Tampa Bay Times Feature!

A month back we partnered with Ryan Joseph of R.Joseph Photographics to produce a photo shoot with the intentions of the photos being used for our new website (still a work in progress and we can't wait to share!).

The location selected was the gorgeous, Lange Farm in Dade City, FL. The missing piece needed was models to help complete all of the photo shoot elements. This past Sunday, we were featured in an article for the Tampa Bay Times with the unique story of how the photo shoot came together and how a random idea turned into one of the most perfect days!

This is the story, of how our website photo shoot turned into one of the most important days of my dear friend's lives. We hope you enjoy and can't wait for you to see the final product on our website.

Click HERE to read the story!

XO - Zoë

A Little Friday Advice!

TGIF! As the week comes to end and Brides and clients everywhere get prepared to embark on the biggest day of their lives (or just have a fabulous celebration), it's important to remember, this is suppose to be a fun day and regardless, everything will come together.

Planning a party or a wedding can bring a tsunami of emotions filled with stress, family drama, or all of the above. You've planned for hours, days, weeks and sometimes years. But the best piece of advice we can give is to hire professionals that give you piece of mind. Vendors that allow you to feel, that at the end of the day, they have your best intentions in mind and are going to take care of you.

We always tell any client, with a Saturday event, make sure you have ALL of your ducks in a row no later than the Wednesday before. That will allow you the rest of the week to simply enjoy yourself.

So today, have a glass of champagne and relax. Enjoy yourself and family and friends that might be in town to celebrate your spectacular occasion. And if you have a moment that causes stress, take a deep breath and remind yourself, it's all going to work out in the end!

Xo - Zoë

P.S. Fun fact, the second picture is of our very own Jess Stephens on her wedding day! :) Courtesy of Sargeant Studios.

Wedding Sneak Peek! Dawn and Gavin!

It's a given we love weddings, but weddings that are unique and filled with details that are personal to the couple, we love them even more!

The January wedding of Dawn and Gavin at The House of Blues in Orlando, FL was such a fun and detailed wedding - the venue itself was such a unique twist on a traditional wedding location.

Dawn and Gavin embraced the venue and incorporated it throughout their entire wedding. From custom save the date posters inspired music concert posters to their ceremony programs that hung from lanyards inspired by back stage passes.

The venue itself was a myriad full of bright and beautiful colors. As a result, we made sure to bring that in through the floral. We used a combination of hot pink, bright orange, yellow and chartreuse greens, including gerber a daisies, alstromeria, billy balls, etc. The one request was to create some impact throughout the venue and to give them more bang for their buck, we created floral spheres on glass elevations of all baby's breath. As we typically are not spokespeople for baby's breath, in this instance, it was a perfect fit with the other elements we had taking place.

We are OBSESSED with the picture of Dawn's bouquet! Isn't it gorgeous? Sorry, yes that was us tooting our own horn. ;) We used such a bright color palete throughout, we brought touches of color into Dawn's bouquet. We used, ivory hydrangeas, dusty miller, orange roses, yellow billy balls, white hyacinth, and white tulips.

We hope you enjoy these images shared by the fabulous Jason Mize of J. Mize Photography. He captured their day and details perfectly! Thank you Jason for sharing such beautiful images. Click HERE to see more!

And of course, how could an event take place without the direction of an amazing planner? Mrs. Anna Richardson of Lucia Paul Design was in charge of the coordination and design of Dawn and Gavin's wedding and we don't think this event could have been more fun and perfect!

Happy Wednesday!

xo- Zoë

St. Patrick's Day Inspiration

With St. Patrick's Day upon us, (yes it is somehow almost the middle of March) we thought it might be fun to share a little green inspiration. In our eyes, the only thing that we feel is acceptable to be dyed green on St. Patrick's Day is Beer and the Savannah River. But unfortunately, grocery stores alike feel it necessary to dye flowers! For those of you that know us well, dyed flowers is one thing we stand completely firm on and do not allow our clients to do.

With that being said, we thought we'd share some natural, beautiful green flowers, followed by what the fake ones look like, so when you're shopping for your St. Patrick's Day party decor, you don't get fooled by the dyed ones! 

These fun, NATURAL green flowers above would be perfect for any St. Patty's Fete and include (from top to bottom, left to right), green artichokes, bells of Ireland, fuji mums, cymbidium orchids, hydrangeas,  trachelium, hypericum berries, lady slipper orchids, dendrobium orchids, green eyed roses and super green orchids.

And then of course, below are the green dyed flowers that we highly recommend you stay far, far away from!

Lastly, some St. Patty's party and home decor inspiration that will make you green with envy! 

Xo - Zoë

Our New Home

Hi Friends,

Yes I've been blogging MIA again, my apologies! Today I wanted to share just a snippet of images of our new studio! To see the rest of it, you just have to come to it in person. ;)

We're very excited about our new space, the extra square footage was needed for years, so it's wonderful to finally have it and be here.

Future and current clients and planners, you'll notice when your consultation appointment is confirmed by Jess, she is directing you to the orange door and asking that you ring the door bell. Since our new studio is larger, it takes us just a couple of minutes to get to the client side.

So what's next? We are currently in the process of updating our website - it's going to be a complete redesign with the addition of Botanica's luxury event brand, Ian Prosser Productions. You'll see new photos, new text sections and the website overall will just be that much more awesome! So stay tuned!

We'll follow up next week with more posts and promise to stick to the three day a week minimum. :)

A HUGE thank you to Amy Pezzicara of Pezz Photo for these and many other, beautiful images.

Happy Thursday!

Xo-Zoë

Wedding Wednesday with Grace Ormonde!

What a better way to celebrate the middle of the week and leap day with a wedding feature on Grace Ormonde of Grace Ormonde Wedding Style Magazine's Blog!

We were thrilled to be a part of Annika and Matt's Stunning April wedding.  With her modern and sophisticated look of her white and slate color scheme, with the the touches of the natural elements like the moss and rocks - we couldn't be more in love with this wedding!

For the tablescapes we paired phalenopsis orchid plants with manzenita trees that sat on top of moss runners accented with blooms and natural rocks - creating a simple and understated yet, fabulous look!

We hope you enjoy! Click HERE to view the feature!

XO-Zoë

Our Big Reveal and What It Means to Zoë!

Since our big reveal and the posting of the video with Ian, I personally have had a lot of questions about what that means for me. (Zoë) Since we have a large following of clients, friends and vendors on our blog, I figured I'd just start from the beginning.

As some of you might or might not know, for the past 5 years, I have had my own wedding planning business on the side that I run completely separate from Botanica, Zoë Gallina Event Styling + Coordination. Most Botanica clients that are reading this didn't know I did planning on the side, but to avoid a conflict of interest, this information was never shared - unless you were referred by an outside source. With the announcement of my new position at Botanica many of you have asked, what does this mean for your planning business? The answer, as of May 12th, 2012 I will have completed my last wedding as a wedding planner and will no longer be offering this service. But as always, will be happy to refer you to some of our favorite and fabulous planners in the area! :)

Why? As much as I absolutely love and adore wedding planning, Botanica will always have the number one place in my heart. My business was incredibly successful, but as it continued to grow and as Botanica continues to grow on a daily basis, I came to a point where a decision had to be made of which one to choose. A turning point in my life, but the more I explored different ideas, the thought of not waking up every day and going to Botanica and working with some of the most amazing staff, let alone not working with my parents everyday, was just not something I wanted to even imagine doing. I got so emotional thinking about it, which led to me knowing exactly what my heart wanted to do.

Now what? With the creation of Ian Prosser Productions, you will start to see a transition with Botanica, Ian will oversee the luxury division of Botanica (IPP as we call it) and I will be the new Ian of Botanica. This will allow for clients to either meet with myself or Ian - affording us slightly more flexibility when it comes to scheduling, and assisting in accomplishing our goal of getting proposals out even sooner.

What next? We've already started the transition, I've been meeting with clients for over a month and absolutely love getting more involved in the design process of a client's big day! Our next goal is a new website. This will most likely take a couple of months to accomplish and perfect, but we're already on our way and we can't WAIT to share the finished product. We're planning on making everything just more fabulous!

We couldn't be more excited about all the amazing things we have going on in the works. I couldn't be more thrilled to be at the helm of everything, loving the opportunity to be more involved in the design aspects of Botanica and creating my own unique twist on this fabulous company. I invite each of you to join us on this journey! Stay tuned!!

XO - Zoë