From Martin Short's Franck Eggelhoffer in Father of the Bride to Nathan Lane's Pepper Saltzman on "Modern Family," the wedding-coordinator shtick is about as old as love itself. A highfalutin so-and-so swoops in on the bride and groom to take charge of everything from rose petals to rosé, to comic effect. But when Caitlin Frauton was planning her own wedding, she laughed at the idea of spending a fortune. Her budget was just $18,000 to entertain 165 guests for an entire weekend. Instead of finding inspiration in a feature film or sitcom, she turned to the DIY Network for her light-bulb moment. "In 2012, when we started talking about getting married, the traditional weddings that we'd gone to in the 1980s just didn't resonate with us," says Frauton, who met her groom, Rick, on Match.com. "Still, we were trying to have the nicest wedding we could at the best cost." With some event-planning and fundraising experience under her belt, Frauton decided to coordinate her own nuptials, which were staged at the Joslin Diabetes Center's summer camp in central Massachusetts. As she explains on her website, "I quickly found navigating the wedding industry was a lot more confusing and time-consuming than I realized. As a result, there were lots of 'oops' and 'wish we had known that' moments along the way." Example No. 1: ordering double the number of invitations she needed, not realizing that each household needed just one, not two. Then, two weeks before the big day, Frauton discovered that her catering staff couldn't make the date. With a little elbow grease, however, and a lot of craft brew alongside a buffet of barbecue, she was able to get hitched in September 2013 without a hitch. After that experience, "I decided I wanted to help other couples have amazing weddings," she writes, "minus all the stress." Without a pre-existing business model to follow, Frauton started from the idea of "coaching" couples on staging their own weddings. "But I knew that in order to be an effective coach, my own wedding wasn't enough," she says. "So I started coordinating other weddings." Frauton launched her website — diyweddingmentor.com — in January 2014. In that same year, she racked up professional experience by coordinating some 30 weddings. Frauton works out of her home in Waterbury, where a desk in the corner of her living room serves as Grand Central Station for weddings…
From Martin Short's Franck Eggelhoffer in Father of the Bride to Nathan Lane's Pepper Saltzman on "Modern Family," the wedding-coordinator shtick is about as old as love itself. A highfalutin so-and-so swoops in on the bride and groom to take charge of everything from rose petals to rosé, to comic effect. But when Caitlin Frauton was planning her own wedding, she laughed at the idea of spending a fortune. Her budget was just $18,000 to entertain 165 guests for an entire weekend. Instead of finding inspiration in a feature film or sitcom, she turned to the DIY Network for her light-bulb moment. "In 2012, when we started talking about getting married, the traditional weddings that we'd gone to in the 1980s just didn't resonate with us," says Frauton, who met her groom, Rick, on Match.com. "Still, we were trying to have the nicest wedding we could at the best cost." With some event-planning and fundraising experience under her belt, Frauton decided to coordinate her own nuptials, which were staged at the Joslin Diabetes Center's summer camp in central Massachusetts. As she explains on her website, "I quickly found navigating the wedding industry was a lot more confusing and time-consuming than I realized. As a result, there were lots of 'oops' and 'wish we had known that' moments along the way." Example No. 1: ordering double the number of invitations she needed, not realizing that each household needed just one, not two. Then, two weeks before the big day, Frauton discovered that her catering staff couldn't make the date. With a little elbow grease, however, and a lot of craft brew alongside a buffet of barbecue, she was able to get hitched in September 2013 without a hitch. After that experience, "I decided I wanted to help other couples have amazing weddings," she writes, "minus all the stress." Without a pre-existing business model to follow, Frauton started from the idea of "coaching" couples on staging their own weddings. "But I knew that in order to be an effective coach, my own wedding wasn't enough," she says. "So I started coordinating other weddings." Frauton launched her website — diyweddingmentor.com — in January 2014. In that same year, she racked up professional experience by coordinating some 30 weddings. Frauton works out of her home in Waterbury, where a desk in the corner of her living room serves as Grand Central Station for weddings…