Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
Bringing together local businesses and neighbor of the Tri-Cities region. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Skip Mauney helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around The Tri-Cities.
Is your business serving the residents of Tri-Cities? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpTri-Cities.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
EP# 240: Finding Your Wiggle: How Plain With Sprinkles Makes Weddings Personal
What makes Erin Lowndes with Plain with Sprinkles Events a good neighbor?
When Erin Lowndes hired a traditional wedding planner for her own 2017 wedding, she discovered a critical gap in the industry. As a self-described "non-traditional person," she felt the disconnect between rigid wedding conventions and her authentic self. This experience sparked a vision that would eventually become Plain With Sprinkles Events—a wedding planning company specifically designed to serve couples who don't fit neatly into traditional wedding frameworks.
From her home in Hot Springs, North Carolina, Erin now leads a team dedicated to creating safe, authentic celebrations particularly for LGBTQ+ couples and others who find themselves underrepresented in wedding traditions. With a background in theater stage management from VCU, Erin brings the perfect blend of logistical precision and creative vision to each celebration she coordinates. Her approach flips conventional wedding planning on its head: rather than starting with discussions about napkins and place settings, she begins by asking couples how they want to feel on their wedding day—a question many have never considered.
What makes Erin's philosophy truly refreshing is her rejection of the "best day of your life" wedding ideal. Instead, she sees weddings as a beautiful moment that should propel couples toward even better days ahead, filled with the love and energy they cultivate on their wedding day. After finding her own chosen family and building a beautiful life in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Erin brings a profound appreciation for authentic community to each wedding she plans. Whether you're planning a traditional celebration or something completely unique, Erin's parting wisdom resonates: approach life with love and beauty, stay present, and when you feel a wiggle of joy, hold it in your heart—because that's where the real magic happens. Discover more about creating your authentic celebration at plainwithsprinkles.com or on Instagram @plainwithsprinkles.
To learn more about Plain with Sprinkles Events go to:
https://www.plainwithsprinkles.com/about
Plain with Sprinkles Events
(804) 516-7680
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. So I am really psyched today because we've got a very special guest in the studio with us and who owns several businesses but and is from one of my favorite places on the planet, Hot Springs, North Carolina. And I'm sure you'll be just as excited to hear from her, because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Ms Erin Lowndes, who is the owner-operator of Plain With Sprinkles. Erin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, I'm glad to be here. Well, like I said, we're thrilled to have you, big fan of your hometown there and super excited to learn all about what you do. So, if you don't mind, why don't you start us off by telling us about your business? Plain with Sprinkles Events. It is a wedding planning company based in Asheville, north Carolina. I clearly work in Hot Springs at my home right now, but I've got a team of really great you know planners and assistants who serve a really amazing part of our population that is underserved in our community.
Speaker 3:When I moved to the Asheville area, I originally moved to Marshall and I started my business thinking that because I just I'm an untraditional person, a non-traditional I don't have a same kind of family structure as everybody else does, and when I got married in 2017, I hired a planner and learned a lot through the process of what it's like to have a traditional planner hired for your event, when you're a non-traditional person in the way that you approach things, and I decided that I needed to make sure that I serve a population that feels like they don't want to have a wedding just like everybody else.
Speaker 3:They want to have more support, they want to feel as safe as possible to express themselves and to show themselves and to be able to share that with their friends and family and their community. And that's really important to me and I found that in my work that I speak to my own community, which is the queer community, the LGBTQ plus people who get married and don't really have the same kind of resources and there's no traditions that really are set in place like weddings are. It is set up in a traditional sense of male and female and you get married.
Speaker 3:There's a bride and a groom, you dance with your father. You do these things, but as a queer person, you don't have those same opportunities. You can't just do the same things. You can't walk down the aisle the same way. Even so, it was exploring these traditions and creating new ones to work with my clients.
Speaker 2:Very cool. I love it. I love it. I did an interview the other week with I don't know. I was going to ask if you had ever officiated or not officiated but planned a wedding at Fleetwoods. Have you ever been there?
Speaker 3:I have. I have. I actually did a styled shoot there. I have not I have actually not planned an event there or an elopement or anything, but I have actually gotten married to my friends there, which was so fun very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that place, I love it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got very good it's like midnight and we uh were having drinks, uh, at the double crown down the street and we decided like, hey, let's all get married together. And six of us got together and be like all did it and they played us David Bowie and it was phenomenal. So our two year anniversary is coming up.
Speaker 2:Very cool, very cool Rock and roll chapel, yeah. So how did you? You kind of touched on this, but, aaron, how did you get into the wedding planning business?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got into the business in kind of a sideways way. I have a background in theater stage management. I went to VCU in Richmond, virginia, and got my bachelor's of fine art in theater stage management. I worked in that kind of career field for a while and ended up moving to Tucson, arizona, for my then partner and ended up finding it hard to work in the theater industry there.
Speaker 3:I had to piece together a lot of things and then I decided that I needed a career shift and to figure out so I can have like one job instead of four or five different jobs at the same time. And I landed in working with this beautiful woman, colleen LaFleur, who she just she inspired me. She was a florist and wedding planner and she trained me up and I just fell in love with the wedding industry in a different way. I never thought that I would land in something that would be in such a commercial or commercials field like field that's not as creative, but it is such a creative field, and decided that, like my you know, my career in stage management has the same kind of skill sets as a wedding planner would have and immediately took on to it and I loved the ability to work with people who are just in love um, and to have an impact on their day and to allow them to be themselves.
Speaker 3:Um, it felt like the coolest thing to be able to bring their personalities into the day. Um, in a way that I couldn't in wedding. They're in theater in the same very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I imagine it's really rewarding to be involved in. You know, for a lot of people that's the happiest day of their life and you know a big event and to be a part of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, to be a part it's got to be exciting it can be, but also in the same mindset of like, um, the way that people think like this is the best day of your life, I honestly don't want this to be the best day of everybody's of their life. Um, I wanted to just propel them into better, if that makes sense, and to propel them into an energy where they're like, filled with love and life, and they get to keep sharing that with people. I don't think it should be the best day of your life, because that feels sad to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too. Me too, I get it. Well, what are some myths or misconceptions in the wedding industry or event industry?
Speaker 3:I mean the misconceptions. I mean people think that they need to do the thing that their cousin did. They think that they need to do what their sister did. They need to do what their parents did has gotten in such a expensive, huge thing that you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to be able to have a good time, to be able to have the luxe flowers that your cousin also had, to have the same stuff. You don't have to have all of that. You can do things on a shoestring budget and be able to still have a magical day for yourselves budget and be able to like, still have a magical day for yourselves. So I don't. I think people can find themselves with money in the wedding industry thinking that they can't have the same things or they force traditions on themselves because they thought they had to.
Speaker 3:So I like to kind of approach working with my clients being like what's important to you, what are your priorities? What do you want to feel on your day? What's that's the important thing? Like, what do you want to create with your, with your partner, what do you want to share with your friends and family? And kind of just stripping away all the extra stuff of like what kind of plates, what kind of napkins? Let's just not even talk about that yet. Let's talk about what you want to feel first, and that, and a lot of people, when you walk into that conversation, don't have not even thought about it yet. They haven't thought about how they want to feel on their day yet. So I like to make, I like to start there.
Speaker 2:Very good, very good. Well, outside of work, what do you like to do for fun, erin?
Speaker 3:I'm an artist, so I paint, I draw. I also make all kinds of really fun fiber arts and things like that. I love hanging out with my friends. We go to the river. I mean, we live in Hot Springs.
Speaker 1:North.
Speaker 3:Carolina, so we're river people over here and we've got mountains surrounding us. I have six dogs, so I spend a lot of time at home with my partner and my dogs and and I love traveling.
Speaker 2:Time with family Absolutely Best. You got the AT going right through the middle of town too.
Speaker 3:I do.
Speaker 2:It's literally a block from my house, so you can hike anytime you want, just walking down the street.
Speaker 3:I walk on it almost every day.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. That's crazy. Love it crazy. Well, let's switch gears for just a second. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you've overcome and how it made you stronger in the end? Oh boy, either professionally or or personally, whatever. Yeah, I mean there's.
Speaker 3:I have a lot that I can go from. In that scheme of things, I think the hardest thing that I've ever had to go through was my career shift into wedding planning and to figure out what actually that I wanted that and to start this business, rather than staying on with LeFleur and becoming a business partner with her, because that was proposed to me when I was living in Arizona. My dad died. My father died and I was living super far away from my family, so it was a tough transition to be able to take the time to grieve and I found myself in the wedding industry and then I decided, like I want this for myself. I want to. I want to work with the clients I want to work with. I want to create the day that I want to work with, or, like the, with the people that I want to work with. I want to collaborate on a bigger scale, um, with these people.
Speaker 3:And I decided I was going to move across, to come back across the country, but not move back to Richmond. And I moved to Marshall, north Carolina, which is the next town over from Hot Springs, and I just fell in love. I fell in love with that community and I. I overcame it just by trying it, just by doing the thing that I felt like I needed to do. I felt a calling to provide a safe space for people, and with that I was in weddings. So why not do it in weddings and make their love feel special? And it took a huge leap and a huge jump. I'd never started a business before, I'd never done a huge move across the country by myself before, so it really felt like a huge thing where I was choosing myself and choosing a place where I felt like I can find the community that I've always been looking for.
Speaker 2:From Arizona to Marshall, North Carolina. That's crazy. How did you pick Marshall?
Speaker 3:I picked Marshall. Well, my grandparents moved to Asheville about 20 something years ago and fell in love with Asheville in a different sense and I loved visiting. My dad also fell in love with Asheville but then fell in love with Marshall. He found he was looking at property in the surrounding areas and fell in love with Marshall and I grew up renovating the family farmhouse in Marshall with him. Every summer I'd come down and renovate and do things and paint and build and it was such an inspiring time and with that I learned the community. Because it's so small, you can't go anywhere here without meeting everyone, and I always had it in my heart as a place that I feel safe, in, that I can breathe. And after losing my dad it felt like, oh shit, oh sorry.
Speaker 2:Language.
Speaker 3:I really just wanted to be in the place that I could breathe and that felt safe to me, and so Marshall was calling to me and just ended up needing to be here and I didn't know why or how. And over the last like almost 10 years it's been the most beautiful time and I found my chosen family here. I have like the most beautiful life and I'm so lucky. Even after Helene it's exponentially more special.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, great, great story. Well, if, erin, if you could think of one thing that you'd like our listeners to remember about you and about playing with sprinkles, what would? What would that be?
Speaker 3:I think not that everybody is getting married or anything, but I think approaching life with love and beauty and being as present as possible really does create magic for you, and I know that this. I don't know if your audience is a little bit woo-woo or not, but if they find themselves feeling a little bit of a wiggle or a piece of joy, hold that in your heart and feel it, and I feel like that's what I like to try to bring to my clients and to the people around me.
Speaker 2:Awesome A wiggle. You got to hold that wiggle in. Hold that wiggle in or let it out.
Speaker 3:Sometimes you got to let those wiggles out. Yeah, you got to release them, you got to share them.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I love it. I love it. Well, for those of our listeners who may be thinking about getting married, getting hitched, having an event of some sort up in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina, how can they learn more about Plain With Sprinkles with sprinkles?
Speaker 3:Uh, they can visit my website, uh, wwwplainwithsprinklescom. It's P L A I N Um. Or they can check out my Instagram at plain with sprinkles.
Speaker 2:Very good, all right. Well, aaron, I can't tell you how appreciative I am of you taking time out of your busy schedule of working and volunteering and helping to get get everything cleaned up there in hot Springs and and Western North Carolina, and so thank you for that, thank you for what you've done, you know, for the community, and we wish you and your family and playing with sprinkles all the best moving forward.
Speaker 3:All right, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and maybe we can have you back sometime in the future when you got something big going on.
Speaker 3:I would love that. Thank you All right.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Erin.
Speaker 1:All right. Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnptry-citiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423-719-5873.