Mindy Weiss, Hollywood’s most celebrated wedding planner, is talking about her latest partnership with a sense of excitement most people would reserve for an exclusive deal with, say, the British royal family. Never mind that excitement seems to be Weiss’s default emotion: The fact that she’s debuting a line of wedding-themed Ring Pops — the oversize engagement-style rings whose baguettes aren’t just candy-colored but actual candy — clearly tickles her because it’s so, well, her. “When they told me Bazooka owns Ring Pops, I said, ‘I am Bazooka. I am that person. I understand your whole brand. You don’t have to explain it to me.’ Because Ring Pops are brilliant,” she says.
That’s Weiss in a nutshell: equal parts fun and brilliance, as playful as pink bubblegum and inspired as a live oak carpeted in white roses (one of her inimitable strokes of wedding design genius). That combo — along with her reputation for crazy creativity, and her kind and calming presence — has made her the go-to planner for the likes of Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin, Ellen DeGeneris and Portia De Rossi, and Sacramento Kings point guard Russell Westbrook and his now-wife, Nina, not to mention a gaggle of Kardashians. But while she’s delighted to work with the A list, it’s clear that she’s got an A list of her own, and every couple whose wedding she’s helped to orchestrate is on it.
What she loves most about what she does, she says, “is becoming part of people’s memories. You’re surrounded by people who are happy, so every weekend, there’s something to look forward to.” And it doesn’t matter whether those happy people are today’s It Couple or a couple of unknowns. After virtually every event, she thinks the same thing: “Look what we did!” And really, everybody’s looking, because at a Weiss-designed wedding there’s so much to look at, whether it’s a colorful explosion of boxed grasses dyed in exaggerated harvest hues or an outdoor wedding “pergola” comprising a quartet of olive trees. Weiss says she inherited her penchant for creativity from her parents, who were famous for their “crazy, creative parties — a little daring, a little funny.”
Her entrée into event planning stemmed from another penchant, this one for paper. After her own wedding, she was looking for a way to spend her time, and she found herself hanging out at an LA stationery store called William Ernest Brown, admiring (and buying from) their collection of high-quality paper goods. (“I’m a paper-holic,” she admits.) One day, she simply asked the manager for a job and was hired on the spot. After four years, she and the woman who hired her (who’d since become one of her best friends) started their own invitation business out of Weiss’s home. Sometimes, clients were so impressed with her creations they’d ask her to plan their entire event, but she wasn’t interested. “I didn’t want to work on the weekends,” she says. Then, in the early 1990s, a client she was particularly close to begged Weiss to plan her father’s 75th birthday, and she agreed. “And that one party lit the light bulb,” she says.
From that single event, she got ten more, and she’s been on that exponential trajectory ever since, weekends be damned. For Weiss, inspiration is everywhere, especially at the thrift shops she frequents as an inveterate collector. For Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s wedding, for example, she collected vintage oil paintings and set them up in little cubbies behind the bar. Recently, she did the same thing with botanical prints in gold frames lightly sanded to lend a feeling of long use. “I always like to do something special with the bars,” she says, “because people spend a lot of time at the bar.”
The same thing, of course, is true of the tables. Weiss understands that guests can end up staring at the table, on and off, for up to four hours, so she hunts down interesting vintage vases to hold floral centerpieces and vintage bowls to contain personalized matchbooks. While scouring the shops for a bride-to-be who loved all things vintage, Weiss found a dealer who was selling 20 old bells of varying shapes and sizes. She bought them all and threaded them through the floral centerpieces. “They were just bells,” she says, “but I thought, Wedding bells?”
Fashion shows provide equal inspiration, in part because fashion designers, like Weiss herself, are always looking to the future. “I’ve seen so many things coming from Dior, Chanel, Gucci — all these wonderful designers are helping us for the next season,” she says. A wall of flowers that served as the backdrop for a Dior show inspired a similar flower wall at a recent Weiss designed wedding. And a fashion show for the French designer Jacquemus, who mowed an aisle through a field of lavender in Provence, is now on Weiss’s bulletin board awaiting the perfect event.
Of course, some of her inspiration derives from the Pinterest boards her clients show her, though, she says, “I always try to elevate or change things because I don’t want my clients to have the same event over and over again.” But some clients lack a clear vision of what they’re hoping for, so she asks them to bring in one item — a photograph, say, or a flower — and uses that single item as a jumping-off point for the design of an entire event.
The biggest change she’s seen in weddings over her three decades as a planner has been the increasing importance of wedding fashion. “Back in the day, the only thing my brides might change into was a beautiful little suit,” she says. In the age of Instagram, on the other hand, a bride typically goes through two to three changes of attire, from a gown to a less formal dress for the reception to an even more relaxed outfit for the after party. And long gone are the days when a groom might defer to the bride in the choice of his wedding wear. “We have a whole world of men concerned with what they’re wearing,” Weiss says. In fact, the bride’s outfits, and increasingly the groom’s, also offer inspiration for the wedding design. “I really find it hard to design without seeing the dress,” Weiss says. “It tells the story.”
Sometimes, the destination sets the stage, and Weiss is, in fact, known for her fabulous destination weddings, from Mexico to Morocco and beyond. One of her most exotic destinations was an Indian jungle; for the ceremony, the groom rode in on an elephant. But she notes that destination weddings carry their own set of challenges for a planner. You may not find local vendors who can provide what you need, so you often end up packing suitcases with linens and other wedding accessories— something that doesn’t always pass muster with customs officials, who might suspect you plan on selling them and levy you accordingly. You’re likely to be more challenged by last-minute snafus. “You can’t just call your rental house and say, ‘I need twelve more heaters,’” Weiss notes. And like a performer on tour, you probably won’t get to see much of the place you’re traveling to. “You’re there to do the job,” she says. “You get off the plane, you’re at the location, and you leave when the event is over.” (Perhaps not surprisingly, her favorite wedding destination is the American Riviera, otherwise known as Santa Barbara.)
No matter: Weiss is a seasoned campaigner, and virtually nothing fazes her, including a demand for an elephant (remember that Indian wedding?) on the morning of the ceremony. She learned early on that if she flipped out, everyone around her would do the same. “You do a lot better when everyone trusts you and everyone’s happy,” she says. “So I always stay calm, and it spreads.”
In fact, she thrives on last-minute challenges, like the decision one couple made to turn their engagement party into a 250-guest wedding eight days before the event. “I truly love last minute,” she says, “and in my head, it’s like a game show.” To emphasize the point, she hums the Jeopardy theme. “I literally hear it and go, This is amazing.”
Because not all of us want our big day to feel like a game show appearance thrust upon us without warning, Weiss wrote what’s become something of a wedding planning bible, The Wedding Book (Workman). (She also wrote a companion wedding organizer, The Wedding Planner and Organizer, and two wedding-themed children’s books, Goldie, the Hand-picked Flower Girl and Jack Brings the Rings.) The Wedding Book has received hundreds of five-star reviews and customers have called it “the best resource out there,” “the only book you’ll need to plan a wedding,” and “a lifesaver.”
Five-star reviews are gratifying, of course, but perhaps not as gratifying as the thanks Weiss received for what she calls her “two greatest successes,” the weddings she planned for her sons. The second of those events, for instance, was held just last year, on a Hollywood sound stage she filled whimsically with vintage lampposts and life-sized tree cutouts. “Guests walked in and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Weiss remembers. But her son’s response was the one she treasured most. “He noticed everything — every candy dish, all the printed materials, everything,” she says. “He came up to me and said, ‘This is the best day of my life.’ I love all my clients, but boy, when your own child is blown away, there’s nothing better.” Not even a wedding Ring Pop with your name on it.
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