Meet Melissa Buscemi, a UMass alum who graduated in 2008 with a degree in English. Since her graduation Melissa has had many accomplishments, one of the largest being the successful launch of her own event planning company Parsimony Vintage. Four years in, the business continues to thrive. This week, we sat down with Melissa to gain some insights into her business and listen to her advice for hopeful entrepreneurs and/or bloggers!
HC: Congratulations on your recent success and feature on the Wedding Chicks site! Tell us more about your business. What does Parsimony mean and how did you get started?
MB: Thank you! We are over the moon about the feature and how well it has been received.
Parsimony Vintage was really born out of my own wedding planning. My husband and I decided that we wanted to create an experience and not just a wedding. So we skipped the traditional wedding venue, and chose a beautiful estate on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. With that, we moved forward and spent three years planning every single detail. Through this process I realized that my background in producing art and culture events had given me an eye for detail that made me a perfect fit for special event design and planning. After experiencing the process, I started toying with the idea of launching my own business and started building piece by piece the elements needed to make a chic, creative and enduring venture.
Parsimony Vintage’s mission is to guide the everyday girl through the process and offer her ways to implement her designs, figure out her style, and capture the details that speak to her all while keeping on budget. As a bride myself, I was overwhelmed. I would spend hours looking at magazines, pinning things on Pinterest, checking the latest blog posts, and being inundated with amazing images of event styles that I knew I couldn’t afford. Luckily, I received the crafty gene from my mother and really love and excel at DIY. Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky. I have spoken to brides driven to tears because they are unsure of how to accomplish a wedding (or even where to start).
Once we hit play and sent Parsimony Vintage into the world, the response was overwhelming and we are so grateful. Our journey has been organic and has morphed as we listen to our audience’s wants and needs. Since we first launched we have opened up our Parsimony Vintage Paper Goods Shoppe, we have a yearly photo shoot with amazing vendors, and now we have been published! With this momentum, we are expanding the topics we cover on the blog. Stay tuned for bouquet obsessions, beauty posts, and of course more and more inspiration!
HC: What is your favorite part of the job?
MB: Do I have to pick just one? Well I guess it would be surrounding myself with creative people. It’s amazing collaborating with others and seeing what takes shape. Then being able to pass it on to our audience is fun and rewarding. This business is chock full of the most amazing vendors who are just bursting with ideas and inspiration, the energy is contagious.
A great example of this is a collaboration that I am working on right now which will launch in the spring called Atelier Reverie. Last year I reached out to Stephanie Romanowicz, owner of Rust and Luxe, to ask her to sign on as a vendor for our 2016 photo shoot. I was obsessed with her amazing lot of vintage couches and inventory. Our initial meeting turned into a five-hour conversation about how we wanted to help future brides (beyond our own clients) plan unforgettable events.
Stephanie and I talked a lot about how many brides we knew that had gone down the rabbit hole of blogs, magazines, pins and message boards into an endless spiral of all things wedding and had become so overwhelmed by the process they didn’t know where to turn. We wanted to provide them the opportunity to daydream alongside experts in the wedding industry. Atelier Reverie is a weekend fair full of advice from experts, vendors and gently used inventory markets. The fair will be held on April 23rd and 24th at The Box Mill in Wareham, MA. We’d love to see everyone there!
HC: What has been your favorite event or shoot so far?
MB: I have to say our 2016 photo shoot was a dream come true. I decided the best way to help brides get started was to go out and create looks from scratch, then give them advice on how to recreate them. In the fall of 2014 we had our first “color stories” shoot, which focused more on decor, so when we started to plan for our 2016 shoot, I knew that I wanted to expand our looks to include things like bridal, beauty, cakes and flowers. I went around and pitched my concepts to vendors and sure enough, based on our results from 2015, they signed on to help me fully create our color stories. It was an amazing 2-day shoot, everything came together in such a magical way. It was such a wonderful experience to partner with such talented and creative people. We all had goose bumps!
HC: What are your goals for the future?
MB: I have many goals for Parsimony Vintage and for myself. We hope to continue to grow the website and increase our audience. We want to expand our content into home decor, cooking and fashion. We really hope to be able to blossom into a creative empire that touches on all parts of life while always keeping the lens of the everyday person. The possibilities are endless and that’s exciting.
HC: What advice would you give to individuals looking to start their own company and/or successful blog?
MB: Make sure you’re passionate about your idea. Starting Parsimony Vintage, I knew that it would be a lot of work but I was not prepared for how much work it actually is! I really live, sleep and eat Parsimony Vintage but I am very happy doing it. I have learned three big lessons so far. First, be diverse in your approach in the beginning, because you never know what will work until you try. Explore every avenue, website, social media and market. Second, hustle, hustle, hustle! You need to be your biggest advocate, always looking out for opportunities to help spread the word about your brand. Lastly, ask! What’s the worse they can say? I have been given so many opportunities simply because I went and asked an individual or company to work with me.
HC: What’s an average day look like for you?
MB: We are a wedding blog but we are also a full service event planning company. So I am always balancing my time between clients and our editorial work. I am blessed to have a supportive (and talented!) husband that heads our art department and also runs our day-to-day operations. I start every day by referring to my project binder. I live and die by my lists! They keep me organized and help me prioritize. On an average day I work with clients helping them design their big days, work through questions about vendors, design their bouquets, and more. On the editorial side, I spend a lot of time working on content for the blog, designing concepts for upcoming shoots and thinking of DIY projects. I spend at least an hour a day looking at inspiring images. I do it to motivate myself but also so I stay on top of the trends.
HC: In your (probably limited!) free time, what do you enjoy doing?
MB: I don’t have much free time, but a perfect day is spent driving around upstate New York, flea marketing and scoring great deals. Then spending a date night with my husband, eating Indian takeout, drinking wine and snuggling with our dog.
All photos courtesy of Melissa and Parsimony Vintage.