The big win – Best Celebrant
In 2020, I won the very first “Best Celebrant” category at the UK Wedding Awards.
At the time, I was four years into my career and honestly, the idea of being an “award winning celebrant” felt enormous.
The shortlist had been decided by an expert panel from Hitched and the editors of You & Your Wedding magazine. But the final winner was chosen by public vote and that really meant a lot. So many of my lovely couples went out of their way to support me and champion my work.
The awards ceremony was on February 13th, 2020 at The Baltimore in Mayfair. I bought a new dress, and shoes I could barely walk in. I took my husband along for moral support. And of course, I wanted to win. I know you’re not meant to but I’ve always been fiercely competitive. Just ask my family what I’m like when I’m playing monopoly! But also, being self-employed and building something from scratch straight after coming back from 2 years extended maternity leave, made for some pretty noisy imposter syndrome. Winning “Best Celebrant” felt like some kind of validation that I was actually good at this whole marrying thing.
So yes, I framed the certificate and sat it proudly on my office shelf.
Then a month later, the wedding industry – in fact the whole country – ground to a sudden halt…
The strange timing of wedding success
There’s a certain strange irony to winning a wedding award just moments before a global pandemic. Within weeks of my triumph, weddings were cancelled by government order.
Over the following eighteen months, I helped my couples navigate 48 postponements – moving dates again and again while trying to preserve some sense of excitement and hope around celebrations that suddenly felt impossibly fragile. And honestly, when the industry was stripped back to its bare bones, very little of it was about prestige. Nobody cared about trophies or titles. What mattered was communication, calmness, flexibility, kindness, problem-solving and being available when people were overwhelmed or disappointed. My role became about helping couples hold onto the emotional heart of what they’d planned, even when everything around it kept changing.
Those eighteen months taught me more about being a celebrant than winning “Best Celebrant” ever could.
Have wedding awards lost their meaning?
In recent years, wedding awards have become…complicated. Not all of them, of course. There are still awards with rigorous judging processes – independent panels, industry experts, real couples casting real votes – where winning actually means something. But they sit alongside many which operate more like marketing exercises than meaningful recognition. You can literally pay a fee to enter and be almost instantly granted a handy little badge for your website declaring you that year’s winner. And the problem is, you can no longer tell clearly which is which.
As a result, it can no longer be seen as a reliable emblem of prestige. It no longer sets you apart as being more qualified, more skilled or more trustworthy than the next wedding supplier. In fact, I think sometimes it can have the opposite effect. Couples question whether you too could be one of the people who has bought their title. And that comes with a definite ick factor.
But also, it means the industry has become saturated with titles like “Award-Winning”, “Best” and “Leading”. And when almost everybody is claiming to be the best, the phrase inevitably starts to lose impact. Its meaning is diluted.
So…do awards matter? And if not, how can we tell who really is top of their game?
My award mattered to me because it represented something real at that moment in time; support from my couples, recognition from industry professionals, and reassurance during those early years of building a business that I was doing something right.
But these days, I don’t think awards are the thing couples should place the most weight on when choosing a celebrant.
I think the better questions to ask are:
- Does their website give you a genuine sense of who they are as a person, not just what they do? A celebrant’s personality is the whole product – you should be able to feel it before you’ve even met them.
- Do they have real reviews from real couples, and do those reviews tell you something specific? “Talking to Laura felt like talking to a friend. She put us instantly at ease” or “We’d been so nervous about our ceremony but it ended up being our favourite part of the whole day” tells you something useful.
- Book an intro call! Are they easy to talk to? Do they listen well? Do they ask good questions? Because the ability to really hear a couple and translate what they share into something beautiful on the day – that’s the whole job.
- And perhaps most importantly: can you imagine trusting them with one of the most emotionally significant moments of your life? Because that’s exactly what you’d be doing.
What makes the “best celebrant”?
Celebrancy isn’t really something you can measure with a trophy. It’s built on hundreds of small, unrewarded moments; the right word at the right time, the ability to read a room, the instinct to slow down or speed up or crack a joke exactly when one is needed. But it’s also about what happens when things go wrong – a venue that closes without warning, pouring rain when you’d dreamed of an outdoor ceremony, someone forgetting the rings. Or something far more significant – a loved one receiving a devastating diagnosis, a family navigating grief while trying to hold onto joy.
The best celebrants don’t just perform well when everything goes to plan. They hold things together when they don’t. No trophy measures that.
But yes…the certificate is still framed.
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