Dear followers, I feel compelled to write this post
after the hundreds of e-mails I receive every single day. I receive emails from
girls who want to work as Wedding Planners in Spain and do not know how to
start this job, i receive emails as well from those who have assisted to one of
those hundreds of courses that “Wedding Planners” are teaching around the
country and have not been helpful at all and of course i receive emails from
those who want to make their trainees with me and from those ones who ask me
what should they do to become a Wedding Planner.
I could go on
and on, but since I would like to answer personally to all of them and it is
not possible due my lack of time, I would invite all of them to read this post
that might clarify how is the Wedding Planners sector in Spain at the moment. Hopefully
it will also be useful to all those engaged couples that arise hiring these
services to organize their wedding.
Currently, there is such an extent of intrusion into
the sector of Wedding Planners in Spain that it becomes very difficult for
anyone to really know who is and who is not a WP. Since the crisis began, the
Wedding Planners are popping without rhyme or reason, and it is a service that
has not been legally regulated yet. No university or college currently bids a
degree or a Master with a minimum suitable number of hours that may allow anybody
to call themselves Wedding Planner, so the result seems to be that in Spain if
you have a cell phone, a computer, lots of free time and lots of chutzpah you
become automatically a “Wedding Planner”!. This people creates blogs or
websites, Facebook and Twitter accounts and in the meantime, all these “wedding
planners” encourage each other with messages of praise, meetings, showrooms and
sweepstakes to have thousands of followers while they expect any engaged couple
to hire their “Wedding planner services”. In addition, their costs are minimum
as they do not even pay their freelance legal tax (except for people that help them at the
wedding), and they do not even have a real office (non-virtual),they do not
pay a Liability Insurance for the event or they are not responsible of the
final outcome of the wedding.
The most recent studies that have been done on the
area of weddings in Spain tell us that only a 5% of engaged couples would be
interested in hiring a Wedding Planner for their wedding, so it might really be
only about a 1% or 2% that really do so. This makes us think in a very
important question: Is the “wedding Planner” job a profitable business?? If we
think as well that there are over 1,500 people who define themselves as Wedding
Planners and really there is nothing behind them to support it, we should think
about a second important question: can we compete with such hypocrisy,
dishonesty and lack of professionalism in this sector??
Moreover, also from 2012 the courses given from “ experienced”
wedding planners have increased about 10 times. Every day there are more and
more Wedding Planners that follow this trend of "as there is no way to earn a
living with weddings, I'm going to earn money from those who want to be wedding
Planners"? and with a few hours and a certificate that comes out
of a printer, they earn money from young girls who believe everything they are
told and do not even know what to do and how to start. The more honest girls are
those who write to us asking for advice and looking for answers. The less
honest girls are those with this certificate taken of a printer with and
invented career path and set to work as “Wedding Planners”.
As if the profession
of Wedding Planners was so simple!! ... Yes ladies and gentleman, being a
Wedding Planner IS a PROFESSION (not a hobby), taking in account that almost
the 95% of these self named “wedding planners” in Spain are ending with the
profession. It is a profession as you need to have a minimum of studies, which
means that you would be able to create your business (does anyone know what a
Business Plan, a Marketing Plan or a Financial plan is? ...) It is recommended
as well to add a specialization and many hours of theory and practice in event
management (there are several Masters in Event Management and you can make your
trainee in event agencies, hotels, caterings, etc.), because a wedding is an
event from the beginning to the end ,but much more personalized which makes it even
more difficult. And when you have all that education, you add the legal
requirements to start a business, such as signing up from the state treasury
and the relevant departments of the state as a freelance event manager, you
have a physical place to carry out the work, hire the necessary insurances and
have contracted with the Social insurance of people working for you, you have
already led almost one successful wedding, in that moment you can definitely
say you are a “Wedding Planner”, but
inexperienced.
That’s how you can start, as i did 12 years ago. When
it takes many years of hard work dedicated to design and organize complete weddings
(work on parts of a wedding is not being a “Wedding Planner” because you can
not handle the event and therefore you can not take responsibility of it), plus
many weddings behind your back and many successes, you will be able, then and only
then, to say that you are a Professional
Wedding Planner.
"The
professionalism in the area of Wedding Planners in Spain is gained by years of
experience, a high degree of industry knowledge, many successful weddings, and
especially a lot of honesty." Currently the certificates obtained of these
kinds of courses are useful to put on your CV or hang on the wall or on the
web, but they are not helpful for anything else.
I hate to be so direct and raw with the reality that
exists but it really hurts me to see how it is being given to understand the
job of a Wedding Planners as a pop up profession, easy, perfect for making a
living and with a great demand. Well no, it is just the opposite: neither is
easy to do or easy to make a living with it, there is not a huge demand but lots
of misrepresented offers and it is definitely not being professionalized.
Nowadays you need more than being a Wedding Planner to live well:
If you have to face the intrusion and with only some engaged couples minded to
hire a Wedding Planner service, you will work a very few weddings and it would be convenient
that during the first years you combine this work with another one with a
flexible schedule that might allow you to fit the schedule of your clients. When
I started in this world of Wedding Planners I worked for 3 years at the same
time in corporate events and only when I maid sure I gained the recognition and
popularity i expected due the success of my job I decided to dedicate my
efforts completely to work as a Wedding Planner. I can say as well that when I
started there was not such an intrusion, and in Spain we were only a few working
on this…
So all of these girls that are willing to be Wedding
Planners need to be very aware of what they are getting into because or they
place themselves at the same level of dishonesty than the rest of “Wedding Planners”
and lie about years of experience or weddings held, or with nearly 2,000 Wedding
Planners in the market, they would not have a chance of earning an honest
living at the moment, at least as long as all this intrusion exists. Who do you
think an engaged couple would hire first, the one who lies about their wide experience
in weddings or the one who says with honesty that they have already started in
the business???.
Please be aware that this high level of intrusion is
growing and growing every day and you are not a Wedding Planner if you have
organized your own wedding, you have worked a few times as a hostess or you
have decorated a church or a banquet.
I am very sorry to be the one explaining the situation
but someone had to do it. It was a really hard time when I had to open the
market in Spain since 2002 and it hurts me to see that there is almost nothing
of professionalism in the industry and it can be counted on the fingers whom are
indeed Professional Wedding Planners. What I would like the most is that there
were hundreds of Professional Wedding Planners, that work honesty and legally,
in order to professionalize the sector what would make more couples to trust in
Wedding Planners for the organization of their weddings, just like it is done in
USA and UK.
In a future post, I will continue talking about the
harsh reality of the Wedding Planners sector in Spain, because there is much
more to tell and nothing nice to say about, and both those who want to join this
sector and those brides and grooms interested on this service have the right to
know.
This has to stop somehow because it is doing great
harm to those couples who trust on these “pseudo Wedding Planners” and spoil them
on their wedding day, and to those girls who want to become wedding planners
and who are being robbed of time and money, and at the end, to all the
Professional Wedding Planners that have been definitely working for years and
have to realize that the sector is full of hypocrisy and falsehood.
Thanks for following and for reading till the end this
lengthy post (there has been no way of summing it).
Emy Teruel
Wedding Planner & Designer and Managing Director of Exclusive Weddings, since 2002
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