Hiring vendors for your upcoming wedding is supposed to be fun. You want to hire competent wedding professionals that sell their services as industry pros. When the event is over you want to feel confident that you hired all the right people and that everything went smooth. You want to feel that you paid a fair price for an excellent service.
If you were to set up a meeting with FadeUp Design Group to discuss your upcoming wedding reception I could honestly say that we’re lighting professionals with almost 60 years of combined lighting experience. I can then back that statement up with testimonials, Websites, Articles about our work and so on.
So many people or companies are getting into uplighting to make a quick buck, but they don’t understand the logistics and how to transform a space.
FadeUp Design Group views lighting design as an art form and many things are taken into consideration from a design standpoint when determining how any environment or production should be lit and the strategy in doing so.
Selling a package is the most common method we see today. A one size fits all or several variations of that package. The package method doesn’t take into consideration the already existing decor that’s been chosen or the architecture that could benefit from well-placed lighting.
There are many ways to light an environment to make it stand out and confirm to the client that lighting was an excellent choice when choosing a method for venue transformation and most times a lighting package can’t accommodate what the environment needs.
This is not to say that a package has no chance of looking good; my point is that the environment dictates how many lights are needed to do the job properly. Using fewer lights to meet a budget is fine, However from a design standpoint, you will want to know which ones to eliminate while still maintaining a beautiful atmosphere.
Once I was speaking with a “Lighting Professional” in the wedding market and asked him what he charged. He said $500.00 for ten lights. I then asked what does that include, and he said 10 lights.
No mention of a design process. The only concern was how much money will be received per light.
That same company offered a photo booth,dj and photography service. I asked if they had a website only to hear the answer I already expected which was NO not yet. These are the same companies asking for $15,000.00 dollars as a one stop shop.
My advice to couples looking for the highest quality services they can afford is to look for companies or individuals that focus on one or two services and they do those services extremely well.
A few questions I would ask are
1: How many services do they provide?
2: Do they have testimonials that are directly related to the services you seek to hire them for?
3: Do they have good reviews on Facebook, Google, Yelp, BBB and other social media platforms?
4: Do they have an up to date website?
5: Do they have a contract that you can sign to get the agreement in writing?
6: Do they have liability insurance should an accident be directly connected to the vendor?
If you’re going to be charged top dollar for lighting or any other service you should be able to go to your providers website and read how people rave about their lighting services or whatever services they are trying to sell. Just because they do one thing well doesn’t mean they do a great job with all their services.
In short you may get more quality if you break your services up and allocate the same overall budget to several companies as opposed to just one doing many different services. To learn more about our services and how we can transform your event space, check us out at FadeUp.com
