Celebrations Ltd. is the premiere wedding event company located in the Cayman Islands and is led by owner, founder, CEO and Creative Designer, Jo Anne Brown. Brown has been in the wedding business since 1987 and is well-known for setting trends in event design and management. It’s no wonder, then, that Celebrations was tapped to produce Engage’09, the megawatt industry conference attended by superstars like Preston Bailey and Karen Rago. Among the many accolades Celebrations has collected over the years, Travel & Leisure recently named Brown one of only six “destination wedding fairy godmothers” in the world, a title shared by world-renowned event planners Marci Blum and Allison Hotchkiss.
Best of Cayman chose Celebrations as ‘Cayman’s Best Wedding Planner’ for three consecutive years, from 2007 up to the present. In 2006, the Travel Channel selected Celebrations for their documentary series “Weddings Away: Cayman Islands,” a six-part behind-the-scenes series that followed Brown and her team as they planned and organized weddings on the island.
Every bride wants the absolute best for her wedding, and to have an officially titled Fairy Godmother of destination weddings creating her big day is a bride’s greatest dream. Therefore, many a bride will be thrilled to learn that Jo Anne is expanding her event planning reach to additional island destinations in her region.
“Currently, our company produces and coordinates approximately 150 destination and local weddings annually, from intimate celebrations to elaborate occasions, including a few celebrity weddings,” says Brown, who estimates that she has been personally involved in the design and creation of more than 800 weddings.
Attracted by Celebration’s in-house floral, linen and rental divisions as well as VIP service and personalized planning, many celebrity brides seek out Brown and her team of 56 outstanding planning assistants and designers.
“Celebrations is known on the island as the company that produces the most unusual, exotic, upscale and dreamlike weddings,” says Brown. “One of my favorite weddings would be Brooke and Neil’s tropical Hindu wedding in Little Cayman. This one is a personal favourite, for not only was it a logistic challenge being that Little Cayman is a remote island, but it was also a test of my creativity in bringing in two major aspects of wedding décor: a lavish Hindu wedding coupled with a beautiful tropical paradise.”
An independent company, not affiliated with any one hotel, restaurant or other venue, Celebrations objectively recommends perfect locations. “We know the islands inside and out, so we know what will work best where for not only the wedding, but for all other events on the island,” says Brown. “Not only do we design the wedding, we design the entire wedding experience.” From the rehearsal dinner, morning-after celebration, and bridesmaids’ luncheon, to mini golf tournaments for the men, marriage proposals and bridal showers, Celebrations covers all the bases.
Celebrations is no cookie-cutter event planning company, however. Brown’s team genuinely cares for each of couple, delving into the personalities and love stories of each bride and groom, swirling that magic wand to bring each couple’s unique vision to life. Celebrations Ltd. will soon expand to other Caribbean islands, bringing their style and flair to Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Cuba, and Antigua. “If any bride contacts us and wants us to coordinate a wedding anywhere else in the world, I would take it on as a personal challenge to realize her dream wedding no matter where it is,” says Brown, who coordinated her own daughters’ dream weddings in Cumbria, U.K. and in May Pen, Jamaica.
In addition to Celebrations Ltd’s much-anticipated expansion to other Caribbean locales, Brown has even more future plans: her book Caribbean Wedding Style is soon to be published, available at www.celebrationsltd.com, and she will be designing a wedding collection that features guest welcome bags, wedding canopies, linens and place settings as part of her desire to design ‘couture weddings’ for the one-of-a-kind bride.
For more information on Celebrations Ltd’s magic in the Caribbean, visit www.celebrationsltd.com.