The era of the copy-and-paste wedding is fading. According to The Knot 2026 Real Weddings Study, which surveyed 10,474 U.S. couples married in 2025, 58% said they would look beyond traditional trappings in favor of details that feel true to them. Couples now hire 13 vendors on average, and 59% say the economy has affected how they plan.
That combination of a hunger for originality and a sharper eye on every dollar is exactly the gap Joyce Parris has spent more than a decade learning to fill.
Parris did not set out to start a company. For years she decorated events for friends and family for free, simply because she loved it.
The turning point came when a cousin announced she was getting married. Parris stepped in to help, as she always had, but this time something shifted. Watching the day come together, she saw how much her work meant to the people around her and realized she could offer that same relief and joy to countless others beyond her own family. What had always been a quiet act of support suddenly looked like something much bigger. “I decided I was just going to do it as a business instead of doing it for free,” she says. In that moment, a lifelong gift for helping others became the foundation of a company.
The early years were a crash course. “I didn’t know much about the industry, and I put a lot of time and energy in places where I shouldn’t,” Parris says. What changed everything was learning to listen. “As I grew and understood it more, I got better and better. I listened more to my clients and gave them what they wanted, and everything fell into place.”
Today, Elegant Decorations & Rental is her full-time business. The company says it has planned over 400 weddings and events, from small family gatherings to a 500-guest celebration, and has travelled across the country and internationally for clients.
Event decorating has few barriers to entry, and Parris has watched the field fill up. “It’s not one of those industries where it takes a whole office,” she says. “People do their own weddings, decide they’re pros at it, and keep going. Some fall out, some keep going. You wake up, and somebody else is doing it.”
Her answer to a crowded market is choice. Clients can hire her team for full planning, coordination, and design. Or they can simply rent the pieces: furniture, linens, centerpieces, draping, columns, cake stands and florals, and style the event themselves. “If you want to do it yourself, you rent the stuff from me and do it yourself, and we come back and pick it up,” Parris explains.
That flexibility matters at a time when couples want an event that looks like nobody else’s but are also watching their budgets. A couple with a clear vision can bring it to life with professional-grade pieces, without paying for full-service styling.
Parris has also turned would-be competitors into customers. Her inventory makes Elegant Decorations & Rental a supplier to other decorators. “If they don’t have the items they’re looking for, they can rent them from me,” she says.
This year, Parris has noticed a new pattern: clients arriving late in the process. Some are planning weddings on short notice. Others started on their own, hit a wall, and need help crossing the finish line.
“People come at the last minute,” she says. “Sometimes they simply get stuck somewhere and need getting through to the finish line.”
Her setup is built for that. Based in the community she serves, Parris makes herself available almost around the clock. “People wake up and say, ‘We need some chairs, we need some tables, we need some linens,’ and they can pop in right away and get them,” she says.
The work is not limited to weddings. Elegant Decorations & Rental handles celebrations across a lifetime, from baby showers to milestone birthdays to memorials. Most new clients still find the business the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth.
The team has transformed ballrooms, parks, beaches, and lodges across Maryland and beyond. But the spaces are only part of the story. What she really builds are the moments people carry with them long after the last chair is folded: the first look, the first dance, the room falling silent as a couple walks in. In an industry where anyone can start tomorrow, she has built something that can’t be copied overnight, because it began the same way it continues: with a woman who once helped someone on the biggest day of their life, and realized she could do the same for so many others.
