The beautiful daughter of two of our very best friends got married at Glen Foerd last Saturday.  Jessica’s parents live here, but  Jessica & Camilo both live in California. Jessica is a writer on “My Name is Earl”; Camilo is in medical school.   Eclatante was honored to help out with this wedding — and one of the best things about it was how hilarious the toasts were!!!!

Kelly Vasimi was the terrific photographer who captured the love these two amazing people have (and was a pure joy to work with!).   It was a drop-dead gorgeous day and we all had a great time!!!

We’re very excited that the Philadelphia area is taking notice of Eclatante’s Kindness Blooms project. We’re very proud of the results thus far. But, of course, we need more volunteers willing to help us out after celebrations are over to take the flowers to local organizations. So, the more exposure Kindness Blooms receives, the better!

THANK YOU Main Line Today for this wonderful feature on Kindness Bloom in the September issue of this must-read mag!

And… We’re very exited about this great shout-out about Kindness Bloom from Philadelphia Magazine’s “Daily Examiner.”

We’ve been getting tons of emails and phone calls expressing praise and interest in this endeavor. So we hope that all of Philly will continue to Spread the Word so that not only can we increase the number of volunteers (we do need lots of those!) but people will be inspired to donate the flowers from their events. Which is a very good thing!

Take a look at one of the opportunities we had this summer to pass along the joy of a wonderful wedding to a group of very very nice people who could really enjoy them for many days to come.

Absolutely stunning ceremony arrangements created by Evantine Design from a great wedding at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were picked up and delivered to Shipley Manor, a retirement home in Wilmington, Delaware. Our Kindness Blooms team arrived with the flowers a bit late in the evening, but we found one wakeful resident who just couldn’t believe what she saw walking in the door!

Without Kindness Blooms coming to the rescue of these beautiful flowers, their fate was a City dumpster!

Please contact Kindness Bloom to donate just a few hours here & there to help us do what we do!!!  To be part of this extraordinary project, please email KindnessBlooms@eclatantedesign.com or call 610.565.9977.

The Knot asked Eclatante to design and plan this year’s Philadelphia Market Party and we were all too happy to oblige.   Not since our launch party have we had an opportunity to create and execute a celebration where we were our own clients!   Here were all the parameters we had to worry about:  It had to be Green Theme and all the vendors had to, essentially, donate their products and services.     The first was easy, the second, well, all I can say is THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to the amazing Dream Green Team who all went so far beyond the call of duty that it was just insane!  

We chose the amazing Turbine Hall as the venue.   

Then, together, the amazing team of professionals from over 25 different companies helped us to execute our design of four “green” parties in one:  a party in a Tropical Rain Forest, a party in the Ozone; another one on the Polar Ice Cap and a soiree in The City.

My truly wonderful friend, Rita from Max Hansen Caterers, made me cry when she put it in these words, “Kendall, this party was the culmination of your brain and all the people who believe in you.”      

Okay, enough words, let the pictures (didn’t Mike Kehr Photography do an amazing job???) say all the rest:

The Tropical Rain Forest

The City

The Ozone

THE DREAM GREEN TEAM

Scrumptious Food by Max Hansen Caterers.   It was truly amazing.   

Stunning Florals by Beautiful Blooms.   Everything was so unusual and creative!

Lighting, Draping and AMAZING Special Effects by VU-Events.   They are my heros!

PERFECT and super-creative printed materials by Two Paper Dolls.   You should see that stuff!   

Fun, Hip and Beautiful furniture by Jersey Street.   Everywhere our guests looked were awesome pieces that were suited perfectly. 

HOT music by The Zone Band from the ESS Entertainment Group.   Even I danced! The sound team of Spellcaster did an amazing job!  

Really unusual and gorgeous linens by The Total Table.   

All those amazing rentals by Party Rentals Ltd.   They are IT in Philly!

You can’t see them, but all the guests were given the coolest pinwheels by Crossroads Cottage.

DELICIOUS wine by Chadds Ford Winery — and they even created Knot labels for us!

Great Spirits for the awesome specialty drinks by Franks Wine Union Mart (YUM!). Stirrings Better Cocktails provide the drink mixers. I hear that the signature drinks were fantastic (I was working.  :(   ).  

Perfect entryway created with a great tent by EventQuip.  

Creative Juice Group provided such a fun element to the party with Flash Photography and a human tree!   

Premier Luxury Rentals provided perfectly timed and an oh-so elegant ride for our guests from Center City and the Mainline.

Our favorite men at Unique Video shot this party and I can’t wait to see the video — I know it will be amazing (because their videos always are!)

Mike Kehr and Jana (Mike’s gorgeous second shooter) did a phenomenal job at capturing this crazy party. I wish you could see all of the photos. I can’t stop looking at them!

Gersey Labs did a lot of the graphics and kept things flowing with emails and invites — they are the best web people in town and we love them!!!

The most delicious cupcakes in the whole wide world came from Lotus Cake Studio.   They also do DELICIOUS and stunning wedding cakes!

And I so wish you could see the adorable and talked-about polar bear cookies from Flour Pot Cookies!

Ice Illusions created not one but TWO awesome ice pieces in the Polar Ice Cap.   Everyone loved them!

Hortulus Farm Nursery and Gardens hauled in a ton of beautiful banana trees for the Tropical Rain Forest and fantastic container garden plants for The City.    People were raving about those!

The Theme Factory gave us really COOL stuff in the City.   It looked and felt exactly like a lovely, tranquil city garden.  People just hung out there like they were in Rittenhouse Square!

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS TEAM!?!?!?

SUBTITLE:   It takes a team

I started Eclatante based on certain principles, and my faith in those principles have only grown stronger since then.   Chief among those principles is the  “Team Approach” to planning extraordinary events. The importance of that principle was never more evident than at the Sonya & Mike’s wedding this past weekend.

I want to give you a peek “under the tent” (as Ed Knight of EventQuip would say) to see exactly why it is so very important that the team in place is made up not only of talented professionals, but professionals  who have no prima donna factor that would keep one professional from going beyond the call to help out another professional for the good of the event.

So here’s a quick peek under the tent:

Just at the moment when this weekend’s bride, her family and her attendants arrived at the bride’s home in the S T R E T C H Elegante Limo for the wedding, the skies literally opened up and let loose with a drenching and blinding rain.  Because of the long, curving, very dark driveway, that enormous limo had to back in.   Without missing a beat, while Tina and I stood in the driveway holding huge umbrellas, Donna O’Brien, the owner of Beautiful Blooms, jumped right out of her role as the florist and ran out in the pouring rain, without an umbrella, to guide the limo down the long driveway.   While the bride and her entourage stepped into the foyer warm and dry, for the rest of the night, Donna was soaked to the bone and shivering.  

Leslie Rosen (Leslie Rosen Catering) made a bunch of calls late on Friday night to her amazing staff and asked them to arrive very early because of the impending weather.   Not a one refused.    The whole catering team was there ready to go well before their appointed time and because of that the guests were served impeccably and precisely on time with absolutely incredible food.   

And literally moments before the guests were to enter the tent, the wind gusts intensified and the walls of the tent were slamming into the tables.   The catering team and the Beautiful Blooms team joined Tina to form a protective line along the wall of the tent, while the EventQuip guys crawled around on their knees (with Donna (again!) alongside) on the wet ground to secure the walls even more tightly  than they were before.   And everyone was  laughing the entire time.  It was truly a great group of team players who wanted more than anything to overcome all the adversity Mother Nature threw at us and provide the bride and groom and their wonderful families with the perfect wedding they deserved.

The moral of this story is: The team you choose to create an event is FAR AND AWAY more important than any of the individual vendors.    I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to create a cooperative group of team players who will be there to do whatever it takes should anything adverse happen on the day of your celebration.   And this past Saturday was proof that the “team approach” to putting together a wedding is absolutely the best approach.   

Tina and I were just plain crazy this past week.   It was beyond anything we’ve ever been through before. Who knew something with such a sweet name as “Hanna” could create such mahem?

We’ve been looking forward to this weekend since we started planning Sonya & Mike’s Jewish/Hindu wedding long ago.   Sonya’s dream, since she was a little girl, was to get married in her parent’s beautifully landscaped and charming backyard.   Once she became engaged, her parents supported Sonya’s dream by not only agreeing to turn their home into a wedding venue but to also defer their plan to sell their now-empty nest until after the wedding.    

The plan was to have the two ceremonies outside, followed by cocktails around the pool (filled with flowers) and on the beautiful deck.  Then the guests would be ushered into a reception tent for dinner and dancing. As of a week ago, that plan was on the verge of becoming a reality because the weather reports predicted an absolutely beautiful day!

But, of course, Mother Nature had other plans.  We, along with the rest of the Philadelphia area, spent the last few days of this week bracing ourselves for a storm of near-hurricane proportions.  We scrambled like mad finalizing Plan B, while creating Plan C — changing to a completely different venue (with an entirely different set of logistics) in a matter of a couple of days.     

On Wednesday evening, we pulled the trigger on Plan B.   And, true to form, EventQuip jumped in and pulled off the near-impossible — creating a tented environment that nearly flawlessly withstood the winds and torrential rain.   And Elegante Limousine managed to somehow get the wedding party and every single guest safely transported from their hotels and cars to the bride’s family home so that the first ceremony occurred ON TIME!!!     Once stepping into the home, the guests never got wet or windblown.   The ceremonies were just gorgeous and the reception was perfect in every way. Sonya got her dream.  

During the bride’s father’s toast, we learned that on the night Sonya was born, after driving through a ferocious winter storm, her parents arrived to the hospital 30 minutes before Sonya’s arrival.    Now, it all make sense!