ around. They hired our Eiffel Tower and got married in front of it. But that’s not all, the rest of the décor and finishing touches were subtly French/Parisian themed too. We provided wall and ceiling drapes in white, a Parisian backdrop, LED dance floor wedding aisle, furniture, a dropping white drape to reveal the dance floor at a the push of a button and loads more. The bride was ecstatic with what we achieved and so was the venue.

What do you think the styling trends for 2015 will be?

I think the rustic chic style might hang around a while longer; it’s a great theme, mixing and matching the new with the old. We are starting to see a large influx in our demand for large illuminated letters for next year, so I think we may be heading towards more of an old-style Hollywood feel with glitz and glam and a bit of renaissance.

What’s your top tip for styling the perfect wedding?

Make sure your wedding style is personal to you and your tastes, and if you’re not sure what it might be, have a scour over the internet (my favourite is Pinterest) to look for inspiration and you will start to gain an idea on what you like and don’t like; you can even create a mood board. Showing suppliers pictures is a huge help to get an idea of what you are looking for, even if they don’t have exactly what you are after, they might be able to make suggestions.

Try to work with your wedding venue and not against it; if you have a low ceiling in your venue ceiling drapes will just make the ceiling feel lower and the room more enclosed; just simple up lighting will help lift the ceiling and add a splash of colour too.

If you’re thinking of having a main feature point, for example a fairy light curtain, or giant illuminated LOVE letters, try to make the most of them, in all the aspects of your wedding, using them for the backdrop of your ceremony, your head table and then for the band/DJ too.

Random question… If you could spy on anyone, who would it be?

My Cat!

Getting to Know — More Weddings