COVID-friendly celebrations

With events forced to take a back seat due to the pandemic, throwing a gathering for your loved ones or co-workers can present numerous concerns. But while keeping safety paramount and following the protocols set up by the Government, local event-planning companies like M Style XP and Dragonfly Experience have gotten resourceful in creating COVID-friendly celebrations.

Lifestyle Today sponsors and set creators M Style XP are a division of the Main Event Entertainment Group Ltd, which provides full-service wedding and event planning, design, and execution services. When the pandemic halted the number of large events that the company had become used to executing, they quickly had to adapt to the current needs of their clients by creating scaled-down gatherings and upping their virtual ones.

“It begins from the initial planning phase, and we try to ensure that we guide our clients with the established safety protocols. We give advice and execute accordingly,” said Sasha Forrester-Miller of M Style XP. “When it comes on to sanitisation stations, safety signage, making sure there are adequate seating arrangements to ensure you don’t have clusters of persons gathered in any one space, we do that.”

Kimberley Dunkley Watkins of Dragonfly Experience notes that people still want and need human energy around. It just has to be done safely. Her business also took a hit due to the COVID pandemic, but she has tried to be nimble and create exceptional micro-events, with a focus on the sensory experience.

“Humans are meant to interact. The reason why I do what I do is because I love people, and I love interactions and relationships with people,” says Dunkley Watkins, who also launched Dragonfly Kids during the pandemic to cater to customising experiences for children. “I think that we as humans crave that [interaction] and need it to live, and to do that, we need to be able to gather, and to be able to gather, we need to be healthy and safe, and it is possible to do that with events.”

From weddings to elevated dining experiences, a silver lining of the pandemic for Dunkley Watkins has been the ability to make the smaller events even better and more meaningful by tailoring locations, cutting numbers, and fine-tuning details that enhance the occasion.

M Style XP has also got inventive in creating corporate gatherings with the help of spacing, attractive décor elements, and the champion of our time: virtual.

Both companies agree that the way forward for events is the safe adaptability and use of creativity in our current circumstance because an unfortunate truth is that the coronavirus will be with us for some time longer, and life as we know it must continue.

debra.edwards@gleanerjm.com