Hello everyone and welcome to our first post on event planning tips! We will be posting party planning tips every week, to help our customers and potential customers with their do-it-yourself events.

Cocktail Parties and Numbers:

So, whether for your parent’s wedding anniversary, or a class reunion, or an executive conference, you’ve decided to have a cocktail party. The problem is, you don’t know how many of what kind of table you need. You think cocktail party and you automatically say, “Well, I need cocktail tables right?” Yes, but they aren’t the only things you need. First, how many people do you have? We’re going to start a bunch of math here, so we need a number to start with. For the purpose of this example, we’ll say you are realistically expecting 60 people. At any one time, you should expect one-third of your guests to sit. So, for our example you need 20 chairs, with smaller tables to accommodate them (a 36″ round table will seat 4, so you get 5 of those tables). OK,  so people can sit. But what about the people standing at those high cocktail tables? Again, at any one time you should expect one-third of your guests to gather at the cocktail tables, so again for our example that’s another 20 people. But since they’re standing, you can fit 5 people at a cocktail table, so divide that last 20 by 5, and you get 4 cocktail tables. The rest of your guests are basically going to stand around in their own little clusters. Don’t forget a bar! Unless you have more than 80 people, you should be able to manage with 1 bar.

We hope these tips will help you in planning your own special events.