Kate Turner of Kate and Co | Three Wedding Businesses, Radical Transparency, One Very Old Horse & The Year That Almost Killed Me
Kate Turner is the founder of Kate and Company, a St. Louis wedding planning and design firm, Marinelle Event Co., a full-service production company, and cofounder of Landlocked Luxury, a wedding industry education conference built specifically for vendors in mid-sized and smaller markets. She has been in the wedding industry for nearly 17 years, has right-sized her business twice, and is currently eyeing a move into a 20,000 square foot warehouse. She also has three boys, zero daughters, and zero regrets about naming her production company after her grandmother instead.
In this episode of the Texas Wedding Podcast, Kate walks through how she built Kate and Company from the ground up in St. Louis starting in 2012, why she right-sized the business in 2017 and again in 2021, and how Marinelle Event Co. came to life just two years ago as what she believes is the real legacy play. She talks about the difference between destination wedding planning versus destination photography or videography, why the mid-market mindset is quietly influencing how major cities operate, and what it actually costs to produce a conference like Landlocked Luxury when ticket sales only cover a fraction of the budget.
Kate also shares how Landlocked Luxury was born: a chance meeting with photographer Trent Broglin at a Vegas wedding where things were going sideways, a DM about a content carousel, a coffee meeting, and a first conference that came together in under four months. They built it because she kept going to conferences where the advice was built for LA and New York, and she needed something that actually worked in St. Louis, Kansas City, and everywhere else in between.
Her WIPACon breakout session is called The Year That Almost Killed Me. She has never spoken on it publicly before. She will also be designing and producing the Monday night gala at WIPACon in Dallas. This episode is part of the Texas Wedding Podcast WIPACon series.
If you are a wedding vendor in a mid-sized market who is tired of advice that does not fit your city, this one was made for you.
Kate and Company, Wedding Planning & Design: kateandcollc.com | @kateandcompany
Marinelle Event Co., Production: marinelle.co | @marinelle.co
Landlocked Luxury, Wedding Industry Education: landlockedluxury.com | @landlockedluxury
WIPA National: wipa.org/2026conference | @wipa_org
The Texas Wedding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Cochran of 718 Creative, a Texas wedding videographer.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out Rebecca Martens of Belle Events for another conversation about what it really looks like to build and scale a wedding business while leading a large team through everything this industry throws at you.
Full Episode Transcript: Kate Turner of Kate and Co
Kate Turner is the founder of Kate and Company, a St. Louis wedding planning and design firm, Marinelle Event Co., a full-service production company, and cofounder of Landlocked Luxury, a wedding industry education conference built for vendors in mid-sized and smaller markets.
Building Three Wedding Businesses: Kate and Co, Marinelle Event Co., and Landlocked Luxury
Kevin: You're talking about getting everyone under one roof. Are you talking about Kate and Co, or Landlocked?
Kate Turner: I actually have three businesses. Kate and Company is primarily planning and design. We take on about six to ten weddings a year, depending on the scope of work. We have a production company that does production for some of our own events, but also collaborates with a lot of other local planners, florists, and venues in the St. Louis market. We're based in St. Louis but travel regionally. And then there's Landlocked Luxury, our education platform.
The production company is named Marinelle Event Co., named after my grandmother. As the story goes, I was going to have a daughter and name her Marinelle after my grandmother, because we're very close. I ended up with three boys and no daughters to name, so I named the business after her instead.
We've had the production company for two years. It's brand new, but we've built it slowly over time, building inventory as we've needed it. We're at about a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse right now. Kate and Co. is at about three thousand square feet. We're looking to jump to twenty thousand square feet in the next couple of years and get everyone under one roof.
Kate and Company will always be my primary business and my passion, but the production arm has the most growth potential. There's probably twenty-five million dollars in the St. Louis marketplace alone on the production side, and the opportunity on the planning side, especially at the level we're planning at, is much smaller. I think Marinelle is the legacy piece, what I'll leave behind, and maybe what my boys will have interest in as they get older. It also has the most room to expand into other categories, like lighting or floral.
Right-Sizing the Business Twice
Kate Turner: We spent a lot of time in 2017, and then again in 2021, right-sizing the business, which I think was really needed. There are four of us here now, and I'm happy with the number of events we take on. Kate and Company will always stay where it's at.
Selling the Family's Event Space and Catering Business
Kate Turner: My dad owned a chocolate company here in St. Louis and moved the facility down to the riverfront. He asked me to consult on the space, and I realized it was made for an event space, a rooftop overlooking the river. We built our first event space together in 2013, and he invested in our hospitality company. That grew to about five to six million dollars a year in catering and events, until 2020 hit.
That was a really hard time. My dad had been diagnosed with cancer for the second time and was looking to exit and officially retire. At the same time, I was dealing with brides who didn't understand cancellation fees during COVID. We sold off that leg of the hospitality company in 2021, and I'm so happy we did. I never looked back, and I'm thankful not to be dealing with food and beverage or venues anymore. We paid my dad back his investment, with interest, in about nine months.
Why Destination Planning Is Harder Than Destination Photography or Video
Kate Turner: This might ruffle some feathers, but I think it depends on what you do within the industry. As a photographer or videographer, working a destination event is so much easier than it is for a planner, because I have to know the ins and outs of a space for eight, eighteen months, every inch of it. A photo or video team can often get by with a scouting visit, or coming in a few days early. Most of the lay of the land, we have to work out virtually, which is much harder on the planning side. I do think it's more challenging to be a destination event planner than it is in some of the other verticals in our industry.
About sixty percent of our work is destination. When I travel into a new market, including Texas, my assumption going in is that there will be more resources than I have in St. Louis. What actually surprises me is how different other markets operate, and how much more expensive things typically are elsewhere than they are locally to us. The other difference: other markets tend to have more tabletop rental resources but fewer standalone production resources (bars, draping, lighting) that you can mix and match across companies.
In St. Louis, Kansas City, and a lot of mid-sized markets, it's common to pull tabletop from one company and bars or draping from another. In bigger markets like Chicago or Dallas, most vendors want it to be all-or-nothing: all the flowers, all the production, all the tabletop together, or none of it. That's starting to shift, though. Larger companies are starting to split their rental and production divisions from their floral and design divisions, the way some mid-market companies have done for years.
On Wedding Industry Pricing and Why She Runs Multiple Revenue Streams
Kate Turner: I recently engaged with a bride on TikTok who was talking about being quoted twenty-five thousand dollars for an event planner, and the comments were calling it a scam. The reality is that couples and their families have no idea how much time goes into what they're asking for, and our prices often don't reflect the actual amount of time we spend. If you look at who's most successful in this industry, people like Lynn Easton or Todd Fiskus, most of them have multiple revenue streams contributing to one pot, not just one business.
People often don't want to pay us what we're worth, so many of us need other ways to provide for our families: planners, videographers, photographers, hair and makeup artists, venues, catering, all of us. My husband is also in the wedding industry, so we're both feast-or-famine, which is part of why I've built multiple businesses.
On the conference side specifically, our overhead for Landlocked Luxury runs about seventy-five thousand dollars a year. That covers the website, email marketing, a social media team, and someone part-time to manage the inbox. People sometimes do the math on ticket price times a hundred attendees and assume that's pure profit, and it isn't once you account for what it actually costs to run.
There's No Such Thing as Work-Life Balance in This Industry
Kate Turner: Boundaries are real and healthy. Balance is not. If you're in the wedding industry and think you're going to have work-life balance, you're in the wrong industry.
I'm lucky. I can get a haircut on a Tuesday, take my kids to a doctor's appointment, or go to a school play without asking anyone's permission. But if a client has a true emergency at seven o'clock on a Tuesday night, I'm going to take that call, because access to me and my team is part of what they're paying for. Anyone selling you on work-life balance in this industry is probably making more money selling you that idea than they are actually working in it.
The Biltmore Storm Wedding
Kate Turner: Last August we did a wedding at the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina. Part of the plan involved bringing in the bride's very old horse for her to ride in on, which meant the horse needed to arrive days in advance to acclimate to the grounds.
We were on a skeleton crew, trying to balance having enough hands on-site without overloading the client's travel costs. I was sitting on a bench with my production manager, Kim, looking at what I thought was a white fluffy cloud over the mountains, and it wasn't. In under twenty minutes, we pivoted the entire ceremony: pushed the start back thirty minutes, briefed the family, communicated the new plan to every guest, and got everyone a drink at the bar while the storm rolled through. Everything dried off, the ceremony happened, and the rest of the night went off without a hitch.
Afterward, we pushed the whole night's timeline back, including fireworks, and I left the event at three in the morning. I had about an hour before I needed to be up to fly home, and transportation hit a few more hiccups on top of that. We never actually went to bed.
How Landlocked Luxury Started
Kate Turner: "Landlocked luxury" is a phrase I coined for a breakout session I gave at Engage Summit, around 2021, the first in-person Engage after COVID. Around the same time, two St. Louis-area photographers, Trent Broglin and Emily, were running something called a content carousel, styled shoots with a planner brought in to design them.
I met Trent through photographer Mike Casimatis, who brought him on as a second shooter for a wedding I worked in Las Vegas three weeks postpartum, after a C-section. After that trip, I sent Trent a DM about how much I loved his content carousel concept and offered to design one for him. That turned into a coffee meeting with Trent and Emily, where we talked about combining a styled shoot with an education component instead of keeping them separate.
We met in January, and the first Landlocked Luxury happened the following April, under four months later. The format: I designed four styled-shoot vignettes, and attending planners paid to learn by helping execute the vision, alongside a morning breakout session (mine was on percentage-based pricing) and an afternoon panel with some bigger industry names.
The response was strong enough that we moved the second event up to the following February, under ten months later, held at the Ritz in St. Louis. That one felt like the first real conference.
Why Landlocked Luxury Exists: Advice Built for Mid-Sized Markets
Kate Turner: So much of the content at major industry conferences is built for people in LA, New York, or Dallas. I was once told by a speaker from New York that I should charge twenty percent with a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar minimum. That's fantastic advice, if you're in LA. It doesn't work in St. Louis, or in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, or Wisconsin.
I credit planner Michelle Rego for pushing me toward percentage-based pricing in the first place, though I had to adjust her numbers to fit my own market. That's the gap Landlocked Luxury is built to close: real, actionable content for the roughly ninety-five percent of us who don't live in a top-three major market, dealing with real resource limits, weather, and budgets that have to stretch.
We cap Landlocked Luxury at 100 paid attendees, usually 120 to 140 total once you count trade and speakers, specifically so people get real access and time with speakers over three days, instead of being one of three hundred people trying to get thirty seconds with someone. It's held annually the first week of March, always in a landlocked city. We've done St. Louis, Kansas City, and Milwaukee, with Nashville next.
Producing the conference at our level runs about six hundred to seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, and paid ticket sales only bring in about two hundred to two hundred ninety thousand of that. Sponsors and partners cover the rest, which is also what lets us keep the ticket price approachable and cap attendance at 100. As of this recording (late July), the upcoming Nashville event was about seventy-five percent sold out, with full-pay, two-payment, or monthly payment plan options available.
WIPACon 2026
Kate Turner: My team and I are designing and hosting Monday night's event at WIPACon, and I'm speaking in a Tuesday-afternoon breakout session called "The Year That Almost Killed Me," a topic I've never spoken on publicly before.
Connect with Kate: Kate and Company, Wedding Planning & Design: kateandcollc.com | @kateandcompany Marinelle Event Co., Production: marinelle.co | @marinelle.co Landlocked Luxury, Wedding Industry Education: landlockedluxury.com | @landlockedluxury
