Lily Spruce

As a wedding DJ, I’ve worked with the Lily Spruce team on several fantastic weddings. There are two types of wedding planners out there: Stressballs and cool cucumbers. Genevieve and team are very calm, cool, and capable. They put together great events, and they make it look easy. Can’t wait for my next wedding with them :)

We used Lily Spruce’s services for our wedding in January and could not have been more impressed. Admittedly, we hired them late in the game (after realizing we were in WAAAY over our heads) but Genevieve jumped right in and immediately put us at ease. Not a single detail was missed and her advice, planning and vast experience made it so that there was no stress on the big day.
Speaking of the big day… We assumed that we would have to handle a lot of the evening’s logistics on our own because we brought Lily Spruce into the process so last-​minute. Not so. Jackie handled everything like a BOSS! Not only did she have the evening scheduled down to the minute, she handled all of the timing and communication with the various vendors. She even delivered the occasional smack-​down when necessary (with a smile on her face, of course).
Thanks Lily Spruce, you saved our butts!

In one word Genevieve is AMAZEBALLS! We hired Genevieve to help plan our holiday party and we ran through some «must haves» and she ran with it and put together some amazing ideas/​options for us to consider. We looked at several venues, met with the chef to put together a great menu and wine selection. We got a DJ, a photo booth, a roaming photographer, and we all had smiles on our faces the entire time.
You can tell she is passionate about what she does and she gave us the attention to make the event we were planning so seamless that all we had to do was show up and at the end of the party walk out with the guests.
I’m looking forward to the next party already!

Wow! I’ve never hire a party planner, but I struck gold when I hired Genevieve and her team to plan my company Holiday Party. She was thoughtful, budget conscious, transparent, honest and super smart. She had great suggestions for keeping my runaway budget tendencies in check while delivering what a whole bunch of people told me was the «best holiday party of the season». Huzzah! Pick up the phone and call her now — you won’t regret it and your guests will love you forever.

We used Genevieve (Lily Spruce owner) for the front end part of our wedding planner to find a location and get some good leads and direction on vendors and our overall wedding to-​do list. She was awesome, really special person who has a wonderful personality that is super easy to work with. She’s responsive and professional, and seems willing to go the extra mile with her clients. Nice to feel that you’re special to her and your event is special, not just one more cut & paste event feeling that you get from some places. She went out of her way to do some extra research to find our wedding venue and it was a huge hit, worked out perfectly. We highly recommend her, you won’t regret it.

As a professional caterer, we enjoyed working with Lily Spruce. Genevieve was very responsive to any questions that I had during the planning process which has definitely helped us a lot. She and her team did an amazing job executing the wedding of Monica and Amit at Park Winters in July 2015. She is professional, diligent and very easy to work with. I believe any bride would have a wonderful time planning their wedding with Lily Spruce’s help!

Do it. If you’re debating or waffling on hiring a coordinator, please let me STRONGLY encourage you to hire Genevieve. You will not regret this (small, but when you’re hosting your wedding, you find yourself questioning every nickel) investment, and please believe me when I say that the return, both financially and emotionally, will be huge. The day goes by so fast and there is already so much stress (much of it for happy reasons). You will regret spending precious minutes wondering who picked up the programs, is there parking for the photographers, does the restaurant know who has a shellfish allergy, why is the band so loud while people are trying to talk, do your elderly out-​of-​town guests have transportation, and where did so-​and-​so go during photo time… With Genevieve, all I had to do was ask, and she handled all of the above and so much more! If you are already so lucky to have found your forever person, you will not want to spend time on your wedding day addressing the mundane, but very real, details of hosting an event.
We did the month-​of-​coordination package for our October 2015 wedding, and I would recommend that any bride and groom do the same. I wanted to be a guest at my own wedding, and more importantly, I wanted my friends and family (many of whom flew thousands of miles to spend the day with us) to enjoy our wedding. My husband and I planned our wedding (church ceremony with live music, cable car trolley tour, dinner reception at Waterbar, photographer and assistant for the day, flowers for the church from SF Flower Mart), but Genevieve pulled it all together and directed the execution. I interviewed several wedding coordinators, and I hired Genevieve based off her Unilocal!reviews and our 1×1 in person interview/​coffee chat. She is low key (a welcome departure from some of the seriously amped up, Type As in the wedding industry!), creative, diplomatic, warm, possesses just a lovely professional comportment and has outstanding professional/​vendor network. GENEVIEVE WILL GET THINGS DONE! :-) She found us a WONDERFUL band, under budget, to play at our reception (my husband I had agreed on live music for the church, iTunes for the reception, when 5 days out he looks at me wistfully and says, «I’m kinda sad we won’t have live music at the party»). She hired a bilingual Spanish assistant so that family from Mexico would feel welcome and their needs attended. She corralled family members (you gotta keep an eye on those octogenarians!) for photos. She texted friends to pull together coolers of champagne for the trolley ride. She saved a menu from the restaurant for our album. The list is endless, all executed behind the scenes, and with zero drama. HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

I had the HUGE honor of working with Genevieve last night at a wedding in Sonoma County. She is 100% awesome, and here’s why: Genevieve is professional, organized, always thinking a few steps ahead, grounded, calm and has a lovely presence. The wedding ran smoothly, the couple was happy, the other wedding vendors were well organized and overall the evening had a sweetness and flow to it that is in large part due to Genevieve. I highly recommend Lily Spruce, and truly hope you have the great fortune of working with Genevieve soon. You will be so happy you did!

GREAT NEWS! If you want to get married on April 11, 2015, Genevieve is now available! Don’t wait to call her!
We have just changed our wedding plans totally, which leaves the fabulous Genevieve available for lucky YOU!
Let me start by saying that we are NOT your typical engaged couple… as I am marrying for the first time in my late 50s and my husband is in his 60s. I am not anything like a «princess» — but being married in a traditional Catholic ceremony and having a nice reception with dancing was what I’d always envisioned. We wanted a traditional wedding, and a nice but more relaxed, less formal, lively/​dancey and fun reception. The Golden Gate Yacht Club was the perfect venue for that!
We reserved the church and the Golden Gate Yacht Club and found our DJ. Then we found a wedding planner we really liked — but our wedding date turned out that it was also HER wedding date, too!
We met with another wedding planner who got top marks here on Unilocal but — when we met with her, we were pretty taken aback. She talked nonstop, and for the first 20 minutes, all her conversation was about herself and her dog. I left feeling like I’d been bludgeoned. Couldn’t imagine how she could be in this business, which is all about listening andrelationships and reassuring people down when they are in the midst of wedding stress!
So we called our first wedding planner and begged her for help. She said that if she wasn’t hiring herself, she’d hire Genevieve, loved her, had total confidence in her.
We met with Genevieve and she was warm, yet professional. Felt she could take charge and get things done efficiently, but be pleasant to work with. She is clearly highly experienced, We just needed a little time to figure out how much help we needed, etc. (We contacted her about 5 months before our Catholic nuptial Mass and reception at the Golden Gate Yacht Club…)
I’ll skip all the in-​between but… this week, 2 months before our wedding, with Genevieve still wondering what amount of help we’d like to engage her for, my fiancée and I sat down and looked at each other and said «tWe know it’s stressful and a lot of work — but nothing about this feels fun or right.». It was like we’d set our feet on a path that had turned into wet cement.
I think the problem was that we wanted a wedding for people who are 25 or 35 or even 40… but it just wasn’t a good «fit.»
Now, 5 days after our conversation, planning to get married in a civil ceremony in City Hall (so we don’t have to deal with the Italian civil government and its hassles), then have our nuptial Mass in a small village in Umbria, Italy where his sister lives… and where we were always going to go for our honeymoon. And we feel so much happier!
We truly dreaded calling Genevieve to tell her, because she’d met with us for an hour, and then redone her estimate 3x and met with us for an hour (that’s a LOT of time and work — it takes a lot of time to retype an estimate.!)
Genevieve was EXTREMELY gracious and kind — and I’m not sure I would have been. Which just goes to show that she is probably the person you want if you’re going to have to deal with prickly in-​laws and so forth on your wedding day!
We told her the least we could do was leave a note here on Unilocal!about how much we liked her and that we would recommend her (she did NOT suggest it or ask us to do it).
Definitely talk to her if you need a wedding planner!

Genevieve is so easy and pleasant to work with. She was our first vendor to book after we got engaged — and we decided on month-​of coordination services. We got all the big things booked mostly on our own in the first few months and also got some good recommendations from Genevieve.
Once the month before our wedding hit, things got into high gear. I don’t know how I would have survived without Genevieve (we also got married just after the holidays). She helped me keep my sanity and make sure we had all the little details come together that I hadn’t been able to decide on up until then.
The week of the wedding (and before) we had a few different meetings to work out design details and she was beyond helpful in getting all this accomplished. In particular, the signage the Genevieve assisted with looked amazing. The day of the wedding, Genevieve and her assistant made sure everything went off without a hitch, and our big day was very smooth for us and for our families, letting us enjoy the day.

We hired Genevieve and Lily Spruce as our day-​of coordinator for our wedding at Shakespeare Garden this past October. We originally thought we just needed someone to help set up some chairs and a refreshment table, little did we know how priceless Genevieve’s help was on so many different levels! She was very professional, she thought of the little details that my now husband and I didn’t even think about. She coordinated the whole ceremony as well as the reception and even wrangled our shuttle drivers to make a few extra trips to take guests back to their hotels. She thought of everything and dealt with every little hiccup so that we wouldn’t have to. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the money to hire someone to coordinate our somewhat simple wedding, but now I know Genevieve was worth every single penny!

Recommend Genevieve and Lily Spruce highly without reservations!
My wife and I opted for the «month of» services, so we arranged most of our own venue and vendors services (Genevieve provided a great list of vendors, all of whom were just as professional and easy to work with as she herself) and she coordinated the month of.
Meeting with her is easy, she’s very considerate, hard-​working, creative and just plain sweet. Rather than going on and on about my wedding itself, I’ll list things that impressed me about her services:
— She will protect you from the stress and bullsh! t if you want her to
— She’s creative and crafty and will help with design and décor ideas
— She’s focused on green and environmentally-​friendly concepts
— Her style is vintage-​y and fun and she’ll help with great ideas
— Her connections and vendor contacts are carefully-​selected and won’t let you down
— Her day-​of services make you feel like a king and/​or queen
— Her staff is hard-​working and professional and blend in the background of your event
— She will REPRESENT for you and handle any and all last-​minute issues
Overall a great experience with Lily Spruce! Well worth the (competitive, in my opinion) price.

The following is a review by my wife–
The Lily Spruce team was one of the best decisions for our wedding planning process. I met Genevieve at a bridal show at the Ritz Carlton and she was down to earth, genuine, and friendly. I was drawn by her sense of style, eco-​friendly approach to event planning, and sincere warmth and passion for her job.
The team started working 6 weeks out to set up a walk-​thru of the wedding venue, corresponding with vendors, seating chart, lay-​out, timeline, delegating, coordinating, communicating, so many details, details, details…
Though Genevieve wasn’t in town on the day of our wedding, she appointed her amazing colleague to be our wedding coordinator of the day! Nhuanh was on point, professional, personable, detail-​oriented, took care of wedding correspondences with our vendors, extremely organized, trustworthy, and was in charge of keeping a good flow for the day. I was able to enjoy and remember my wedding day, because we hired the Lily Spruce team and I would definitely recommend them to future couples.
–Kelly Pong-​Der (wife

Hiring Genevieve and team at Lily Spruce was one of the smartest things I could have done for our wedding. The details will start to catch up with you, even for the most efficient DIY bride — they definitely did for me! I hired Genevieve for month of coordination, which means she steps in about a month out from your wedding date. At that point, she was the point person for my vendors to contact, leaving me to relax and spend time with all our of our guests flying in for our wedding. The day of our wedding went off smoothly. I think there were a few hitches that were identified and solved immediately, leaving me none the wiser and all the more relaxed!
Genevieve is super chill, and friendly person. She won’t be the person that oversteps on your vision, but will graciously offer any well founded opinions when you need it!
Thank you Lily Spruce!

I worked with Genevieve Roja and she was exceptional. She is very confident, provides a great deal of peace of mind, not afraid to share with you the terrifying details (at the appropriate time), and her smooth collective personality provides her with the ability to manage different personalities. Really, a planner has to be well versed in managing different personalities because they are coordinating with the venue, caterer, photographer, videographer, florist, cake vendor, band, etc. I would highly recommend her because of her communication skills and organization.

For their reasonable price (for city weddings), you definitely want to go with Lily Spruce! We had our wedding on July 4^th this year and we knew it was going to be crazy. With 2 locations for the wedding (church for ceremony, and boat for reception), it was going to be a scary task to deal with the holiday’s busy-​ness — unbelievable traffic from the fireworks event, America’s Cup opening ceremonies, and to top it off, the last minute BART strike. With all that, Genevieve and her team still pulled it off.
What I loved about working with Genevieve is that she is a no-​nonsense professional. You want your wedding to be as best as it can be with the schedule, events, and ideas you have in your mind — Genevieve understands THAT! She knows it is YOUR ONCE-​IN-​A-​LIFETIME BIG DAY and will take every single note and detail that you have in mind. She will share with you her experiences and guidance to help you make your day everything you need it to be, honoring all your creative requests. What I loved about her also is that she truly knows how to work with people. She has dealt with «challenging» personalities (and you WILL have at least one to deal with in wedding preparation) and just knows how to talk to them calmly, assertively and cordially to get the job (s) done. This is probably because she is a people person and simply just knows and wants to connect with people. That, on top of her years of education and experience doing events and planning, keeps her EXTREMELY ORGANIZED, EXTREMELY TIMELY, and basically ON TOP OF IT. THAT, i know, is what EVERY bride wants in a planner to make that very special day an unforgettable and unbelievably joyous one forever stamped in her memory! Thank you Genevieve and the Lily Spruce team!!!

I am a classical guitarist and I worked with Genevieve for the first time this past week during a wedding at City Hall. Not only is she bright, friendly, and flexible, her business demeanor and idea are truly inspired. Simple, elegant, and reliable — that’s what you’ll get with Genevieve and the Lily Spruce crew!
Look forward to working together in the future,
— Matt

Genevieve helped us plan our excellent beach wedding in summer 2012.
We are very happy with the services she provided us on our wedding day. The entire experience was a great success and everything went according to plan.
Genevieve went above and beyond and was very professional. She had great ideas and was totally dedicated to making sure everything went smooth. She is easy going but firm in her mission to make your vision reality. We appreciate her hard work and highly recommend her to anyone looking for wedding coordinator services. You will not be disappointed and this is something that will last you a lifetime.
M & M

If you want to actually enjoy your wedding (or, really, any event you’re planning), HIRE LILY SPRUCE. We used Genevieve and her team for our wedding coordination this summer and it was worth every penny of the reasonably priced rates. Most importantly, we achieved our main goal: to have FUN on our wedding day. Top reasons you should use Lily Spruce:
— Genevieve was really flexible in working with our budget and using her experience to advise us where we’d need the most help.
— Along the road to our big day, she knew all the right questions to ask of us and our vendors, knew when to push back and where to make things work.
— Her great eye for design really helped stamp our day with a perfect look and feel and she had so many ideas of ways to make our wedding both sophisticated and «green.» (Having worked in catering for years, I did not want my wedding to be the wasteful extravaganza I’ve seen so many times.)
— She is somehow able to be both incredibly calm and accommodating while also managing a gazillion details — so you don’t have to.
— She immediately invoked confidence in my [really big] family who all had their own needs and demands. Once they met her, they stopped turning to me and relied on her for everything.
I was one of those brides who thought I could do everything myself. And I probably could have, but my wedding would not have been the totally perfect day that my husband and I envisioned.
THANK YOU, LILY SPRUCE!

Genevieve is an awesome choice for planning your wedding!
She has great style, is completely open to the thousands of ideas brides have when deciding about the look and feel of their wedding, and is amazing at suggesting a DIY approach for achieving the style you want.
As other reviewers have mentioned, she has is super laid back but somehow still on top of everything — a rare combination that makes her a dream to work with! My husband and i both loved meeting up with her to discuss the details of the day.
Lastly and most importantly, our wedding was executed perfectly. It was the happiest day of my life and i didn’t have to think about or worry about a thing — Genevieve had it all taken care of!