Creative Concepts by Lisa — Local services in Hamden

As soon as the first check was cashed, we received a verbose email from Lisa with a tone of reprimand outlining the restrictions of her availability, times and means of communication. We were gobsmacked, as we only ever used email for communication throughout the entire six-month process; however; we were instructed not to text/call, except during very specific windows of her availability. When I stated our unavailability (only ever due to work and work travel), she blasted us with emails. Lisa made a point of stating that she receives NO MONEY from any of the vendors, and that they are very lucky to be on her preferred vendor list. She insisted, “I remind them often that they can be deleted from my list as easily as they can be added.” Upon signing the first vendor contract, we became privy to the fact that Lisa does receive her cut from each vendor. Other than her lack of transparency, there are two specific areas of weakness and deficit to be addressed: communication skills, and ability to create and work to adhere to a budget. Her emails were extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to follow, requiring several readings to understand. We received incoherent ramblings without grammar or punctuation. Lisa is incapable of anything pertaining to “budget,” and we had to beg and plead to get her to do any work on it. When she finally sent the initial cost spreadsheet, it contained many line items just indicating “TBD.” For example, cake. When I asked Lisa directly for a ball park estimate on the cake (she knew the exact cake we were getting), her reply was, “I have no idea.” If she has been planning weddings for 16 years and she works directly with this particular baker regularly (a personal friend of hers), she should be able to give us a ballpark estimate on the spot. I asked about gratuities, wanting guidelines and for them to be included in the budget. She replied to me in email by pasting the dictionary definition of the word “gratuity.” When we were not getting anywhere with establishing a baseline number, I finally did some research and sent her an email with what I found, indicating that the average wedding in CT for 50 guests costs about $30,000. She immediately retorted, “well, it’s not. It’s $65,000!” Why could she not tell us that in the first place? She did absolutely nothing with the florist until two months out, insisting “not to worry. I work with them all the time. They have you on their calendar. You’re locked in.” We were also given no choice of florist. She told us we had to use this specific florist because all of the other ones already “had their books closed out for the rest of the year.” I finally became insistent that we have something in writing from them (the only vendor with whom we still had no contract and to whom we had not paid a deposit). Two weeks later, she finally sent us an email indicating the person with whom she had been working all these years at the florist had left, and now just the owner was there and she was going to have to be working directly with him, and he was not as knowledgeable as the worker who was no longer there. The very first thing we mentioned in our initial meeting with Lisa was that a Spanish/English bilingual DJ and music were the most important components of this wedding. Finding such a DJ proved to be impossible. Lisa did tell us she had concerns from the initial meeting. We settled on a DJ after we had an initial Zoom meeting, but he turned out to be a total failure. While Lisa had not worked with this company before, she and Traci (her “associate planner” who was the lead on our wedding day) most certainly did still have a responsibility to attempt to get the situation under control when it became evident that there were problems and that things were going sideways. Traci should have been doing more throughout the wedding to get/keep him on track rather than standing on the sidelines and allowing it to happen. Traci was too timid, and really needed to take the bull by the horns and call...

Hire Lisa! We are true show queens and we wanted to make sure our wedding was a true celebration of love and musical theater. Finding Lisa Antonecchia of Creative Concepts by Lisa was the only way our crazy vision for a wedding ever came together. We had signed with our venue about 3 months before first meeting Lisa. It was beautiful. We were so excited. And the venue, while staffed with wonderful people that are easy to deal with, provides nothing to its renters. Every chair, table, speaker, microphone, lighting instrument (and the list goes on and on) had to be brought in. Lisa did everything, from serving as a liaison with each of the vendors, to recommending and guiding choices where our lack of wedding planning experience left us uncertain. And when we would make adjustments to original invoices or proposals, Lisa clearly communicated to each vendor what the changes were. We don't live in the same state as our venue, and had to trust Lisa and the vendors to build the event we had dreamed. Lisa and her team delivered 200%. When our Uber arrived on the morning of the wedding, we could see the fullest and most beautiful execution of our months and months of planning, e-mailing, phone calls, and, let's face it, frustration. We knew immediately it was going to be a better day than we could have ever hoped. So, yes, Lisa did all of these things and it was amazing. But on TOP of it, our wedding featured a lot of live performances including: a huge processional/opening number, a 10-song cabaret during Cocktail Hour (featuring friends from all over the country), a sing-along during dinner, live drag performance, a pianist, and a piano bar/open mic after party. Lisa, in this way had to become a director and stage manager for the entire event (a 9-hour event, not including the 5-hour load-in that Lisa organized before guests arrived) and we rightfully credited her as such in our wedding program. You can imagine that all of these moving pieces needed to be executed seamlessly, transition within minutes, and keep the energy pumping. Lisa and her team were perfection throughout the day. Family and friends stopped throughout the wedding to tell us what a great time they were having and to marvel at how perfectly Lisa managed the entire 9-hour day that was always transforming into something else: a ceremony to a cocktail reception, a reception to a cabaret, a cabaret to a dance party, dancing to dinner, dinner to a sing-along, and so on and so on. Okay, final thing. As we got into the weeks before the wedding, Lisa kept urging us to step back, promising us that she had our backs. We knew this the entire time, but it's hard to let go when something is so important and the most personal expression of your love. However, Lisa was so concerned that we had become so stressed out that she booked herself a hotel room for the night before the wedding so she could be at our Welcome Reception to help us troubleshoot any questions that came up. Lisa is a rockstar. She lets your ideas be at the center of your day while gently advising you all along. She becomes your friend and family and you know you're in the best possible hands. We can't imagine why people choose to be wedding planners. They are putting themselves in the middle of one of the most costly, stressful, personal events in a couple's life. Regardless, we are super fortunate that Lisa made that choice. Our day was perfect; we hope yours...

LISA IS THE BEST! Hands down. Aside from getting married to our best friends and the loves of our lives, Lisa was the best decision we could have ever made when it came to planning our dream wedding. She exceeded all of our expectations and our guests were incredibly impressed with every detail of our special day and how seamlessly Lisa and her team executed such a magical event. We (Kelly and Drew, the bride and groom) were living in separate states (halfway across the country from each other) and were planning Kelly’s move (and sale of house) to finally be together with Drew in Michigan, all while also working stressful full-time jobs when we attempted to start planning our wedding. We decided to have our wedding in CT at the Madison Beach Hotel because it was close enough for the majority of our families and friends to drive to, and we knew as soon as we saw it that it was the perfect venue for our dream beach wedding. We knew we were in great hands with MBH. When we received their package of paperwork to complete regarding our vendors and our choices and timelines of anything and everything that could possibly covered about our wedding crammed into a 50 page worksheet... double sided..., we began to understand the reality of how much work goes into planning a wedding. After acquiring a couple more vendors and feeling the need to inundate Madison Beach Hotel’s event team with questions either from ourselves, or from our vendors (-to which we rarely knew the correct answers), we felt overwhelmed about getting our planning done and being able to plan and execute our dream wedding when we had no clue what we were doing! We started to look into wedding planners, and we were unable to feel that any of the ones we saw would actually be able to help us with our unique bride and groom location circumstances. Just as we were about to give up, we asked Madison Beach Hotel to refer someone to us and they mentioned Lisa. We immediately met with her because the way MBH spoke of her gave us a really positive and optimistic feeling. As soon as we met her, we felt like she was family. She made everything immediately feel like an awesome and fun celebration for us rather than a dream day that requires a giant months-long stressful undertaking prior to coordinate. We had a blast while working with Lisa. She is a great person to talk to and sort out ideas with while also a perfect person to chat with about anything if you need to smile. She was able to give us inspiration and help us come up with the visual product of what our imaginations allowed for us to describe as our dreams. She helped us figure out how to make it so US! Our wedding party also fell in love with her and loved working with her. One of the bridesmaids is even hiring Lisa for her wedding next year! Almost every single guest at or after our wedding has complimented us on how amazing our wedding was. They were so impressed by Lisa’s ceremony that she performed for us as Justice of the Peace, by the way our wedding was perfectly US, thanks to all of the planning- even the little details that Lisa helped to coordinate for us and make our dreams into a reality. We would never have been able to create on our own what Lisa and her team were able to do for us. We will never forget how magical our special day was and we still want to take Lisa back to Michigan with us!! She was the best decision we made about planning our...