My daughter spoke to several wedding planners to help coordinate the day-of activities. She hired Bristol at Sustainable Soirees who was highly organized and knowledgeable and very easy to work with. On several occasions when we weren’t sure how to handle something we reached out to Bristol and always received very helpful advice from her many years of experience. She handled a great variety of details on the day-of starting with the bridal party getting ready to the very end of the evening which allowed us to enjoy the wedding celebration without having to worry about or handle any details. I wouldn’t plan another wedding without her!

One of the first questions Bristol asked us was what we didn't like about the wedding planning process and the day of activities/schedule. That question revealed so much about Bristol's professionalism, thoughtfulness, genuine curiosity, attentiveness and detailed approach to event planning.

We knew we wanted to hire her as our day-of coordinator

Beyond that, when we explained our needs and vision to Bristol, she was up for the challenge. It required communication and coordination across multiple locations and multi-faceted logistics, which were all executed beautifully.

Secondly, the team knew several of our sustainability-minded vendors, which was a huge plus for us, as it made coordination and communication easier. Even without those connections, the detailed documents provided helped us stay organized while giving the team the info they needed to ensure everything ran smoothly.

We appreciated Bristol's professionalism, creativity, flexibility and support throughout our wedding planning process. Her company's values aligned with ours, which we wanted to display through the various elements of our wedding. She brought it all to fruition and understood exactly where we were coming from.

Bristol helped us solidify the vision and execution of our "playfully elegant" theme, gave her honest and expert opinion when solicited, ran on schedule, and picked up, set up, and packed up all of the decor items we had. The team even sent us some of the photos they took of our venue and wedding day details.

We felt completely free to enjoy our wedding reception and are so glad we selected Sustainable Soirees. We would absolutely hire Bristol for future events and couldn't recommend Sustainable Soirees enough -- especially for those who care about the sustainability of their event.

Sustainable Soirées was an incredible partner for us during the planning and execution of our wedding. Bristol and her team worked hard to make sure the process was as painless as possible while keeping us on-track and realistic. We particularly appreciated Bristol's design plan, which wound up influencing a wide variety of thematic elements and giving our concept some much-needed clarity. She also helped us locate several of our amazing (and eco-conscious!) vendors, some of whom we wouldn't have otherwise even known about. She was communicative and easy to reach throughout the process.

But perhaps most meaningfully, we appreciated her willingness to jump in and help us catch up. Since as a queer couple neither of us had been planning our wedding since childhood, there was a lot we didn't know, and her immense expertise and experience were invaluable to us.

Several of our guests said ours was one of the best weddings they'd ever attended, and (biased though we are) we'd have to agree. Bristol deserves the lion's share of credit for that.

In one sentence: we fired Sustainable Soirées after four months due to their poor quality of work, lack of attention to detail, and AI slop design work, and we were refused even a partial refund of our $4,250 deposit.

We were excited to work with Sustainable Soirées based on what we read online, but we feel like we got a completely different vendor than other reviewers online. We sprang for their full-service package because we did not know where to begin with wedding planning, nor were we particularly crazy about having a huge event. However, given that our families were willing to pay for us to throw a big party and that we come from different cultural backgrounds, we felt we needed someone not only to plan logistics but also help turn our nebulous ideas into a clear vision. We were assured that the full-planning service would be perfect for this.

However, not only did we end up still feeling completely overwhelmed by the venue search process and without a clear vision, but we ended up actually cleaning up the mistakes that Sustainable Soirées made when reaching out to vendors. I want to stress that my partner and I met working in consulting, and we actively try to avoid being problem clients. I can confidently say that we have not been problem clients: we have done our best to communicate in a timely manner, and we understand that vendors are not mind-readers and so do our best to provide as much information as we can and level-set our expectations. We have done this with Sustainable Soirées.

Here is (most) everything that went wrong with our four months working with Bristol and Hilary in a nutshell, ranked from most to least egregious:

- Hilary provided a photographer with the wrong year for our wedding, and we almost lost them. When she told us, we were bummed, but when we reached out to the photographer ourselves for engagement photos, we learned that she actually was available for our wedding and that Hilary had asked about her availability for the wrong year. Fortunately, we were able to book the photographer, but we only learned of Hilary’s mistake by accident.
- Details were not being properly documented and constantly slipping through the cracks: the mother of the groom’s allergies were recorded as “preferences,” not the allergies we specified they were, and mixed up with the mother of the bride’s drink of choice, which MOG is allergic to; Bristol forgot that our ceremony was offsite and not at the reception venue — four months after we’d started working with them; at least two of our emails were not acknowledged or responded to.
- The “design work” that was provided as part of the package did not match the reference materials we provided at all. Two weeks after our “design” call, Bristol sent us three AI-generated images and AI-generated text to accompany them that did not match what we provided at all. When we pointed this out and asked if AI was used for the text or images, she responded only about the images, saying she sourced them from Pinterest, and asked us what we didn’t like. We asked friends and family, which includes interior designers and florists, if we were being unreasonable about our expectations; not only did they say we were, but they were even madder than us at the AI slop and the discrepancy between what we sent and what we got.
- We did not receive much support during the venue search process. Hilary would send venues three at a time, and they often in direct conflict with the detailed information we provided about our preferences and the three venue tours we did do before working with Sustainable Soirées. Her advice was often unhelpful and just gave us more variables to think about instead of providing clarity. Eventually, we stopped updating Hilary about our venue search completely, as it just became a bottleneck to update her.
- The onboarding call itself was stressful, and we felt like we weren’t being listened to: we were asked big questions that my partner and I wished we’d been sent in advance to think about and align on; I said that I did not want getting-ready photos, and she pushed back and said I would probably “at least” want a picture of my mom zipping me into my dress; and we were asked for the third time since our intro call if we wanted our pets included in our design, despite us saying no and providing rationale for why each of the other times. We sent a friendly but firm email after this call letting Sustainable Soirées know that we were concerned about how we felt we weren’t being listened to and that we were overwhelmed with the questions.
- The design call, like the onboarding call, was odd. For example, one of the questions we were asked was, “What are the top three things you notice at a wedding?” Well, my cousin had pyrotechnics and a camera crane, and I definitely noticed that. It was really unclear what Bristol was trying to get at with these questions, and given the quality of work we received later that totally missed the mark, the call turned out to be a waste of our time.
- After we terminated our contract, we reached out on our own to a caterer to ask for a quote; they responded they had sent one to our planner a few weeks ago and asked if we could confirm that we wanted the menu completely gluten, dairy, and nut-free. This was news to us: all we had told Bristol and Hilary was that I am allergic to cashews and pistachios but that cross-contamination is fine and that the mother and aunt of the groom are allergic to gluten and dairy.
- When the contract arrived, and the section about what services they would provide was completely blank; we had to ask them to correct this.
- We were scheduled for a 60-minute onboarding call and were stressed out when we ended 20 minutes over; we re-read our contract a few weeks later and learned that we were actually entitled to a 90-minute onboarding call.