With so much importance placed on their ‘special day’, Apostolidis says there are generally three types of brides: the nervous person; the control person; and the negative person.
“If they are naturally an anxious person, they will continue to be nervy the whole way through. For this customer it’s about gaining their trust, so this takes constant contact, but it’s a fine line between contact all the time and then spoiling them to the point that it’s detrimental to other clients,” she says.
“What I try and do is manage expectations. I tell them I won’t always be contactable, but I give them my mobile number so they can leave a message and I’ll call back as soon as possible.”
For people who like to be in control and do things themselves, Apostolidis greatest challenge is trying to organise the wedding with the client persisting in making their own bookings or micro-managing.
“Then there is the client you just can’t please. They’re generally very negative and they’re the most difficult client, but on the wedding day they let go and enjoy it. They get to a point where they’ve had so much angst that they just let it go and end up having a great time,” Apostolidis says.
Everyone imagines a perfect wedding, but in reality no one can control everything.
“With weddings, there’s always a problem when people are involved. Cars breakdown and people run late, but it is how you respond to it that makes the difference … You have to turn a negative into a positive.”
Fortunately, Apostolidis has escaped many major catastrophes, but she did have one close call when a client’s dress wasn’t what she ordered.
“She’d chosen her own dressmaker who made her pick it up the night before – that made it too late to do anything about it when she discovered it was the wrong dress,” she says.
“So I asked people who I knew to open up their store and this allowed the client to buy a dress the morning of her wedding.”
Being one of Australia’s leading wedding planners, Apostolidis planned the wedding of singer David Campbell.
“They’re just human beings like all of our clients. They have budgets to stick to and we treat them with respect, forgetting the celebrity persona. If they have press it’s a bit of a different affair, but we try to keep some normality to the event and have a proper celebration.”
In her spare time Apostolidis likes to go dancing and salsa.
“It’s really something which takes my mind away from things. For that hour I completely forget and it just makes me happy. For me, exercise has got to have some kind of fun aspect to it. If I’m going to do something I want to enjoy it.
“I’m also a book worm, I read everything. I love non-fiction and detective novels.”
Looking forward, Apostolidis intends to expand the business.
“I want to have a Nightingales in the major cities, that’s the big target, and I’d also like to write some books. That’s my two-year plan,” she says.
“In all the decisions I involve my husband and I involve my staff when it comes to certain targets we have. It’s not so much the monetary targets, but certain things we want to achieve, for example, if we want to advise the Asian market about our existence. That’s another of our big targets, to increase the visibility of our business in Asia.”
