We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful April Arnold. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with April below.

April, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Kosi Events started 7 years ago as of August 1, 2023. But, we weren’t always Kosi Events. We actually started as April Marie Events, a name I landed out solely based out of exhaustion and an inability to handle the pressure of naming my business. When I first started my business I brainstormed for days, randomly searched online, found names I loved only to find they already existed and belonged to other businesses, a dealbreaker for me. After a few weeks of this process, I gave in and just name my business after myself, which I had seen many event planning companies do. Naming my business felt like a huge roadblock to actually starting my business and I just needed a name to register my business, get my EIN, get my website up and running, and start on branding. I couldn’t spend any more time brainstorming, I had to start *doing.* So began April Marie Events.

The business cruised along for the first two years and the name wasn’t a problem. I really didn’t think too much about it until the fall of 2020. Of course, being in the event industry, 2020 was a revolution year in a lot of ways. More than half of my events outright cancelled, and the rest either rescheduled to 2021, or radically scaled back. While this created a huge slump in 2020, it also positioned my business for serious growth in 2021. By late 2020, I knew I’d have to hire additional planners for summer 2021 in order to keep pace with demand, which was something I had wanted to do for some time.

Knowing I’d have more planners working with me, suddenly our name, April Marie Events, didn’t make any sense. I knew it was time to reevaluate, so I took advantage of free business coaching offered by our local Business Incubator office. Changing the name of the business felt like an insane task, and I really didn’t know if I could. I felt like I’d developed a reputation and identity around the business name and I didn’t want to start over by changing it. However, my business consultant quickly helped me see that the benefits greatly outweighed any potential downfalls, so the quest began. I needed a new business name.

Honestly, the process of finding a new business name probably took 3-4 months from start to finish. The journey began by defining the values of my current brand, what was important to me moving forward, defining my target clients, figuring out how I wanted to set myself apart from other planners, and a ton of other details. There was so much to consider before I even got to the part where I thought about a new name. What felt different this time around, was that I had years of experience under my belt and could answer these questions for myself, which I couldn’t really do when I was brand new starting my business.

After defining the major characteristics of what I wanted while moving forward, it was time to actually try to find a name – yikes! The search felt aimless at times, and again, there were times when I thought for sure I’d found THE NAME, only to find that the web address was taken, or someone was operating in another state under the same name.

Finally, one evening in late January, I stumbled upon the work koselig. It’s a Norwegian word and concept, and as soon as I read the details and intricacies of what it meant, I knew it would be the base of our new name. Koselig closest English translation is cozy, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. It is a hard-to-describe feeling of happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment that you get in a group of people. Imagine having a dinner party with your family or closest friends, and you’ve had a few glasses of wine, and there’s a fire in the background or candles on the table, and the sun has set, and everyone is sitting around sharing stories and laughing. Do you feel that? That is koselig.

That feeling is exactly how I wanted my clients to feel at their events, whether they had a small event of 10 guests, or a huge 200-person affair. I wanted everyone to feel relaxed and happy and full and warm and satisfied.

So I took that concept and created Kosi Events. Kosi is pronounced the same as cozy, which I’ll admit isn’t obvious to people finding our name for the first time. Kosi is a short word, easy to remember, and has enough of a tie to the original word, koselig, that I think that meaning comes through. I could not be happier with our new business name and the switch from April Marie Events to Kosi Events wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it might be. This new name aligns so much better with our core values, and has grown as our team and services have grown. It was a long process, but so worth it.

April, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I didn’t mean to be an event and wedding planner, it really happened on accident. I went to school for technical writing and computer science, but found those job options far too solitary and frankly, boring. After finishing my second degree, I was still bartending and met someone who owned a mountain lodge. He invited me up to train his staff on bartending and serving. After my first shift up there, I knew I wanted to take over more aspects of the lodge, which I did within 6 weeks. I worked there for over a year, helping to run the restaurant, revamping the cabin rental system, redesigning the website, and helping to manage and run the 10 weddings they had booked. After completing the year, I knew events was my path forward!

I worked at a hotel as the events manager for two years to gain more experience in a less chaotic and more structured environment before I walked off on my own and started my own business in 2016. I haven’t looked back since.

Kosi Events, my planning business, offers a variety of planning services, both corporate and social. We focus primarily on weddings, but also have strong local connections and work many large corporate and non-profit events through the year. We have a team of 4 lead planners (including myself) and 4 assistants to help support us on the weekends.

We focus on providing a high sense of organization and many systems to our clients so we can make sure nothing is falling between the cracks. Most of our social clients live out of town or out of state, so we make sure to offer the highest level of communication between ourselves, clients, and other vendors.

Teamwork is a central focus of our brand. That comes out within our planning teams in-house, of course, as well as with clients. However, the most important part of teamwork for us is with our vendor partners. The other business that are working to make the day happen are our co-workers, teammates, and frequently, our friends. We make sure to go out of our way to support them however we can, jumping in when needed, since we know they’d do the same for us.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

It took me a few years to learn that *I* am not my ideal client. When I started my business I created my marketing material, my inquiry responses, and all of my information to me. I am someone who has a very *can do* attitude and I am happy tackling things myself instead of paying a professional. Guess what? Someone with that mentality and attitude is way less likely to hire a wedding planner because they think they can do it themself!

It took some time, but I realized that I want clients who look at an event planner as a profession with skills that they do not have (which we are!), therefore they are happy to hire someone who has the knowledge and experience. When I had this realization, I had to re-write most of the content for the website, brochures, and everywhere else so that I wasn’t talking to a diy-style person, but so I was talking to someone looking for a pro.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think the philosophy of Kosi Events is pretty simple: work hard and be nice. However, as I’ve built the business from scratch and seen many business rise, some fall, and been able to look into the inner workings (as a planner we are uniquely in touch with every other event business, seeing their communication, pricing, company culture, and how they treat clients) of so many, I’ve learned that this mentality is more rare than I expected. Let’s break it down into two parts:

WORK HARD
This seems simple, I know, but it’s a little more complicated than you might expect. Working hard means more than just working a lot of hours (but you have to do that too). I think working hard means that as someone starting a new business, you probably have to set your prices lower than you are worth to begin to carve out a place for yourself. You have to entice clients to take a chance on a business with no track record, which for us meant that we offered a much larger (and crazier!) list of services than we do now, and we did it for lower prices than we offer now. We set up tables and chairs, we picked up and delivered from other vendors, and we did it all on time or early, happily, and without complaint. It was HARD, but it showed other vendors that we were there to pitch in and it got us our first 5-star Google reviews that we could show the next clients so we didn’t have to do quite as much.

I think the second part of working hard is persistence. Starting a business is hard and takes time (especially 7 years ago when the wedding industry wasn’t experiencing the insane boom it’s currently experiencing). Working hard means pushing through the slow times and hustling to keep the dream alive.

BE NICE
This also seems simple, but when you’re working with 10 different businesses, have a tough client, or have a member of your vendor team that isn’t pulling their weight, it is hard to keep being nice. However, for us, this is an absolute mantra. Our job on an event day is to provide support to whoever needs it, even if we don’t feel like it. And we want to do that graciously and without making them feel like a burden. If one of our vendors drops the ball it isn’t our job to call them out, to yell or reprimand them. It is our job to ask, “How can I help you solve this problem?”

This priority has come back to provide us with so many benefits. Vendors who we’ve helped in the past don’t hesitate when we need something or when we mess up. When we need a deal for a client we love, they are there to make it happen. They know they can depend on us, so they are there to support right back. Sure, this might be partially because we are organized and good at our jobs, but I’m willing to bet it has even more to do with the fact that we make sure to always be nice.

Following those two principles has, undoubtedly, helped me to grown the business to where it is today. A huge majority of our business is referrals from other businesses and from being on preferred vendor lists.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kosievents.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kosievents (@kosievents)
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kosieventsllc/ (@kosieventsllc)

Image Credits
The Foxes Photography Angela Hays Photography Skywater Photo + Film Kimberly Crist Photography Amanda Matilda Photography