On a sweltering Saturday afternoon at Labrador Park, wedding planner Sherwin Lee – brows furrowed and iPhone glued to his ear – is in a spot of bother.
“Where is the florist,” he complains, shooing away a swarm of mosquitoes. “She was supposed to be here at noon and what time is it now? 3pm?”
According to the muffled voice on the other line, some miscommunication has occurred and the offending vendor is “stuck somewhere”. He heaves a dramatic sigh: “All these stories and excuses, I’ve heard them before.”
The minutes are ticking by. All the prep work needs to be completed by 5pm, in time for vows to be exchanged between operations manager Hena Yeo, 31, and new media firm boss Ang Chonglai, 34.
After the solemnisation ceremony, a 10-course Chinese dinner will take place under a specially constructed marquee.
Nuptials aside, you are tuned into The Sherwin Lee Show. Calling the shots is the 31-year-old executive director of DoWed, an “experiential weddings” company – as he describes it – that he started four years ago as a creative response to soporific ballroom affairs with cheesy slideshows and unexciting menus.
The boisterous bachelor says: “I hate boring weddings. Cut cake, change gowns, that’s it. I like to do something different each time, no matter what the budget.”
This wedding, which costs about $25,000 for about 200 people, is a simple affair by his standards. His most lavish project to date cost around $100,000. A wealthy Chinese couple had flown him to London to organise a bash at the Ritz-Carlton there.
Wedding planning services, he says, are getting increasingly popular among Singaporeans, many of whom are marrying later and have more money to spend on professionally tailored weddings. Becoming a wedding planner requires no official accreditation.
Mr Lee manages about two to three weddings a month, with consultation fees starting at $3,000. The money gets you his undivided attention and he looks after anything from securing the dinner venue to the couple’s sartorial choices – bow tie, vest or cummerbund?
“I hate the word ‘event’ because it’s so cold and business-like,” he says.
“For me and my clients, it’s about the relationship first. I’ve been told I’m a bad businessman because I don’t base my services on a contract that has been signed. That’s because after nine months to a year, I become the couple’s best friend.”
Amid the flurry of activity, the pint-sized dynamo is instantly recognisable in his oversized black-framed spectacles and slick yet impractical all- black attire.
“It is super hot,” he says, mopping perspiration off his brow. “But as a wedding planner, you must have fashion sense.”
Looking good might be easy but the actual work is not. His mind-boggling checklist includes flowers, cocktails, door gifts, flower girls and the Justice of the Peace, all of which he must ensure are already in place or arriving in time.
About 10 female assistants in dresses and high heels, most of them students from a wedding planning course he runs on the side, respond to his beck and call via walkie-talkie. “You are now my slaves for one day,” he tells them.
Being one of a handful of male wedding planners in an industry dominated by the fairer sex has its pros and cons.
“Sometimes men come in handy,” he says. “Sure, I might not be able to help the bride adjust her gown or her bra. But if the female wedding planner is too pretty, the bride will not like it.
“Having said that, if Tay Ping Hui becomes a wedding planner, the groom will not like it either,” he adds with a guffaw, referring to the actor’s turn as one in a recent Channel 8 drama.
Man or not, he needs all the help he can get. Pulling off today’s occasion, he reveals, will be no mean feat.
Indeed, wedding woes struck two weeks ago when the couple was told that Villa Seafood Galleria, the Chinese restaurant in Labrador Park they had chosen for the wedding banquet, had been shut down by the Building & Construction Authority for being structurally unsafe.
Frantic, the couple made an SOS call to Mr Lee, hiring him at late notice to salvage the situation.
His solution: Move the wedding, with food still catered from the Chinese restaurant, to the adjacent Italian restaurant Olive Ristorante and dress up the outdoor premises with Oriental-style umbrellas to help retain the event’s Chinese flavour.
Both restaurants, incidentally, were opened by Singapore Explorer, a company that went into receivership in February for non-payment of accounts.
“We planned our wedding only three months ago and it was tough on both of us when we were told the restaurant had to be shut down,” says Ms Yeo, a remarkably zen bride, while taking a break in the air-conditioned comfort of the nearby Villa Raintree Spa.
Mr Ang adds: “Without Sherwin, we would not have been able to pull this off as both Hena and I are very busy people. We would not have known how to make an Italian restaurant Chinese.”
Out of earshot, Mr Lee confides: “In my four years in the business, this has been my most disastrous and challenging case because we have only one week to pull something together.”
Because of the late notice, he is working with unfamiliar vendors. Tardy florists and other hiccups are all par for the course. “Usual, this is usual,” he says. “This is not my ‘stressed face’ yet.”
More updates are coming his way through his earpiece: Guests, including the designated flower girls, are stuck in a traffic jam near VivoCity.
There is also the issue of the weather. “We had no time to make a contingency plan. So I am praying it does not rain.” To keep the storm clouds at bay, he places two whole chillies under the stage – an old event-management superstition, he says.
Despite the uncertainties, he is sticking to the golden rule of wedding planning: Never let your clients know if things are going wrong. “It’s their big day. They should think everything is perfect.”
After repeated calls, the florist finally arrives. Meanwhile, Mr Lee and his staff have laid out an array of about 70 decorative waxpaper umbrellas in pink, green, red and blue, leading up to the white wedding tent.
Props like these – the umbrellas were bought from Chinatown – make the ambience come alive. A few days earlier, he visited the MediaCorp prop warehouses at Caldecott Hill to source items for two upcoming themed weddings: one replicating the whimsical world of Alice In Wonderland and the other, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“For Alice In Wonderland, I’m renting a gigantic golden egg for guests to sit in,” he says excitedly.
His eye for aesthetics comes from his diploma in arts management at LaSalle College of the Arts and a desire to “make things look nice”.
Creative blood runs in his family. His brother is in events management and his sister, who doubles as his personal assistant, is a pianist. Their background was humble. His father was constantly ill and his mother was the sole breadwinner, juggling double shifts as a factory worker and hawker.
He says candidly: “I was the disappointment in my family because after I graduated, I did not know what I wanted to do in life.” So he dabbled in corporate sales and event management, and travelled the world looking for inspiration.
He first ventured into the wedding industry as an emcee, before deciding that the job of a planner appealed to the restless soul in him.
“Every job is different, every couple has a different love story. Finally, after so many years of searching, I found something I love to do and I am sure I won’t get tired of it.”
The 2001 romantic comedy The Wedding Planner, starring the glamorous Jennifer Lopez, had something to do with his choice of vocation as well, he confesses.
“But wedding planning is not glamorous. It doesn’t mean you are David Tutera, Preston Bailey or Martha Stewart,” he adds, referring to Hollywood’s party planning triumvirate. “You have to do everything, including cleaning toilets.”
At a recent wedding, he did just that after forgetting to hire cleaners to keep the outdoor loos fresh.
“It was my fault. So I stationed myself there for some time, as a punishment, to clean and hand out towels to the guests. Sorry to say, if your toilet stinks, your whole production sucks, too.”
The toilets are not an issue today. Timing is. With some guests still on the way at 5.30pm, the Justice of the Peace is concerned he will be late for his next solemnisation of the day.
After consulting the couple, the decision is to carry on anyway. Despite the delay, the intimate 20-minute ceremony – attended by close friends and family – goes off without a hitch, with some latecomers trickling in midway.
Pausing to take stock, he says with a smile: “No matter how many times I see this, I still feel moved.
“Signing on the dotted line is a huge commitment that I still cannot understand. I really admire people who make that decision. It takes guts and so I really respect these couples.”
Happy endings like this one keep him going, even if the journey there is sometimes fraught with dramatic twists and turns. Part of his job is dealing with clients, high-strung brides usually, who break down for all sorts of reasons.
“All brides want a perfect wedding. They don’t want to turn into Bridezillas but usually there is some sort of issue they have to deal with,” he says.
One bride who behaved unreasonably all the time revealed, in a fit of tears, that she did so because she felt inferior to her husband’s family. Another would ring him at 2am to ask if she was “making the right decision”.
“You have to be impartial,” he says of the latter predicament. “Sometimes they just want you to listen and not give any advice. But I usually tell them to reflect on the good things.”
While major fights between couples have occurred, he has not encountered any runaway brides or grooms. He says philosophically: “Getting married is possibly the most stressful day of a person’s life. Sometimes people get so caught up in their wedding they forget it’s really about their marriage.”
The sentimentality wears off quickly. Pre-dinner cocktails and macaroons need to be served. Seeing that some guests are not getting their drinks as quickly as they should, he grabs a tray and begins to wait tables as well.
He is disappointed that none of his own staff and students follow his cue. “We are in an actual wedding right now,” he reprimands them later. “If you have to be waiter, receptionist or cleaner, just do it. There is no excuse for standing around. That’s lesson 101.”
He hands over the reins to his sister and personal assistant Sandra. It is time for him to put on his second hat, as emcee for the night.
“Stylish, suave and good-looking,” he jokes, when asked what his emceeing style is. “But seriously, I like to do this something ‘extra’ for the couple by volunteering as emcee.”
Apart from making sure his staff help out with the dinner service, most of his work is done. A swig of beer to loosen his nerves and he is up on stage rallying wedding tributes and “yam sengs” with practised ease.
The chillies work. The weather holds up, something he later celebrates with a feast at the 24-hour Crystal Jade at Holland Village.
“Well, we did it, despite the initial problems,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s not about the location for the couple. It’s about heartwarming things like the fact that their friends and family all came. It is a celebration of love.”
>> A day in the life of a wedding planner
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
