What’s a Timeline and Why is it Important?
A wedding day timeline is one of the most helpful things you can have, not only on the actual day of your wedding but also as you begin to near the end of your planning journey.
What is a timeline? Essentially, it’s an overview document detailing all parts of a wedding day, and it acts as a guide for those who will directly be involved in helping everything come together, specifically, your vendor team and sometimes select family members/friends.
When to Start
Depending on the overarching outlook of you and your partner’s big day and what all you’re wanting to incorporate into it, that will shed light on when you should ideally start putting your timeline together.
Here at Fancy Fox Events, we like to start working on a timeline with our clients at a minimum of roughly two months out from the wedding, but for two of our three offered packages, we sometimes begin even earlier than that.
Why? Well, in most cases, there’s more that goes into crafting one of these documents than you may think. In communicating with both you as the couple and your other chosen vendors, decisions need to be made as far as when this or that is happening, for how long, and what makes the most sense in relation to the overall course of the day.
Think of a timeline as a living document - one that ebbs and flows and is tweaked here and there leading up to the wedding, to ensure that all the pieces of the ‘puzzle,’ if you will, fit nicely into one another to make for a seamless end product.
Who Gets It?
Once finalized, you’re going to want to pass off your wedding day timeline to a handful of different people. This may include but is not limited to; your photographer, videographer, DJ, caterer, florist, and transportation company (if you have one for shuttles and such).
In some cases, you may also want to give a copy of your timeline to close family members and/or friends. For instance, let’s say you need your Aunt Susie to arrive at the venue at a certain time to drop off decor before coming back a few hours later for the festivities. Rather than stressing on the day of about her arriving on time and delivering what she needs to, you can directly include in your document something that says ‘Aunt Susie Arrives’ with a stated time, what exactly she’s to be bringing, and where she should take it when she gets there.
The timeline for family members or friends can also be edited slightly to be a little less information-heavy than the one being shared with your vendors, as to not overwhelm them or give them more detail than what’s really necessary.
The creation of this document and dispersing it out to those who you think will need it or benefit from having it, is really just about making sure everyone is on the same page on wedding day and that any lingering questions people may have are answered.
What All Should Be Included?
A Fancy Fox timeline typically has a lot of information, and that’s mainly just because we believe the more detail there is, the better! We’ll often even begin our timelines with a ‘Wake Up’ time, and go through all the little parts of the day after that.
We of course include the timing of ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception, but also things like hair and makeup touch-ups, immediate/extended family photos, reception first look, and more :)
Recently, our very own Alicia, owner of Fancy Fox Events, married the love of her life and had the most beautiful wedding day!
Having a timeline to follow on her special day was absolutely helpful in so many aspects and allowed not only our team, but the other teams we worked with as well, to get through the day as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
All in all, having a timeline on your wedding day won’t just allow you to more easily visualize everything, but it will also provide your vendors and any loved ones a better insight into the when, what, where, and how’s of the day, acting as a tool to help make your wedding as much of a success as possible :)
