Ever since she started her business GOPR & Events a decade ago, Stephanie Ledigo has become known for her incredible event planning skills and has thrown everything from parties to baby showers to weddings, amassing over 28,000 followers on Instagram in the process.
With recent clients including Paris Fury, Holly Hagan and Steven Bartlett, Stephanie is no stranger to holding events that will be seen by thousands on Instagram – and it’s clear that she pours her all into every event she works on. Here, she speaks to OK! about all things event planning and how she's living her dream…
“I started my business GOPR & Events 10 years ago when I started doing small events in places like hair salons and gyms. One of the salons said they wanted a celebrity involved, so we asked Tanya Bardsley from The Real Housewives of Cheshire to attend and she was the first celebrity I’d ever dealt with. The event was a success and through word of mouth I started doing more celebrity events – it’s all thanks to Tanya really.
Recently it's gone absolutely bananas and I’ve done events for actors from Hollywood and Coronation Street as well as people from Geordie Shore. I can’t think of a celebrity that hasn't messaged us at some point.
As it’s my job to organise these events, I try my best to not get starstruck. I treat everybody the same because I need to be professional. My aim is to make clients feel as comfortable as possible, so selfies are strictly off limits.
Very often I’ll get a DM on Instagram and a client will tell me about an event they need help with. I’ll then ask if they have a theme in mind and from there I will draw up some proposals so they can pick exactly what they want.
We always go above and beyond with our events. Sometimes we’re even told that we’ve done too much! Paris will often laugh, ‘we don’t need 1,000 balloons, Steph’.
The Furys are an event planner’s dream. Paris is the busiest woman in the world but she always puts her kids first and puts so much thought into their birthdays. We’ve doneVenezuela's birthday for the past three years and the theme has changed each year. With the Furys, we usually get two or three days' notice because children can change their minds when it comes to the theme, but that’s the case with all kids!
One of the best events we’ve done was the christening for Paris and Tyson’s daughter Athena which featured on their recent Netflix show. We took over a hotel in Morecambe and draped the whole room in pink. It was the most pink you’ve ever seen – I was in Morecambe for three days for that. It was such a special event.
I’d say children’s parties are one of my favourite events to plan as the themes can be out of this world. I also really love romantic surprises. For Davide Sanclimenti's birthday, Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu said that she wanted to decorate their hotel room. While they were at breakfast, we decorated it with Italian themed balloons and had a singer perform Italian songs – I actually hid in the curtains in the room for that one. To see them so happy meant the world to me. The response is always the best part of the job.
I’ve also done some gender reveals, and it can be a lot of pressure to know that you’re one of the only people who knows the baby’s gender. At one point we had around six celebrity gender reveals on at the same time and I was so worried that I’d plan one party around the wrong person’s pregnancy scan – luckily that never happened!
We never like to do the same theme twice, so everything takes a lot of research. Even when I’m on holiday I’m looking at different hotels to see what flowers they’re using when my friends just want to go to the beach. I think they’re used to it by now.
This business is my dream and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I joke that it’s hard to get a boyfriend because I’m constantly on my phone and at work, but I make sacrifices because I love my job so much. I remember being on a flight once and finding out that a client had got the date of an event wrong by one month. Suddenly something that was a month away was happening in a couple of hours and I had to fire out a lot of messages just as I was boarding the plane. We managed to get it done but it wasn’t the best way to start a trip.
Throwing an event for the Kardashians would be the ultimate goal, but a lot of my ambitions for the company have already come true. I’m into manifesting and one time I put pictures of dream clients on my Instagram Stories and the next morning I had a message asking if I could help one of them with an event and I couldn’t believe it. Maybe one day I could do the same with the Kardashian family.”
Find and follow GOPR & Events on Instagram at go_pr_and_events.
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