Open letter:

I am writing this blog post at 11:14 p.m. with a glass of sub-par orange wine I bought because it was on sale (helllooooo $9.99, Trader Joe’s vino, do not look up the reviews). My baby is finally asleep in the other room, miraculously, after a feeding she did not want and a series of lullabies I am not sure she liked (we’ve been interchanging between Billy Bragg and Neko Case, lol). I have a status meeting for work at 8 a.m. tomorrow, which means I am writing this quickly between midnight and the next time she wakes up. shudders

And what I am writing about is, I think, you.

Here is what I think you’ve been doing: You started a Pinterest board. You Googled “cool wedding” or “chic divorce party” or “best places to vacation with your family without wanting to kill each other, 2026”. Whether it was the week after you got engaged, or the week after you turned thirty-nine, or the week after the divorce was final, the impulse was the same: you needed to somehow pin down a feeling you’re craving, and you trusted images more than you trusted yourself to name it.

Maybe you’ve talked to four planners and they all sent the same intake form. They all asked what your theme was, the budget, the color palette. They showed you portfolios of weddings and parties that were beautiful and felt like they belonged to other people. At this point, you might have started to wonder whether the thing you want is actually possible and whether the gap between the event in your head and the events on offer is wider than what you can bridge with time, money, or even, taste.

Enter me! Maggie! I run an event design company called Maggie Sinclair (listen, the wildest names were already taken!), and I am writing this letter because I have spent years convinced that ~you~ exist, and now I would like to find you in the depths of Substack and beyond. I think we’d make a good pair.

And here’s why: you want an event that feels exactly like you. You want to walk into your party or head out on your trip feeling like you’re landing somewhere specific, kinda like the way it feels to land in a city you’ve never been to before but immediately know which café to walk to first. You want your guests to be doing something else, days later, why they suddenly remember the music. Or the color of the sunset at happy hour. Or what the bread tasted like (perfectly salty and airy). You want guests who enter as strangers to leave as friends as they trade numbers in the parking lot.

You want to feel known. Witnessed.

And most planners can’t give you that because most planners aren’t trying to. They’re trying to give you the version of the event that thousands of clients are asking for, they kind of events they could do with their eyes closed, and they are good at it. These event planners are not unskilled, they’re just simply not asking the questions to which answer is you and how you want to feel.

The first thing I ask a new client is not what’s your theme. It’s not what’s your budget. It’s not what’s your venue. It is: what do you want the people in the room to feel when they leave? How do you want to feel at your own party?

Most people don’t have a clear answer the first time. Many stumble over the word “feel” and try to substitute “see”, and then realize that’s not what I asked. It’s a hard thing to answer but worth mining inside yourself for the truth. That’s the brief on how to get an event of your dreams. Everything else…the menu, the intinerary, the room, the music, the seating chart, the small thing nobody else would have thought of…is logistics.

This Substack is going to be about that conversation between us. Real events I have designed. Events I’d design around specific cultural references that taught me how to think differently. The questions I ask clients that I think more planners should be asking. The occasional confession that I, a person who plans events for a living, also has anxiety about hosting a dinner party for six people…sometimes.

I will not write about industry trends. I will not be writing about the wedding color of the year. I will not write about how to save on flowers! There is a robust Internet industry already devoted to those topics and Google and Gemini and Claude can all take you down that path should you so choose it.

What I will write about is how to plan an event that could only have been yours. An experience or trip that you’ll remember forever because it felt like you.

If you stick around, I will treat your taste as the asset it already is. I will not tell you what’s elevated. I will not tell you what’s curated. I will not tell you what your aesthetic is. I will tell you what I think you’ve been reaching for, and I will help you build it.

If you are planning something, a wedding, a fortieth, a launch, a friends or family trip, a corporate retreat, a divorce party that nobody told you you were allowed to throw, tell me. I’d love to hear about it.

I am going to close my laptop now because I just heard the baby. The wine, for what it’s worth, was actually fine.

Xx,

Maggie