10 Years of Sicilian Wedding Day: Our Interview with Emma Mell, Co-Founder

Our client Sicilian Wedding Day has been helping couples to tie the knot for 10 years! Celebrating this momentous milestone, our Marketing & Research Officer Joey interviewed Emma Mell, Sicilian Wedding Day Co-Founder and one of wedding plannings most passionate voices.

This piece originally appeared on the Sicilian Wedding Day website.

What is Sicilian Wedding Day?

Sicilian Wedding Day is a wedding planning organisation based here in Sicily, and we specialise in destination weddings – so that’s couples from all around the world who decide to come to Sicily to get married.

How did Sicilian Wedding Day come about?

I moved to Sicily in 2008; my husband is Sicilian. Previously I lived in Edinburgh for 10 years and worked in marketing and comms – not necessarily in the wedding ‘space’, but using all the same skills of event planning.

I actually planned my own wedding in Sicily, that’s how it started. I really enjoyed that process, and was toying with the idea of doing more of it when I had a conversation with my now -business partner, Simona.

Simona is Sicilian, her husband and my husband are friends, that’s how we met. She’d worked in the wedding industry for many years, organising wedding fairs and writing for industry publications. We were sitting on the beach one day and I just asked, ‘would you fancy us starting a wedding planning business?’.

Next thing I knew, we were at the National Wedding Show in London. We had a stand, we were very excited, very hopeful. That was our launch.

Simona and Emma

And now it’s 10 years later, you’ve survived a global pandemic, which was an extremely tough time for the wedding industry – how did you manage that challenge?

The pandemic had a massive impact on us. We had to reorganise weddings in some cases twice, so pushing them back once, and then again. Some couples decided to get married elsewhere, which is understandable, but others stuck with us. It ends up being years that you know people; they become a big part of your life.

Last year, we held the last of our outstanding weddings. This particular couple had been waiting over four years to get married! Giving them the Sicilian wedding they had always dreamed of was absolutely thrilling.

Can you reflect on any key learning experiences that helped get you to where you are today?

One wedding from 2016 in Cefalù comes to mind. We were driving to the venue and had just come off the motorway, when a tolbooth attendant asked us, ‘you know about the wildfires, right?’. As it transpired, the whole of Cefalù was rapidly being surrounded by flames.

We started getting calls from the florist, the musicians, the celebrant – they were all stuck in various locations due to the fires, and as we arrived at the venue, we had none of the things we needed to host the wedding. We immediately began searching for alternative solutions, such as finding a local florist last minute and arranging for the musicians to arrive by sea. I even volunteered myself as the stand-in celebrant.

With a little luck and a lot of wangling, the wedding went ahead exactly as planned, just a few hours late. At the end of it all, the bride and groom, who owned and managed several restaurants in Liverpool, were so impressed with our ability to stay calm under pressure, the bride even said that she had learned a lesson in perseverance!

That was probably the most difficult event, but also one of the most rewarding. It was a long, scorching day, with the distant fanning flames taking the temperature to about 45 degrees Celsius. Truly, a baptism of fire.

Do you still get surprises?

We’ve had everything up to and including the wedding cake being dropped, that’s a fun one.

There’s been plenty of pleasant surprises too. We planned a really exciting wedding in 2018 for a Nigerian couple, which was a whole spectacle of colours and sounds. Culturally, it was completely different to the weddings we plan for our couples from Europe and the USA. Our normal approach went entirely out the window.

Why do you think people come to Sicily to get married?

There are a few different reasons. Geographically, it’s chosen by our clients from the USA and Australia as it’s a convenient central point to meet family and friends coming from all over the world.

There’s also the historic background in terms of emigration. A lot of people want to get married in Sicily because there is an element of Sicily in their family. In fact, we recently planned the wedding of an American couple; the groom had discovered he had a Sicilian relative way back. He visited the village where he knew there was a familial connection, and the locals loved that – they took him in and showed him around, it was really special.

And of course, Sicily is absolutely stunning. It’s known for the beauty of the beaches and towns, and its food and wine. It’s still fairly authentic in that sense. It’s not been too commercialised, as opposed to other wedding hubs such as Lake Como and Tuscany.

Why do people choose you to plan their wedding?

When we ask our couples, they really like the fact that I’m British and Simona is Sicilian. Hence, we understand what couples coming from the UK, Europe, USA and Australia are looking for from their special day. We also understand the specific cultural elements that should be present at a Sicilian wedding, and can have those conversations with Sicilian suppliers.

Are there other wedding planners on the island?

Of course! We’re part of SiWePA, the Sicilian Wedding Planners Association, a group of wedding planners focused on establishing standards of conduct and encouraging professional growth. We share information, resources, and our experiences to guarantee quality for our clients – sadly, there’s a lot of people that do an online course and call themselves wedding planners these days.

Have you noticed any changes in tastes regarding weddings over your 10 years in business?

I’d say social media has had a big impact. Couples are much more educated today about what’s available to them and what they want their wedding to look like. They often come to us with really clear ideas, and our role is to bring them to fruition.

What are you most looking forward to about the next 10 years of Sicilian Wedding Day?

What’s exciting for us is the focus on Sicily at the moment, with it being featured in films and TV shows etc. I hope that that continues and more people decide to come to this magical place.

I’m looking forward to growing and developing the business further, including finding new wedding locations and continuing to meet new clients from all around the world. I believe our destination weddings are about bringing people who have maybe never been here to discover the island, have a true Sicilian experience, and leave knowing they’ll come back. I hope we can create more ‘ambassadors’ for Sicily and everything that’s so wonderful about it as we look to the next 10 years!

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