Indispensable to our wedding!
Valerie Slaven is an absolute superstar wedding planner. After doing extensive research into Columbus wedding planners and interviews with a handful potential candidates, we hired Valerie for full wedding planning shortly after we got engaged and booked our venues -- a little over a year before our wedding. That was the best decision we made during the entire process. While the Columbus wedding industry has plenty of talent, we feel that Valerie is truly superlative among her peers. Our family is already quite organized and detailed, and we had a specific vision for our wedding; even so, Valerie taught us so much that we didn't know beforehand, and was the most important person on our team by far. Among countless other things, Valerie helped us: hire most of our vendors; extensively negotiate contracts when we wanted to adjust the contract terms; design venue layouts; create a detailed wedding website; stay on track with vendor payments; arrange logistics; create a wedding weekend schedule; come up with creative ideas for personalized touches; arrange calls with vendors; visit vendors in person even when my spouse and I were out of town and unable to join; and execute all our plans on the wedding weekend, including coordinating with our families and picking up and dropping off innumerable items at our home, the hotel, the venues, etc. Valerie was very responsive by phone, text, or email the whole year; she fielded so many questions from me especially; and she was willing to accompany us to vendor meetings as needed (some planners that we initially considered were unwilling to attend more than a couple vendor meetings). Beyond all that, and perhaps most important, Valerie's social skills and emotional intelligence are sky-high. She went above and beyond to get to know us, to put us and our families at ease, to offer advice with both candor and warmth, and to accommodate and encourage our multicultural traditions. She even stopped by our wedding shower to meet our friends and extended family ahead of the wedding. Honestly, one of the things I will miss most about wedding planning is the time we got to spend with Valerie. We consider her a friend of the family now, and we cannot recommend her highly enough.