February, and the activity heats up even if the weather doesn’t!

February was a brave choice for a big marquee wedding but apart from some very wet and windy weather at the start of the week (and some restrictions on vehicle access!) it was a great success. Justin Orde took over the reins at Gill Orde in Catering for the first time and did an amazing job. We brought Finix in to do the lighting and once again they created an oasis of warmth on what was a fairly raw February night.

The marquee was designed with a luscious honey beige carpet, black and white dancefloor, panels of fairylights on the ceiling and lots of warm greens and golds in the table centres and floral displays. Marquee heaters kept the inside cosy while outside Finix's lighting cast a majestic glow over the house and surrounding trees.

The rest of the month has seen marquees at the Murrayfield Hotel for the first of Scotland's Six Nations matches at home, and the Point to Point marquee at Friarshaugh still stands proud until the next meeting for the Buccleuch Hunt on the 19th March.

Meanwhile Steph and Karen beaver away in the office dispatching quotes and planning ahead for the busy summer months... time flies when you're having fun!

January - a month for meetings and planning!!

January was a month for meetings and mad planning! Meetings are not just a means for us to get business, it's also imperative that we familiarise ourselves with every site that will be accommodating one of our marquees and, particularly when it comes to weddings, it is also very important that we meet our clients face to face and start to develop a good working relationship right from the start.

Ultimately a marquee is a marquee - most of us in the industry get our marquees from the same manufacturers and, certainly when it comes to the clearspan framed marquees, the basic structure is the fairly standard. The difference with Best Intent Marquees comes from our service and the fact that we want to help our clients customise their marquees to match their vision for their event, whilst bearing in mind their available budgets. The traditional poled marquees offer something slightly different, as there are very few of us supplying them nowadays and as such they are in high demand. We are actually just in the process of renewing and replacing a lot of our stock for the traditional poled marquee, as while other companies are trying to move away from this style of marquee, for us it is a key product.

Indeed the January planning always leads to some quite major reinvestment - at the moment this year we have focused on a new lorry and forklift and new traditional marquees, but no doubt as we go through our orders for the rest of the year we will find other things we need to buy, upgrade and expand. This is an inevitable part of our business, as we always want to feel that our clients are getting the best of everything - particularly when it comes to their wedding day.

A very happy Christmas from Best Intent Marquees...

December is a time for Christmas parties and New Year celebrations. Despite a few clients cancelling for weather reasons, we still managed to provide a high school party marquee, furniture for Melrose Rugby Club and a New Year tent in Edinburgh. Otherwise, December is a good month for planning and maintenance. Christmas is always a popular time for people to get engaged, so we revved up the website and waited for the enquiries to come in, which - thankfully - they did! Thank you so much to everyone who used Best Intent Marquees in 2010 and to everyone who has chosen/will choose to use us in 2011 and beyond! We really enjoy the work we do, the challenges each event throws at us and the different visions people have for their marquee weddings, parties and corporate gatherings. Thank you to all of you for allowing us to keep doing what we love doing and please keep telling us where we can improve so that we can get better and busier year on year.

November marquees in the snow, wind and rain...

Unusually, November was quite a busy month. The first weekend in November saw us provide wedding marquees locally at Thirlestane Castle and Abbotsford. Later in the month we did marquees at the Murrayfield Hotel in Edinburgh where they provide a marquee bar and hospitality for the Autumn Rugby Internationals.  The weather in November proved to be quite a challenge for putting up the marquees for the corporate events and weddings across Scotland. We just managed to get the marquees at Lennoxlove done for the Lennoxlove Book Festival, before the snow came down....

The weekend of 27th saw us do two marquees for 21st birthday parties in Chirnside and Newcastleton, and while we managed to get on site to put them up no bother, it took a few days before we got back to take them down!

October finishes with an explosion of colour and light and two big marquee weddings...

October was - as you might expect - a quieter month. We did a couple of small marquee events in the Scottish Borders during the month, but then the last weekend of the month saw a big weekend of marquee weddings, with previous clients celebrating a second daughter's wedding in Gorebridge, and an old borders family wedding at Philiphaugh House, Selkirk. The weather was against us during the week but we worked hard and were rewarded with a lovely sunny day on the Saturday. At Philiphaugh we once again teamed up with Finix Productions with some wonderful interior and exterior lighting as a result.

With our wonderful student team back at university the workforce was slightly depleted so the partners were a bit tired come the weekend, but we were delighted that both clients - both of whom we had worked with before - enjoyed their days.