Sally Mussared is the designer and founder of Mussared design studio creating luxurious handmade silk wedding gowns.

Tori Wood creates stunning florals, perfect styling and breathtaking installations at Tori Allen Events.

Recording by the fabulous Miss Bella Hazelton.

Time Stamps

00:51 First Contact

02:18 Tori’s Special Way

03:03 The Venue of Choice

04:08 The Motivation for it All

06:36 Back to the Roots

07:56 The Strangest Request

08:53 Tori’s Tips

11:25 The Unromantic Romance

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Hopelessly Devoted podcast. I’m bridal designer Sally Mussared, delivering you the inside tips from Melbourne’s top wedding professionals.

Very excited today to be here with Tori Wood, at Tori Allen events, who do.. . well, what do you do, here at Tori Allen events?

We are a team of creatives who deliver wedding concepts and corporate concepts for clients. We are all inclusive of styling and the floral design for all events, anything from a bridal bouquet right through to a large scale installation, things for corporate events and private parties as well. We not only do the floral design, but also bring in the furniture and styling elements and design the tablescape, and all those small details.

First Contact

So, when a bride contacts you, you get an email from them and what happens next?

Ah, our lovely Jess responds, and a thing we like to do is give the bride the information and encourage them to come in and have a chat, because there’s nothing like a face to face conversation, to further explain what we do, and hear what the bride’s requests are.

And then how do you develop the design of what you’re going to?

Yeah, so, our… once our bride comes in and decides, you know, we’re the stylists and floral designers they want to work with, we often hear their brief, and they may have a Pinterest board, or they’ve collected imagery over time from magazines, and various, sort of… sources, and quite often it has ten different ideas. So we help tailor and tame their ideas to one sort of way that will bring what they want to life with our experience, so we will consider their venue, we will consider the type of personalities that they are, their requests are, and then assist with saying well, we think your colour palette should be this, we think that your textures should be this, your vibe of the wedding should be this… yeah. It’s a collaborative approach, but we definitely come in with a strong opinion and a really, I suppose educating the bride on what we believe is best, and what our opinion is. We adapt our creative language to the bride, orthe client, depending on what type of person they are, and what their kind of brief is as well.

Tori’s Special Way

Yeah nice, so, what makes Tori Allen unique?

We are a one stop shop, we offer the styling and floral and stationery solutions for your wedding. Being, you know, a group of designers, we sort of come from a different approach perhaps your normal retail florist or an independent stylist where we, we look at the total concept and we, everything works together. We look at things with a, quite a contemporary and sheik approach, you know, we’re not too traditional but we don’t buck tradition at the same time, we like to sort of merge the two together, so that things do have a bit of depth, but they’re still in line with the trends that are on Instagram and Pinterest and, you know, in vogue et cetera.

The Venue of Choice

So once they’ve let you know what venue they’re going to have it in, how do you work from that?

Generally speaking we may know the venue, because we would have worked there before, or we’ve been on a site visit, so we will look at the couple and their requests,