Be Sage Conference / Flora Farms

Designing, Corporate Events

Isn’t this place beautiful???? Flora Farms in Cabo is one of the coolest places I’ve been. It’s an outdoor restaurant (hello, Mexico) with an insane event space called the mango grove. The space is an open air field that’s lined with mango trees and a canopy of twinkle lights. It’s basically everyone’s dream. No wonder Adam Levine got married there.

To close out the Be Sage Conference in Cabo, attendees where treated to an off-site party at Flora Farms. The most delicious food (butternut squash pizza, thankyouverymuch) and cocktails (lavendar martinis and carrot juice margaritas, thankyouverymuchagain). It was my job to design a space that fit in with the environment, brought pops of happy colors, and used the local land as my inspiration.

To do that, we grabbed tomatillos, bananas, and hibiscus flowers from the farmer’s market at Floral Farms to decorate communal farm tables that had bright yellow runners on them. Local sunflowers were in jam jars on the tables. To keep it modern, which you is my style, I chose clean lanterns and a fun geometric pattern on the linens.

The canopy of lights gave a soft glow as we all chatted about the amazing things we’ve learned those past two days. The warm breeze brought sniffs of mango to our noses as we sipped on locally crafted cocktails.

This is the last blog post in the series of three all about the Be Sage Conference that I designed in Cabo. The three day, three location event, was one of my favorite projects to date. You can see the Mexican Fiesta Welcome Party around the pool and the Contemporary Conference room here. I’m booking more corporate and conference design work for 2017 and 2018. Reach out if you need art direction and floral design for an event you are hosting.

Event Planning: Sweet Pea Events

Event Design: Michelle Edgemont

Event Venue & Sponsor: Flora Farms

Rentals: Del Cabo Event Design

Floral: Arete Florals

Stationery & Signage: Pink Champagne Paper

Photography: Barbie Hull

Video: Splendor Films

Event Shuttle & Sponsor: Impala

Music: The Shamans

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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

Event Design: Michelle Edgemont

Rentals: Del Cabo Event Design

Floral: Arete Florals

Stationery & Signage: Pink Champagne Paper

Photography: Barbie Hull

Video: Splendor Films

Tote bags: Venue Safari

Office Kits (and legal advice): Annette Stepanian

Stationery Printing: Thomas Printers

Guest photo books: Guesterly

Be Sage Book: Mintwich Creative

MC: Discovery DJs

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Be Sage Conference / Welcome Party

Corporate Events

The biggest event design project that I ever worked on was the entire Be Sage Conference last year in Cabo San Lucas. I was given the task of designing the conference, which included the main learning space (a kind of ugly hotel conference room that had to be made beautiful), a welcome party (around the pool), and a closing party (at Flora Farms). I’ve been a huge fan of Be Sage Wedding Pros for years and being able to work with them to create a welcoming, intentional, comfortable learning environment for their amazing conference was such a great honor. I’m excited to start using my design experience on corporate events, and although I’ve done smaller ones in the past, a three day conference with 60 attendees, two parties, and a conference room was my largest undertaking to date.

Now, let me show off all of the hard work in this series of three blog posts about the conference. Designing a wedding is about letting the couple’s personality shine, designing a corporate event is a delicate dance between creating instagrammable moments, building a comfortable environment, and infusing the brand’s aesthetic and tone into each element.

With the planning help of Meagan from Sweet Pea Events Dallas, we successfully collaborated with a team of vendors in Cabo to make this conference happen.

You can get a quick idea of the event design work we did in this amazing video by Splendor Films. Three different locations tell three different stories over the course of the conference. Each with it’s own design board, color palette, and overall feeling:

First up, the welcome party. The conference took place at the Secrets Resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. All-inclusive resorts feel….fake to me. They are luxurious and beautiful and the service is remarkable, although it doesn’t feel like real Mexico to me. So, for this welcome party, my goal was to design a space around the pool that felt and looked like a traditional Mexican fiesta. We used custom made upholstery and linens created from original Otomi embroidered fabrics. The chefs created foods that their grandmothers would make at family gatherings. I literally said to them at our first meeting: “cook what your abuela cooks.” Finally, a classic mariachi band entertained the crowd.

Here is the Design Board I put together for the Welcome Party:

The Welcome party was sponsored by Rentivist, which gave me as the designer an interesting challenge: how do I design a party that feels like a Mexican fiesta while keeping to the clean aesthetic of the conference hosts, Sage Wedding Pros, and the sponsor, Rentivist? We did it by doing exactly that: contemportary white furnishing enhanced with the Rentivist Logo. Foil printed cocktail napkins with their cheeky slogans. And bright colors that instantly made the mood fun-loving.

I used this opportunity to really go colorful with the lights, which I wouldn’t do for a wedding. Designing for corporate gives me the chance to try different things. I’d say that these lights are very, very different than the twinkly wedding lights. Super fun, bright, and gave the party a feeling of a good time.

Here’s what the party looked like before the sun went down. Still fun, with the balloon installation in the pool and the Otomi fabric on the modern white tables. As the sky darkened, the palm trees were slowly lit to be bright and colorful to get the party started.

Gotta have hashtags. And they have to be prominent, easy to remember, and easy to find. Check out all the cool images here on instagram.

Huge thank you to all of our collaborators on this welcome party at the Be Sage Conference. Being the event designer at an event that was taking place internationally was a new challenge for me. Without these amazing businesses, it wouldn’t have came together as seamlessly and beautiful as it did.

I’m now taking on corporate clients for 2017 and 2018 events, conferences, brand launches, product parties, etc. Contact me to get started on your design process.

Event Planning: Sweet Pea Events

Event Design: Michelle Edgemont

Event Sponsor: Rentivist

Rentals: Del Cabo Event Design

Floral: Arete Florals

Stationery & Signage: Pink Champagne Paper

Photography: Barbie Hull

Video: Splendor Films

Photobooth: Booth-o-Rama

Blanket Gifts: Aisle Planner