Managing Bridezillas and Bliss

Course, New Text Introduces Students to the Rigors of Wedding Planning

By Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95

The summer before starting graduate school, Maggie Daniels found herself working at a country club where they had two to four weddings a weekend. “That was my initiation to the world of weddings,” she says. Daniels then found she couldn’t stay away from event planning. “Finally, I accepted that I was hooked and went back to school for a PhD in tourism and events management,” she says.

Now an assistant professor in Mason’s School of Health, Recreation, and Tourism, Daniels finds she is not alone in her interest in wedding planning. “The events management students always want to focus their projects on weddings,” she says. “It is an area of great interest for our students.”

Then Daniels got an idea that perhaps Mason needed a course on wedding planning. But she knew it would be a hard idea to sell.

“It was going to have to be a tough class in order to convince the curriculum committee that this is academic work,” she says. She put together a challenging syllabus with “hard-core content,” and soon the course was approved. But as Daniels was preparing to teach the class, she found that none of the existing texts really met her needs. She muddled through with what she was able to pull together from various outlets and brought event planners and other vendors into the classroom to share their expertise.

That’s how Daniels came to work with Mason alumna Carrie Loveless, MBA ’95, the owner of Carried Away Events, a wedding planning and events management company in Washington, D.C.

The new course was a popular elective. When Daniels needed someone to teach another section of the course, she turned to Loveless. Before they knew it, the two were hard at work creating their own textbook.

“We recognized the need for such a book in the market, and in less than two years, we wrote, edited, and had it published,” says Loveless of their text, Wedding Planning and Management: Consultancy for Diverse Clients (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007).

“We literally went into the trenches and did tons of interviews,” says Daniels. The book features descriptions of real weddings and how those couples navigated cultural considerations and still had their dream wedding, as well as vendor profiles in which the authors asked caterers, florists, and others to expound on their wedding experiences.

The project really got interesting when photojournalist Rodney Bailey, one of the most sought-after wedding photographers in Washington, D.C., agreed to allow his photography to illustrate the book.

“Rodney’s photographs are so beautiful. It just wouldn’t have been right to print them in black and white,” says Daniels. Publisher Butterworth-Heinemann agreed, and the coauthors found themselves with an elegant, colorful 528-page book that looks more like a coffee table book than an academic text. Reviewers in the industry have called the book “the most comprehensive work on wedding planning ever produced” and have commented on the perfect marriage of academic insight and real-world practicality.

It is the combined years of experience in the field that the two authors share that has made the book a success. Loveless had been coordinating corporate events, such as store openings and celebrity appearances, for more than 15 years before starting her own company in 2002. “With only a BA in English [from Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania], I began to feel as if I needed the business acumen that an MBA would give me in order to advance my career,” she says. “Creating my own business was a dream and completing my MBA helped make that dream come true.” Over the course of her 20 plus-year career, she has staged social events domestically and internationally for parties of 20 to 5,000.

When asked what they thought were the most important skills needed by a wedding planner, organizational skills was Daniels’s immediate answer: “Organization is the key to success. A wedding theme may be incredibly clever and creative, but if there is not an organized plan to pull it off, it will probably flop.”

Loveless felt the ability to “think on your feet” was critical. “When you are managing an event, there is no such thing as perfection,” she says. “Curves will be thrown at you, and it is how you respond to these curves that measures your true success.”

With all the talk of bridezillas in the media, the coauthors were asked about the strangest the thing they had ever been asked to do for an event. Loveless recalls being ask to dress a dog.

“I was asked to locate and purchase appropriate attire for the family dog, so he could attend the weekend-long events that I had planned for his owners,” she says. The wardrobe consisted of a rugby shirt with the pup’s name embroidered on the back for a Friday night cookout and an elegant black and white tuxedo for the formal event on Saturday. “My only regret is that I didn’t get a good photo of him in these outfits!”

After interviewing vendors for the past two years for the book, Daniels says, “My own stories pale in comparison to some of the accounts I have gathered from others. Whether it is using a traffic cone to build a cake or installing a tent on top of a 20-story building, the vendors tend to be confronted with the strangest aspects,” she says. “The planner’s job is to convey the couple’s vision to the vendors in such a way that an outrageous request will seem like a creative challenge. What makes this book fun is that we present these cases throughout the text as learning tools.”

Daniels says she has retired from hands-on planning and, by concentrating on research and teaching, now sees herself as a consultant to the consultants, which she believes helped vendors open up to her as she interviewed them for the text because they did not see her as professional competition.

And what about the movie The Wedding Planner? Do they see themselves in the Jennifer Lopez role? “This film, combined with reality television and web sites such as theknot.com have helped legitimize—and somewhat over glamorize—wedding planning as a career,” says Daniels. “In the role of wedding consultant Mary Fiore, Jennifer Lopez exhibits some of the skills I impress upon my students: organization, awareness of trends, and sensitivity to your clients’ needs.”

Loveless concurs. “The movie did a great job of capturing many important aspects of the planning job—the attention to detail, serving the client, organizing the event,” she says. “However, the movie was not realistic in that Ms. Lopez is shown working in three-inch high heels. No planner in her right mind would wear high heels for an all-day event.”