We had the BEST experience working with Laura at Back Patio, and I think it was the best investment I made during wedding planning! As someone who went into wedding planning feeling intimiated by the vast unknown of the process, I found it immensely helpful to have Laura to guide me through it all. I was planning my north county San Diego wedding while living in LA, so I decided to book the Garden package to get expert insight on local vendors from the beginning. From our first phone consult, Laura was so clear in what the different package offerings covered, what to expect working with her, and immediately got to work to help bring our vision come to life. Outside of our contracted check in calls, she was always accessible via email or phone to answer my various questions or provide suggestions. When unexpected challenges with weather came up days before our wedding, Laura worked swiftly to help us navigate the situation with ease and we ended up having the best day, despite a little rain. Plus, she and Kayla were so kind and friendly, so it made getting to know and work with them such a pleasure. If I were planning another event in San Diego, I'd work with Laura and Back Patio again in a heartbeat!

The Backyard Patio Event Design team made our wedding such a spectacular, beautiful celebration for my new Husband and myself and our family and friends. Hands down best team!
From clear communication the whole way through our planning process to an abundance of vendor referrals they made our day feel so manageable to plan. To the day of the wedding where they were nothing short of amazing!
We truly could not recommend their services more. They went above and beyond! I give them so much credit for our day being as enjoyable and seem less as it was! Thank you specifically to Kayla who was always there for us!

We had a 3 day wedding celebration and believe me when I said Kayla and her crew did such an AMAZING job. If you really want to enjoy your wedding day, they are the best wedding planners to go to. I highly recommend them!

Each and every day came up exactly as we planned according to our ideas and their recommendations. Thank you for making our special day's go smoothly and organized.

Worth every penny! (Honestly, they should charge more). After every meeting with Kayla, we felt less stressed, more excited about our big day, and confident that our wedding was coming together exactly how we had always dreamed. Kayla perfectly helped us combine our vision/vibe with all the fine details. The final month before our wedding, Kayla was critical in organizing our vendors and timelines and ensuring everyone knew what to expect and that all items were accounted for. The day of, we had no stress or decisions to make, and as far as we know, everything went perfectly! Kayla and the team worked so hard to ensure everything was perfect, and we seriously had one of the best days of our lives!

My husband and I had the pleasure of working with Laura and Kayla planning our wedding! I would say hands down, Laura and Kayla made my wedding day an absolute dream! I could not have asked for a better team to work with. I worked primarily with Laura, we had monthly calls; check in’s, seeing if I had any questions, if I needed help with anything. Laura is a true professional; there were a few bumps in the road, as I imagine planning any wedding would have, and Laura handled every single issue with poise and handled everything. I cannot be more grateful working with such an amazing team. Highly, highly recommend! These ladies are rockstars! :)

I cannot express properly how thankful my husband and I are that we hired BPED for our wedding. From the moment we began working with Kayla, it was clear she was truly invested in our wedding day. She's an expert in this industry. She provided fantastic recommendations - whether it was for vendors, or for event execution. Throughout the planning process, she kept us organized and on track. On the day of the wedding, Kayla & Laura were rockstars. I did not have to worry about a thing from set up to tear down. As hiccups arose, they handled them quickly and efficiently, without us having any idea that they were even occurring. They had a pulse on every single thing happening at the event, the entire time.

Arguably, the best money we spent for our wedding. They are seasoned, organized, and visibly very passionate about what they do. Thank you BPED!

When we enlisted the ladies at Back Patio Event Design 3 years ago, we had no idea what would be waiting for us in 2020. Laura and Kayla have been invaluable through 2 postponements (due to Covid) and life changes (we moved across the country, twice).
I was told when I started planning that having a good planner is invaluable and we've found this to be true in Laura and Kayla. We worked primarily with Laura leading up to the wedding and she has been super helpful with keeping us on track. And we couldn't have pulled everything together on the day of without Kayla, who, I'm sure, helped put out a lot of small fires in the background, which allowed me to focus on enjoying the day as opposed to panicking about trying to coordinate with our vendors. Bonus! BPED has a great inventory of decors that we took advantage of and the option to order customized signs through them – I ended up DIYing some of these elements since I desired a creative outlet, but for those who want a cohesive look, ordering through BPED is a great option!
Laura and Kayla - thank you so much for making our day as stress-free as possible. I say without exaggeration that I don't think we could've done it without you both!

You should hire Back Patio and never look back! I am so forever grateful for all the help I received from both Kayla and Laura. They are gems and by far the best money we spent on our wedding (ok, maybe tied with our amazing photographer).

I hired Back Patio for their month of services. Compared to most other planners, Back Patio has some of the lowest prices I could find for month of planning. So, it came as a shock when their services actually began nearly a year before my wedding. I met with Laura at least 4-5 times (often for over an hour) BEFORE the month of my wedding.Additionally, Laura went to a venue walk through 3 months prior to my wedding. Laura provided me with such great recommendations, including finding a florist in my budget (which was pretty difficult to find and that florist turned out to be astonishingly amazing).

Laura also took over the reins of coordinating my vendors. I had some issues with my venue/park coordinator and Laura, knowing how frustrated I was, completely took over those communications for me (again, months before what we had contracted for). Laura is easily the most organized person I've ever met; she laid out every single aspect of our wedding minute by minute. She made sure that we got everything we wanted out of the day. Truly, Back Patio's customer service is just unmatched. Planning a wedding is stressful, even if you are pretty low-key about the entire event. With Laura and Kayla on my team, I knew I never had to stress. I was able to let go entirely, because I knew that Back Patio would pull everything off for me.

On top of their amazing planning skills and exceptional customer service, Back Patio handled pretty much all of our signage. I was shocked at how little they charge for this! Many items were free for our use because they were already in the Back Patio collection and for our customized pieces we were only charged for the materials (our giant welcome sign ended up costing $40).

Laura was actually 9 months pregnant by the date of our wedding (congratulations on your baby boy!), so by day of our wedding Kayla took over (along with her assistant Diane).
Our wedding day went off without a hitch. It flowed beautifully and I am sure that wouldn't have been possible without Kayla and Diane. We had a complicated venue with the reception and ceremony being on opposite ends of the Safari Park. I'm sure that less experienced planners would have floundered. Kayla kept us on schedule whilst simultaneously decorating both the ceremony and reception venues. At the end of the night, Back Patio took care of all the clean up.

In addition to their expertise, Laura and Kayla are exactly the types of people you want around on one of the most important days of your life. Laura truly felt like a friend to me by the time our wedding came around. Even though she was approaching her due date, she kept responding to all my questions and emails until the very last second. Kayla is a little ball of energy. She's so happy (but also incredibly professional), it's simply a joy to be around her.

I truly cannot thank Laura and Kayla enough for their incredible work. I simply could not have pulled off our wedding without them.

Going with Back Patio was far and away the best decision we made when hiring vendors for our big day. We mainly worked with Laura for the year leading up to and the day of our wedding, and I sincerely mean it when I say she was everything we needed and more. Our wedding was in 2021, and so the time leading up to the wedding during the pandemic was chalk full of unknowns, especially in the wedding industry – everchanging federal and local legislation/regulation, fluctuating guest count restrictions, mask mandates, looming travel restrictions, vaccine requirements. All of these things had big implications on what our wedding day could be, doubly so because we live on the east coast and were planning a destination wedding with our family and friends in San Diego. Throughout this shape-shifting chaos, Laura handled everything with ease, staying alert and on top of all regulations that could affect our wedding, and clearly and constantly communicating the implications of these regulations so we could work out contingency plans together.

Now that we’ve discussed Back Patio’s ability to work within a nationwide pandemic, let’s make mention of their incredible skills as planners. There are a couple key characteristics of Back Patio and Laura’s services that need highlighted to illustrate how great of job they do:

Incredible attention to detail: Laura was so incredibly detail-oriented I am 100% certain she knew more about my own wedding than I did. She was meticulous about making sure we had every single detail nailed down and documented so that we could clearly envision what our day would look like. She created clearly organized, shared online documents that allowed us to collaborate virtually on everything from signage to napkins, to table shapes/layouts, to vendor roles and responsibilities, and the list goes on and on. This attention to detail was instrumental in ensuring everything went without a hitch the day-of, and I can tell you that everything went exactly as we laid it out in our planning. We had mentally rehearsed what would happen step by step so many times with Back Patio that the day-of was a breeze.

Constantly communicating and connecting: We were in touch with Laura constantly leading up to our wedding. Emails, texts, calls, and even an in-person lunch in San Diego when we were in town for our tasting. Laura was always available to answer any questions we had, and it was never the case that we had to double message her to get her attention. And she wasn’t just great at communicating with us – she made sure she was in touch with all of our vendors as well to make sure that all of their services worked as a single unit to meet our expectations. She was also in constant communication with the event coordinator at our wedding venue, which allowed us insights into how the pandemic could or would affect our wedding. You can think of me, my wife, and all of the vendors as separate nodes, and Laura was the central hub that connected us all due to her facilitation of lines of communication. This aspect of her ability to plan, along with her attention to detail, mitigated basically any risk beyond an act of God creating trouble for our wedding day. Probably worth mentioning here that her personality is awesome and she makes the wedding planning process something exciting instead of something you dread.

There are just a few more things I want to mention before wrapping up this review. The company has excellent taste, and Laura’s opinions on the things we were on the fence about were instrumental in making sure every little detail was perfect. She offered opinions on color matches, groomsman outfits, my shoes the day of, table layouts and more. She truly goes above and beyond - heck she even created key pieces of our signage for us, and they were beautiful! Most of all, they are incredible at the human element of this business. Laura understood how stressful everything was for us planning across the country, and she was more than able to quell our many fears of anything going amiss. She was so competent from the day 1 that just the fact that she was our wedding planner lifted a massive amount of stress and anxiety off of our shoulders. She proved that competence time and time again, and had our full trust with the most important day of our young lives thus far.

Thank you to Laura and the Back Patio team for giving us a perfect wedding day! If you’re considering Back Patio, it will be the best decision you made for your wedding!

Fist off:
We hired them as day-of coordinators, not as full wedding planners, so I can only speak to the portion of their services we utilized. Though they did provide an excellent recommendation for one of our vendors.

Good Communicators:
We worked predominantly with Laura, but both respond quickly via email; usually next working day (occasionally same day but I tend to be a late night corresponder). They reached out several times between their date of hire and the event to make sure they had all the correct information, and understood what we wanted of the event. They were very clear on what services they do and do not provide, their requirements for meals and safe working conditions, and the payment schedule.


Good Eye For Decoration:
Due to a major snafu, we arrived much later than anticipated; Laura and Kayla had to do pretty much all of the set up by themselves without any direction. They did have a floor-plan, but unfortunately the dimensions provided by the venue weren’t accurate and they had to make some executive decisions on where to put the lounge furniture so it made sense and didn’t get in the way. They did a wonderful job and we didn’t make it easy on them. Laura and Kayla turned on and placed an obscene amount of LED candles (at least 150) and fairy lights and pre-lit garlands, added the provided florals to the table garlands, set out the chargers and menus and place cards, and set up the ceremony space (baring the chairs, that was our rental company). They even moved the welcome table and ceremony decorations to the reception space during cocktail hour so we could get more use out of them and more guests could sign the book. Everything was lovely and they worked very hard to make it so. If Laura and Kayla weren’t there to take charge, the whole day would have been about 3 hours behind, and it would have been a disaster.

Problem Solvers:
During the wedding, they handled most of the problems without needing my input, but for the major snafu the information and the options were presented to me as a clear this or that scenario, so they were off again and handling it without much delay.

Thoughtful: I was panicking before the ceremony, due to the aforementioned snafu. Not only did they keep everything going smoothly for the guests, Laura also found my best friend and sent her to me to calm me down. No one ever mentioned to me later that they noticed anything had gone wrong. They also chased my husband and I down with a snack tray during couples photos, which was much appreciated since I hadn’t eaten yet that day. They both, Laura especially provided a very calming “we got this” energy when I was being pretty emotional/illogical. By the way: I’m sorry, and thank you!

Payment: Accepted credit cards and provided invoices, via Quickbooks. Very easy. We paid in two installments, half when we reserved their services, the remainder the week of the wedding. The cost for their services was very reasonable and I do not regret a cent.

Perks: They offered to make our personalized welcome sign, if we provided them with the materials. We did not utilize this offer, as my sister made our welcome sign, but the table numbers and general signs (pick a seat not a side, table numbers, etc) were lovely; so I’m sure the personalized sign would be equally beautiful. Laura and Kayla generously allowed us to use the general signs along with some décor items (easels, blanket crates) at no extra charge.