Designing big days

Dream job

Zhang Liuyi became a wedding planner after hearing about the ceremony for Taiwan pop star Nicky Wu and Chinese mainland actress Liu Shishi in Bali in March 2016.

"Fresh flowers were shipped in. A whole team worked on the ceremony," she recalls.

"I thought it sounded fun."

She previously worked in a county-level agriculture bureau, mostly to please her mother.

"But I felt desperate during the first three months. The routine was boring. I envisioned spending my whole life there."

She quit her job and used her bonus to study at the vocational institute. She didn't tell her parents.

Zhang learned how to select suits and dresses. She visited high-end stores, attended weddings and she even worked as an unpaid intern.

She now works for a wedding-service company in Zhejiang province's capital, Hangzhou.

She signed her first wedding contract early last month.

"My parents accept that I've become a wedding planner. They know my decision wasn't impulsive," she says. "I didn't explain much. They agree because they see I'm happy."

Zhang will fight her first "battle" as "chief planner" following the recent Spring Festival, after working as an assistant.

She's nervous, she says, because she has seen how things can go wrong. One time, she joined a team to organize a wedding in a restaurant and found the stage was too large and the ceiling was too high.

"It took a long time to decorate. We had to order more materials, and I had to make it appear less messy," she recalls.

"There are frustrations, such as when clients ask for weddings that are beyond their budgets or when restaurants complain that we take too long to clean up afterward.

"You need true passion, or you'll often want to quit, but I'm happy when our efforts pay off and we finally see the lovers on the stage with beautiful smiles."