Carmela Occasions & Creations

I loved everything Carmela designed. The bouquet was gorgeous! Carmela took my dream of Bermuda pinks and Mountain greens merged together and produced an elegant affair. My groom is from Bermuda and I'm from Florida, so it was perfect. The 1927 Lake Lure Inn was an amazing location, especially in the off season, Feb 29, 2020, we had the entire place to ourselves. Carmela's planning skills helped move things along during the wedding and ensure the details ran smoothly. I would highly recommend this extremely talented person to be part of your designing and planning for the most special day of your life. Everything from budgeting to picking our flowers and colors was easy. It took much of the stress off of the wedding.

Carmela was fantastic. Her attention to detail and planning helped make our wedding absolutely perfect. From the pre wedding calls to the day of, everything was absolutely seamless.

We cannot recommend working with Carmela enough. We hired her as our day-of coordinator for our August 2024 wedding at Henderson Acres and our wedding day would not have gone anywhere near as smoothly and stress-free without her. A few things we really loved about working with Carmela:

-Timeline management: Carmela very graciously took my hyper-detailed (very type A) wedding planning binder and put it all into action. We had a pretty tight timeline and amazingly, everything went according to plan.

-Gorgeous set-up: My husband and I gave Carmela some pictures of how we wanted the ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception space set up and they absolutely nailed it! Carmela has an incredible eye for detail and really knows how to create a beautiful space. My mom and I were planning on making bud vases the morning of the wedding and Carmela graciously did all of them (and did wayyy better than we ever could - pictures to prove it!). It was stunning - I'm still so blown away by how gorgeous it was. Carmela also put out appetizers for my husband and I to enjoy after our grand entrance, which was so thoughtful.

-Ability to manage complicated guest dynamics: One of our guests unfortunately tried to make a scene during our wedding. We are so happy we hired Carmela and her fantastic assistant, Ivy, because they did an incredible job handling a pretty awful situation. My husband and I, plus most of the other guests, had no idea!

-Coordination with vendors: Carmela did a great job coordinating with our vendors. We bought flowers from a local flower farm and when they arrived just three hours before photos, to my horror, the colors were totally wrong (my bouquet was supposed to be pink but arrived bright orange and purple!). Carmela stepped in right away: she contacted the florist, sent the bouquet back, worked with them over the phone to get it fixed, and even had the florist send a final photo for my approval. In the end, the bouquet showed up on time for photos and I loved it!

-Meetings in the lead-up to our wedding: We spoke with Carmela on a regular basis for approximately six months in the lead-up to our wedding to discuss the plan for the day. These conversations and other resources Carmela shared with us were really helpful for finalizing our timeline, working on our ceremony plan, and making other decisions.

-Experience at Henderson Acres: Carmela knows this place inside and out, which was incredibly helpful when planning, especially for a destination wedding, and even for small things during the wedding, like dimming the lights.

-Decor to rent: Carmela has a small collection of wedding-related items, like bud vases and cake knives, that we rented from her for the day for a very reasonable price. Everything was perfect and it was great to have one less thing to worry about in the lead-up to the wedding.

... and this is only the half of it! Thank you so much, Carmela, for all your support in making our wedding a success!

Carmela was so helpful with venue questions, planning and bringing it all together into a beautiful evening for the newlyweds. Yes, she is very professional but also becomes your friend and I would repeat doing business with her.

Carmela is the sweetest!! She helped us out so much and did an amazing job! 10/10

We were fortunate enough to have our wedding in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Despite the obstacles of the hurricane, we had 4 months of planning with Carmela. She missed 1 of our 7 phone calls. She showed up 40 minutes late to our rehearsal, the day before our wedding. Our officiant had to improvise and direct the rehearsal herself. We get a call one and a half hours BEFORE the wedding ceremony starts saying she has to leave. She assured us Jennifer her assistant will be there to take care of everything. We had never met or talked to her before the day of. She was not at the rehearsal and multiple “assistants” had been named in previous texts and call. Carmela did not give us a reason or heads up about these changes and left us to figure out the day of changes on our own. We tried to rehearse again the day of and she was unclear of the orders. Instead of a day of planner, we hired Carmela who created day of chaos. If it weren’t for the help of Jennifer to figure everything out, I don’t know what we would have done. We had to conduct our own rehearsal the day before as well as well as a make up rehearsal the day of the wedding. We needed a wedding planner to help catch last minute items and manage the rehearsal smoothly but what we got was all last minute personnel changes, a missing table of guests, and last minute decor prep for $1500. If it were not for Jennifer, we would have had a disaster of a wedding. We talked to Jennifer who assured us she would be paid for what Carmela did follow through with who tried her best on the day of which in our view was very little as our ‘day of wedding planner’, and we recommend that you hire Jennifer instead of Carmela to save you the heartache of last minute changes and actually showing up for your wedding!