Ali Phillips married her husband in a morning ceremony at her church, the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, 20 years ago in August. She planned a semi-traditional wedding with her mom, making sure to balance English and Scottish heritage with modernity. Her husband wore a traditional morning suit that ends at the knee with a tail that represents their heritage.
Phillips is a hard-working woman that is full of life and laughter, making anyone she meets feel welcomed by her bright smile and hazel eyes. That day, her smile was illuminated by the white wedding dress she wore, which had a square neckline that allowed her blonde hair to fall naturally underneath a veil.
After they said their vows and walked down the aisle, the newlyweds and 100 loved ones were planning to head to a luncheon at Salvatore’s in Lincoln Park when they noticed something was missing – the limo.
The driver was parked across the street. As Phillips was calling the driver, who kept saying he was in front of the church, she was searching for the limo in the street. It turns out that he was actually across the street next to the Westin hotel, a block east from the church. After they figured out where he was parked, the Phillips walked over to the limo, got in and headed a little late to their luncheon.
But even though they had to deal with the timing setback, the situation caused an interesting event to happen at the airport while they were heading to Tahiti for their honeymoon. A couple had seen the newlyweds waiting for the limo at the corner outside of the church and recognized them at the airport. “They were like, ‘oh my God, did you get married yesterday on Michigan Avenue?’ ... We were flying to Los Angeles to go to Tahiti and [the couple] had seen us come out of the church in the morning. And they were like, we were right there when you came out. So that was very special,” Phillips says.
Now, 20 years later, Phillips has continued planning weddings through her business Engaging Events by Ali, where she specializes in Chicago, destination and South Asian weddings.Everything is mostly online for Engaging Events (besides the wedding, of course). Phillips’ team works online with shared documents of check-lists and notes to make sure everyone is on the same page. Unless you’re lucky enough to meet this vibrant entrepreneur in-person to plan your wedding, then you’ll likely meet with Phillips on Zoom.
She has her laptop set up in her kitchen, steps away from where she can refill her coffee mug. She has on a casual outfit and glasses; it looks like she’ll be spending the day online working on planning a wedding. Like how she converses with her team over the computer, we discuss her journey of being a wedding planner.
Originally, Phillips didn’t start in the wedding planning business. She worked in the logistics industry, specifically with one company for eight years. It wasn’t until that company was bought out by a big competitor that Phillips decided to change careers.
An opportunity arose to own a transportation company. “I kind of got that fever of like, wow, being an entrepreneur can be great. You know, I like learning about being my own boss,” Phillips says. However, the idea fell through, so she started attending women networking and entrepreneurial luncheons. At one event, she sat next to a wedding planner and struck up a conversation. “She was a woman that worked in the suburbs and had a small business. And we just started talking and she said, ‘you know, I need someone to help me this summer who’s kind of logistically minded and oriented and sort of customer service related,’” she says.
“I didn’t dream of being a wedding planner,” Phillips says. “I dreamed of being a female entrepreneur, business owner and being my own boss.”
This woman, as Phillips calls her ‘mentor,’ wasn’t focusing on downtown Chicago weddings, so Phillips had the idea to start her own business that included local weddings since she lives in the city. And with no websites, TikToks or Zoom seminars on how to market your business, Phillips put up an open sign and learned from there. “Obviously, the industry has changed so much over the years. I mean, at that point, it was like old school – going out and meeting people and having coffee dates and stuff like that,” she says.
During Engaging Events’ first years, she took on any weddings she could get since her business was just beginning. But after that, as her reputation grew, she was able to build out from Chicago weddings to the destination market, and then into the South Asian market, where those clients are mainly Indian, Pakistani and Muslim.
Most years, more than half of the weddings Phillips plans are South Asian and Indian weddings, which for some are also destination weddings. “We do everything, but for some reason the last couple of years, I found that our really big, in-depth weddings are these larger, sort of four-day Indian events. But we do everything, we don’t specialize in one thing,” Phillips says.
On Engaging Event’s website, they have shared details and pictures from weddings within recent years. One wedding is Hemali and Pavan’s, held in the Morgan Manufacturing building in Chicago’s West Loop. They had an Indian wedding that was “a celebration of love, culture, color and fun,” the website says. They chose this location for the industrial and rustic feel that represents Chicago, where they are both from.
The culture and color came from the outfits and the decor. The bride was wearing a sari, a cotton or silk garment that is full of color, which is worn by draping it around her body. Her sari was gold, orange, blue and had touches of red (a tradition wedding sari is red). The groom wore a blue tuxedo. The reception was filled with pinks, yellows and blues as well as natural herbs and plants on the tables.
There was Indian and international cuisines, a donut station and an extended cocktail hour (as to not rush the guests). During this cocktail hour there was a magician, and a caricature artist gave out paintings as the party favor. “The bride and groom love ‘90s hip hop, so we began with Bollywood and fun dance music,” Phillips says on her website. As to not scare older couples, there was an after-party in another room that had late night snacks.
“There’s always a first for things, right? Your first Indian wedding, your first wedding that you do out of the country,” Phillips says. The destination market is intertwined, as planners from one country can be contracted to help planners from another country. Phillips helped a friend, a top planner in Costa Rica, for a large event 10 years ago. The reason behind this is not only to give help if they’re familiar with the venue and area, but also in case a planner doesn’t speak the same language as the couple.
And Google is a great place for planners and couples alike to find help in creating a wedding. “When you google ‘South Asian event planner,’ I come up as well, just because we’ve done so many events and have them featured. So it kind of just hits the algorithms,” Phillips says.
Other than Google, websites like The Knot helps couples find planners based on reviews. On this website, Promiti P says that Engaging Events planned her wedding exactly how she wanted. The wedding was four days with 200 guests, but Phillips took care of every detail during the 10-month planning process, Promiti says. “She was more knowledgeable of Indian/Bengali weddings than I was and managed everything (and everyone) with the stern-but-very-polite attitude you need from your planner,” she says.
Within a year, Engaging Events takes on 12 to 15 weddings. She typically doesn’t plan more than 13 weddings because she does full planning, which is an overall boutique experience that takes a lot of energy. They do have contractors aiding in assistance, but even with that help Phillips doesn’t take on more than one wedding a day.
It’s important to Phillips to not have a large team in her business and instead focuses on what she can do. “I have friends in the industry that have, you know, four or five planners out all the months. I have chosen not to do that. It was a shift in our business. We did it, and then I just didn’t love it. I like having the control of having that curated Ali Phillips event and experience,” she says.
This experience starts with Phillips sitting down, preparing herself to make sure that the wedding date, like a deadline for her, can’t be pushed. She creates a master to-do list, and works with the clients to show exactly every little thing that will be accomplished per month. They first start with the budget and work from there. “Obviously it can ebb and flow, go up and down,” she says.
Phillips starts by hiring vendors to create a team based on what the couple wants. With the vendors ticked off her list, she focuses on the design elements. “We’re talking about design, reviewing design, looking at flowers, linens, lights, and how that all fits together to create that amazing wedding,” she says.
Closer to the wedding, Phillips creates a schedule of what vendors are loading into the venue at what time. Some venues are smaller than others, so she has to make sure that each vendor has enough time and space to unload.
And finally, they get into the last production choices of planning, where the entrance song is picked, the first dance song is chosen and the seating arrangements are set. When a couple is struggling to agree on a song or choosing appetizers for the meal, Phillips steps in by giving them pros and cons to each choice.
Picking a favorite wedding is like picking a favorite child for Phillips. Even though it depends on the experience with the venue, vendors and personalities of the couple, she loves any wedding that feels magical (and most of the time, they all are).
One such wedding featured five events in five days in Zihautanejo, Mexico. Organizing a wedding in a different country and culture can be difficult, but Phillips speaks Spanish and was able to take on this large event. “We took a property that had never done a big wedding and, by building floors and tents and all the things, it was logistically really challenging,” she says. “For me, that was awesome because I love being able to look at a beach with palapas on it and say, let’s remove the palapas, let’s do this, and like completely transform the space and have the client completely trust you to do it.”
For this wedding, she had to outsource help from Acapulco, Mexico, to build on the land. It took 52 people and over a week to finish putting the wedding together. “You kind of look at it like, is it gonna all come together?,” Phillips says.
Videos of cakes falling down as it's being wheeled to the couple, and even brides passing out, have been going viral for years. But when these moments happen at her weddings, Phillips remains steady. “For me, when those things happen, it’s just remaining absolutely so calm,” she says, adding that when something does go wrong, she wants her employees to tell her with a smile on their face. This helps combat any suspicions from the guests.“
There’s always a solution,” she says.She uses her naturally relaxing tone and charisma to make the guests calm while presenting the issue with multiple solutions. “For me, it’s just staying positive and presenting, and just being very honest and open with our clients. Because there’s no such thing as perfect,” she says.
One example was when an officiant was stuck in traffic and therefore late to a wedding on the University of Chicago campus due to an accident on a highway. To make sure this didn’t stop the wedding, Phillips asked around if anyone was ordained, and in the end they were able to get someone to officiate the wedding. After that, Phillips made sure to be ordained, just incase. “At the end of the day, they’re still going to be married. It’s gonna be a memory as part of their day, so they can always giggle about it.”
Even though COVID put a stop to a lot of things, of course including weddings, Phillips found the silver lining. Being able to spend even more time with her clients that were supposed to get married during COVID and are now rescheduling those plans with her, is something special. “That to me was very rewarding, when those people actually got to get married, she says. “Because you’ve been with them for so long and been through so many tears, and been through the not knowing when we will be able to do the event.”
Engaging Events had switched to remote work before the pandemic. In the office, coworkers were going in and out on a daily basis, so Phillips (along with her “not an office hours” attitude) decided to keep everything online. “We’re all very connected. Nothing for me changed with that,” she says. “For me, having an office became sort of something financially that our accountant looked at and was like, it’s not worth it,” adding that recently she spent seven weeks abroad because she is able to do her job anywhere that has internet.
They were even using telecommunication services like Skype more than a decade before the pandemic hit and didn’t experience that big change to Zoom. “With all my international people that we talk to, you know Zoom is very popular now, but I giggle because I was using these formats you know 15 years ago, before Zoom, before COVID happened,” she says.
Engaging Event’s usual wedding season is October, but Phillips noticed that last year, they had three weddings in December, which she says never happens. “You know, people, when COVID went away, people were booking venues, [it] was so busy that people were just taking different dates, whether they were getting married on a Friday or a Sunday, instead of a Saturday. Or getting married in the season because venues were a little more available,” she says. Phillips also noticed that couples also came out of COVID differently, and instead were wanting to plan a wedding within four to six months. “We planned a major, 250-person Indian wedding in Mexico in November in under five months,” she says. Their usual wedding planning takes seven to 14 months.
But back home, Chicago is reopening. She started the Illinois Events Coalition with two friends in the wedding industry to help keep track of COVID rules. “One thing I noticed during that is that the group, the industry, really banded together to support one another. And I feel honored to have been the person to help people navigate,” she says. They even worked with Senator Dick Durbin’s and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s offices to help put guidelines together.
Phillips also runs women’s retreats that allows women to “celebrate the light that they have inside and branch out and reach out, and just be the best woman that they can be.” After a short halt on the retreats, this year they picked the event back up in Mexico.
This past year, the Phillips renewed their vows in Scotland for their 20 year anniversary. Most of the time, her husband is alone on the weekends when Phillips is traveling for weddings. “But for our very big, large weddings, he actually does join the team. He’s kind of our head of logistics and, I don’t know, calmness,” Phillips says.
“We’ve done just under 500 events. And you know, we keep a list of every single one of them,” she says. “I just did a wedding the other day where I did both sister’s weddings, you know, 13 and 14 years ago. There I met their kids and they’re like, this is Ali, they planned mommy and daddy’s wedding. And you know, it’s such an amazing career. And as a female business owner, I’m very proud of the friendships that I’ve made in this industry and the amazing artists and artisans and entrepreneurs that pour their heart and soul into what they do.”