- Lelian Chew is the founder of The Atelier & Co, a Singapore-based luxury wedding planning company.
- She shares the importance of having weddings steeped in tradition and hearing everyone’s needs.
- Chew doesn’t believe any request is too out there — with enough time and resources.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lelian Chew, a private banker turned luxury wedding planner. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I spent a decade at Goldman Sachs, working in Singapore and Hong Kong managing key relationships by flying to a different Chinese city each day. It became exhausting but gave me insight into the gold standard of ultra-high net worth.
After leaving finance, a former client called to ask where I was moving next, and I told him I was taking a break to plan my wedding.
English wasn’t his first language, so he misunderstood and thought I was starting a wedding planning business. He immediately asked me to help plan his son’s wedding, insisting I take a look since I knew the family well.
So, I flew to Indonesia, where he was based. When I arrived, I was surprised to see seven other wedding planners in the room, as hiring even one professional planner was rare.
Since I was close to the family, I decided to plan the wedding and handle their needs directly, while other planners focused on other aspects of the wedding. This experience opened my eyes to the complexity of orchestrating such an event.
At the wedding, the word got around that I was involved in the planning, and some of my former clients who were there asked if I could plan their children’s weddings, too.
In 2013, I started my events planning business, The Atelier & Co.
1. No such thing as “impossible”
My mantra is that anything is possible with time and resources. This mindset has kept me calm in the face of challenging requests.
An unusual guest request once stumped my team for a wedding on a remote island: He insisted that he wanted to sleep in his bed.
But I didn’t flinch. I just made arrangements for his bed to be transported over.
It is important for us not to judge whether something is necessary for the wedding. Our role is to facilitate and provide solutions to make the request happen.
We had a wedding in the Maldives, which is a beautiful but difficult destination for weddings because we had to ship or fly all our logistics in.
To set up, we loaded cranes and trucks onto an oil tanker, which took 24 hours to transport to the island, and we had multiple tankers, taking a week in total.
2. Finding every couple’s love story
One of the biggest challenges when planning luxury weddings is that everybody wants to be original, the biggest, or the best.
With a small circle of high-net-worth clients, guest lists from weddings often overlap — with some guests being our former clients — adding pressure to make each wedding unique.
So it’s important to ensure each wedding feels distinct from what we’ve done before, down to the decorations, the venue, and the entertainment.
I tend to find inspiration from the bride and groom. Understanding their love story, family dynamics, and priorities helps us design a wedding centered around them.
3. Ensuring everyone has a voice
In terms of the scale of our weddings, I always say that it is almost like marrying two conglomerates, with many nuances in managing the expectations of different family members.
Creating a bride and groom’s dream wedding is always important, but the family often funds the wedding and want their needs heard, too.
Our role is to be objective professionals. I always start by meeting all our stakeholders and ensuring everyone has a voice, even though their opinions might not get incorporated.
Of course, it’s not always possible to have one event that meets the needs of all stakeholders, so it’s not uncommon for us to plan multiple events for our clients, from an intimate family celebration at home to a destination wedding party on an island.
4. Focusing on traditions
Preserving traditions is essential for grandparents and parents, who want to pass down what they grew up with to the next generation.
Many of our elder clients want to see their grandchildren uphold customs they cherish, like family crests and cultural elements. For example, with the Chinese, there’s a tea ceremony that we have to get right because it is a custom that connects Chinese elders to the younger generation.
We want the wedding to reflect their societal status — grand but not overly extravagant, as flaunting wealth is sometimes frowned upon in Asian culture. The goal is to strike the right balance to create an intimate and personal celebration rather than another corporate event.
Do you have a story to share about working with or for high-net-worth individuals? Email this reporter at lwee@insider.com.
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