Of the 3,000 marriage proposals Daisy Amodio has planned for her clients, there was one that stopped her in her tracks. A male pornstar wanted to propose to his pornstar girlfriend. What he asked for was a specially decorated room in which they could spend all day having sex, the walls plastered with naked photographs of the couple.
“My team was like, ‘should we really be doing that?’ and I had to take a step back and think about it,” says Amodio. “Then I thought, ‘yes, we should’, because that’s what this couple likes, and every relationship is different … the man had to go to Boots and print out naked photos. It was a bit scary.”
Often the client is less specific about what they want, coming to Amodio and her team at London-based The Proposers to be inspired. “One guy told me that his girlfriend loved cats,” says Amodio, adding, “he must have mentioned that about four or five times, so I figured it had to be cat-themed”. The team hired the cat cafe, dressed fifty cats up as waiters and put the ring on the bow tie of one cat. Then as the man was about to propose, a jazz singer began performing a cat-themed song that Amodio and her team had written.
A Harry Potter proposal created by The Proposers company. The client had a budget of £5,000 (Photo: Zak Matkowski)
But one of Amodio’s best proposals was for a man who wanted help with a live recreation of a music video by the band McFly – one of his and his girlfriend’s favourite songs ‘Love is Easy’ – starring their family and friends. “It had a lot of props in it, it took us weeks. There was a whole section of choreography, too.” Amodio also contacted Harry Judd, the drummer from the band, who made a video message that was shown during the proposal.
The McFly guy had a budget of £12,500 for his proposal, and the cat cafe man had £3,000. Amodio, who set up her business 11 years ago, says that the average client might spend £2,500. “For that they’d want a private dining room with decorations, flowers, candles, maybe a harpist and a photographer, then we’d make it a bit more personalised, with their favourite colours and photographs.”
Although the rest of her clients “either want it to be super crazy and never been done before, or they’re really high earners so they don’t know what they want, they just want something spectacular and they’ll throw all the money in the world at it”.
The billionaires, says Amodio, are generally too busy to talk to her and so she’ll deal with their assistants, who know everything about their life. When it’s millionaires, they’ll often go to Amodio directly because they feel proposal planning is too personal to organise through their secretaries, but they’re too busy to talk much. “They give us a little brief, but they don’t have time to send pictures, and they expect us to pull it out of the bag. So we stalk the girl, we literally go on their Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, anything we can find.”
NYC wedding planners Proposal 007 organised this rooftop moment in The Big Apple (Photo: Proposal 007)
Amodio says you can “tell everything about the girl” from the pictures, and what she might like. “If she’s dripping head to toe in Gucci, you know that she’s really into designer and everything’s going to have to be five star, high end. If the girl looks more Bohemian, we’ll do something different. We had a guy wanting to spend £52,000 on a proposal in Santorini, and his girlfriend’s whole Instagram was about fitness, so we got her up at 6am, got her dressed in a Prada gym outfit and then she did this hike through the mountains, which led to a beach, where she then went on a horse, and then did some metal detecting.”
Amodio undertook seven different proposals in Santorini alone this summer, each costing the client over £30,000. “Santorini is getting bigger, and bigger for this,” she says. London and Paris are always very popular, too. In the winter months, she gets a lot of moneyed men wanting to propose in Dubai or Iceland.
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Amodio, whose office is in London skyscraper The Shard, says that she gets a smaller number of same-sex couples, and in the hetereosexual relationships it is almost always men proposing to women. Only four of the 3,000 proposals have been women proposing to men. Two of those were in a Leap Year, the one time of year, according to tradition, women are “allowed” to do it.
Those four female clients wanted similar things to what most male clients want – “that super romantic proposal with a nice view”- but they got much more involved in the planning. “They want to know precisely how many petals we’re putting out and they’re a bit more detailed, whereas the guy will leave us to get on with it.” (For the record, it’s usually 5,000 petals).
Meanwhile in New York, Tatiana Caicedo, who runs a US wedding proposal business Proposal 007, is working on the onslaught of Christmas engagements. “We get a lot of tourists and people from other states coming here for an iconic New York proposal on a private rooftop with a view of the Empire State Building.” Caicedo will sort out bookings, decorations, the neon signs saying ‘marry me’ or ‘you’re my person’ that she says are all the rage now.
A couple getting engaged on a Parisian rooftop using one of The Proposers’ Paris packages starting at £4,500 (Photo: The Proposers)
However, the crucial part of her job is logistics. She will, for example, make sure that during a proposal she has planned in Central Park, nobody walks right through the special moment and ruins the photograph. There was a Times Square proposal, where Caicedo told the man he had to be there at a specific time so that his girlfriend wouldn’t miss the moment it said “will you marry me?” on the rolling billboard they had rented. But he got stuck in traffic and so the couple almost missed the entire thing. “That was very stressful,” she recalls.
Caicedo also gets a few unusual ones. She was paid to hire a New York cinema for a private screening of Star Wars, when the client then proposed dressed as a Jedi.
As someone whose friends have proposed on walks, in the pub, in the living room, over a McDonald’s chicken nugget, or simply agreed to get married without any proposal, I tell Amodio I had no idea people went this big. “Neither did I, before I started this business!” she says. After working for 15 years at an advertising agency, Amodio started The Proposers after the task of planning her brother’s proposal to his girlfriend – a treasure hunt around London – left her feeling elated.
“I googled ‘wedding proposal planner’ and couldn’t find anything, so I went with my gut and started the business. I knew weddings were getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and people were wanting more personalisation for the huge moments in their life. People want pictures they can put on their social media straight away – sometimes before they’ve even told their parents, the proposal is up there on Instagram,” she explains.
The billionaires, says Amodio, are generally too busy to talk to her and so she’ll deal with their PAs, who know everything about their life (Photo: Nudge)
Amodio used to personally attend every single proposal and cry from the sidelines- “I found it really moving, I still do”, but now she often sends someone from her team. “I’m older and I have kids now.” Yet when it comes to the £30,000 high rollers, she makes sure to go, in the hope that when the client goes on to plan the wedding, they’ll use her event company too. “Someone spending £30,000 on a proposal will be spending over £500,000 on a wedding”. She gets a fair bit of business from footballers, and next month she’s attending a baptism in Florence for a couple who she originally did a proposal for.
After all the money spent, has she ever seen someone say no? In New York, Caicedo has never seen someone decline one of her planned proposals, but does know of a few couples who broke up soon after, and others where the girl had only said yes “because there were cameras around”- and presumably because there’s quite a lot of pressure due to the money spent. (The ‘flower arch rooftop package’ costs $2,300/£2,041 alone).
In London, Amodio says she has also only ever witnessed people say yes but there was one couple who broke up six months after the engagement, because “he found out she was sleeping with a famous boxer”. But there was a happy ending. “Six months later he came back to me to plan his proposal to someone else.”
