We recently connected with Cecilia Claudio-Torres and have shared our conversation below.

Cecilia, appreciate you joining us today. Has Covid resulted in any major changes to your business model?

The event and wedding planning business took a serious hit during the pandemic. A lot of weddings postponed multiple times, some were canceled. Many vendors, especially those with perishable products like food and flowers closed their doors, some temporarily and others permanently. In our case, we worked with our customers to either revamp their wedding event to a mini-moon (our pivot moment!) or to honor the contract in good faith and help them re-plan their weddings when things were better.

A mini-moon package is a wedding planning package that we designed for small weddings (50 guests or less), had to be held outdoors, taking all Covid precautions of social distancing, masks wearing at all times, once small gatherings were permitted. It allowed alot of our clients to keep their original wedding dates and be able to celebrate, albeit in a smaller scale, their weddings. Because we use small, local vendors and many of them were onboard with how we designed the package, it also helped our vendors during Covid.

Thanks to our pivot moment, the mini-moon package is now a standard package that we offer, for small weddings, indoor-outdoor, and only using local venues and vendors. We still have clients who want the traditional weddings, but a lot of our clients are leaning towards those mini-moon packages because its more intimate, its budget friendly, and they like that we really honor those relationships with the local community.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I entered this industry by pure luck. I worked in a management position at a local bridal shop when one of our clients called because nobody could bustle the train of her dress. I clocked out for lunch, headed to her venue, helped bustle the dress, and the dad gave me a $100 bill. I told him I didn’t need to get tip and he told me that I had performed a fluff service. No idea at the time what that was, but quickly learned that it was an actual job of helping a bride on her wedding day get dressed, steam her dress, etc. From there, I started getting more calls to do fluff services until one day while helping a bride, her coordinator never showed. So, I grabbed her timeline and stepped in to help. When a friend of mine asked if I would plan her entire wedding, I asked my best friend if she would help me. Five days after that wedding, my best friend and I joined forces, LLC’d the business, and we’ve been co-owners of Elegant Evening Events for almost six years now.

Elegant Evening Events is a wedding and event planning and coordinating company. We are a veteran-owned (Maria, my business partner and bff is an Army veteran), a women-owned, and minority owned business (we are both hispanic). We offer planning and coordinating services, officiant services, and more for both weddings, corporate events, non-profits, and more.

We like to think of ourselves as fairy godmothers, taking away all the stress from our clients when it comes to planning their events. You will always get both Maria and I on the day of your event, we don’t have a time limit as to how long we are there, we are the first ones there and the last ones there.

What I’m most proud of is that Maria and I give a personalized service to our clients and that for us, it’s about the relationships we are building between our clients, our vendors, and us. The big day doesn’t happen without everyone who is involved and that means creating those working relationships that will make our client’s day a special one.

How’d you meet your business partner?

When I met Maria, I was working in a management position at a local bridal shop and she was one of our customer service staff. I knew that there was more to her that met the eye and help to train her so that she could transfer to the sales floor. She is smart, creative, hard-working, and has an eye for knowing how to turn the vision of the client into a reality. We became really good friends and that friendship evolved into best friends. When I was asked to plan a full wedding, I asked her to help me and she didn’t hesitate. And if she did, she didn’t tell me, lol. When the wedding was done, we decided to turn this adventure into an actual business and we LLC’d it 5 days after the wedding.

This business is a success in a huge part because of who she is and what she has always brought to the table and I’m grateful to have such an amazing human being as a business partner and best friend.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

With us, what you see is what you get. We are both hard workers, we value the connections that we make with our vendors and our clients, and for us, it’s not just networking, it’s truly making those relationships with the vendors that respect our mission, respect what we stand for, and deliver quality work. We’ve been very lucky that even though our business is only 6 years old, we’ve been in the event business in different aspects for years, so our vendors know who we are.

Delivering events to our clients that are exactly what they envision, within the budget they set, with quality vendors is what we do and what we are known for.

Contact Info:

• Website: eleganteveningevents.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/eleganteveningevents
• Facebook: facebook.com/eleganteveningevents
• Other: tik tok: tiktok.com/elegant_evening_events

Image Credits
All pictures are Elegant Evening Event Pictures