Roxana Onaca Is Great!
Dear All,
Our names are Alex Radu and Bride Trozelli-Radu and we were very lucky to have had Roxana Onaca as our wedding planner for our big day in July 2024 in Sweden. We didn't know what post-wedding gift to get her for all her hard work so we created this website for the world to get to know how great she is.
*And yes, in case you’re wondering, Bride is the first name of the bride!
.jpg)
Roxana came into our life at the start of 2024, seven months before our wedding date. We had just removed our previous wedding planner after many months of doing all the work ourselves and recognizing we were in need of both guidance and an additional helping hand!
A close friend introduced us to Roxana and highly recommended her as one of the top wedding planners in Romania, who specializes in destination weddings across Europe. When we told Roxana that while we live in London our wedding will be in Sweden she told us most of her weddings have been across Italy, Greece, France and Romania and she'd be very excited to add Sweden to her portfolio of destination weddings – while also working with two challenging people!
We decided to move forward with Roxana – and over the next seven months we repeatedly told Roxana that she was the best thing that happened to us this year.
Here are the top 10 reasons why we loved working with Roxana:
1. Roxana has a great vision. We had a very good idea of how we wanted our wedding to look like. Alex is Romanian and Bride is Swedish but we each lived a decade in the US and another decade in the UK. Roxana immediately understood how we wanted to blend the four cultures that created us into our wedding concept and host four events over four days that each map to one of them. She took our concept and expanded and designed a great vision for each event.
4. Roxana is well organized. Roxana set for us a recurring weekly zoom call every Sunday at 8pm our time in London which was 10pm her time in Bucharest which helped us inventory all tasks to be done and monitor our progress. Despite the meeting being very late on a Sunday for her, Roxana would push us to stay longer until we reviewed everything on the agenda, sometimes for 1.5 hours or more. In contrast our previous wedding planner had offered us a total of 4 zoom calls of strictly 1h each throughout our entire wedding planning month.
2. Roxana is extremely hard working. Roxana would not wait on us or any of the other suppliers to do the tasks assigned. If something wasn't done, she'd do it herself. We had a long list each week of people to contact or decisions to make. If by end of week we were falling behind, she'd step in and just do it.
5. Roxana always finds a solution. Our sound engineer who was supposed to ensure all audio equipment for our religious ceremony, celebratory drinks, dinner and speeches and party was not available to allocate time to us one month before the wedding. Roxana spent a weekend calling local sound engineers to find a replacement, found the best one and negotiated a great package. The new sound engineer arrived to the property the same day to understand the scope of work and provide us with an offer.
3. Roxana is very hands on. Our wedding was at Bride's family home in Sweden. Roxana took half a week out of her schedule so that months before our event she travelled from Romania to Sweden to understand the layout of the house, the chapel and the gardens in detail and meet all the local suppliers in person. She’d stay up past midnight every night to measure the dining halls and tables by herself and inventory all the decorations she’d need for our big day.
6. Roxana finds the best suppliers. We have been able to get the best providers and suppliers from all over Europe through Roxana's network. Our wedding band came from Nice, France, our videographers and club entertainers from Bucharest, Romania, our photographer from Stockholm, Sweden, bartenders from Sicily, Italy, our stationery printers from London, UK and our florists were from Norrköping, Sweden. Roxana’s ability to find anything online, call people in every country and negotiate any contract regardless of type of work is beyond impressive.
7. Roxana is a great leader. It takes a special person to cut across cultural barriers, country borders and different personality types and coordinate a wedding team formed of people from all types of backgrounds. Roxana led our large wedding crew formed of Swedish, Romanian, British, French and Italian folks. She was able to work with each person in a style that worked for them. When she had to be firm with them to manage timelines, she was. When she had to be kind and encourage them, she did just that. Roxana has a great ability to work with the most diverse set of people and get the best out of them.
8. Roxana gets along with everyone. Roxana lived with us in Bride’s ancestral home for the week of the wedding and the one before. She quickly became the best friend of the family of the bride (yes her first name is actually Bride!) and that of the groom and got everyone to enjoy their time together. She helped a lot to work with more difficult counterparts and mediated all relationships, did that with a smile and put smiles on everyone’s faces.
9. Roxana gets her hands dirty. During the wedding and much before we were genuinely impressed that Roxana would not just manage the team – she’d do things herself from carrying crates with 16 bottles of wine to physically carrying herself the carpet which made the aisle for our wedding ceremony. From high-level wedding concept design and ideation to manually re-arranging the flower arch behind the altar, Roxana gets it done – and it takes a special set of skill and a special personality to do everything from the highest level to the smallest detail.
10. Roxana became one of our best friends. Roxana did not ever treat us as clients but as some of her close friends – and she became one of our best friends in the process. As you can probably tell we were beyond impressed by how much value she added to our lives and wanted to create this website as tribute to her talent, hard work and effort – and let others know that if they have the opportunity to work with her, they should take it while it’s there. We always say that we hope our children have at least a tenth of the great talent and qualities that Roxana has.
If we can ever be helpful to provide a reference, please drop us a line on LinkedIn and we’d be happy to provide more information:
​
Alex Radu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexradu08/
​
Bride Trozelli-Radu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridetrozelli/
​