Be Sage / The Conference Room

Corporate Events

Earlier this week I showed you the Welcome Party that attendees were treated to once they arrived in Cabo for the Be Sage Conference. Today, let’s chat about the conference room it’s self. Hotel conference rooms are all big bummers. The Secrets resort was gorgeous – beautiful landscaping, white stucco, archways, lovely furnishings. Then you get to the conference room…and….womp, womp.

All is not lost! This is my job. To take a venue and make it work for the event. Designing a conference is much different than designing a social event in that each element needs to be thought out according to what the attendees will be doing around it. For example, the centerpieces. The Be Sage Conference’s main goal is to educate wedding pros with actionable knowlege and deep thinking. Giant, visually stimulating, colorful centerpieces were not going to create an enviroment for this heavy learning.

Instead, Arete Flowers (who we partned with in Cabo), created understated, monochromatic, centerpieces that accented the tables while not being too visually stimulating and left plenty of room for coffee (ahem, margaritas, who are we kidding), notebooks, and snacks.

My aesthetic goal with the conference room was to bring the outside in with a lot of foliage, use calming colors like ocean blues and sand ivories, and create a space that felt comfortable, relaxing, and refreshing. We wanted to make each attendee feel special too. Through personalized touches – their names calligraphed onto leaves and engraved wooden name tags – everyone felt thought of, important, and included.

The backdrop of the stage was a huge wall of all tropical greenery. It created a beautiful texture behind the speakers and gave the room that tropical feeling that it needed. We were in Mexico, afterall. The more tropical leaves the better. The team at Arete Florals did an amazing job at putting this wall up late into the night. The conference started at 9am, which meant that everything needed to be perfect the night before.

On the second day of the conference, I added some authentic Mexican tiles to the centerpieces. Each table was decorated with a different patterned tile. Instead of table numbers, we used table patterns. Follow me on this one: The escort cards were designed to match the tiles on each table. To find your table, each attendee matched their escort card to the patterned tiles on their table. The tiles were a big hit – being able to support local businesses to design our conference in Cabo was important to the vision. These escort cards! The best, right? I loved how they looked in a group all layed out on the table in the morning. Such a pretty vision on the second day of learning at the conference. It’s these types of authentic, thought out, personalized details that are remembered from the aesthetic details at an industry conference. The networking, the learning, the drinks – those are all givens at any event. It’s the personalized, intentional, visual details that can take a conference from ho-hum to wow.
Event Planning: Sweet Pea Events