Happily after wedding

“Where is the florist,” he complains, shooing away a swarm of mosquitoes. “She was supposed to be here at noon and what time is it now? 3pm?”

According to the muffled voice on the other line, some miscommunication has occurred and the offending vendor is “stuck somewhere”. He heaves a dramatic sigh: “All these stories and excuses, I’ve heard them before.”

The minutes are ticking by. All the prep work needs to be completed by 5pm, in time for vows to be exchanged between operations manager Hena Yeo, 31, and new media firm boss Ang Chonglai, 34.

After the solemnisation ceremony, a 10-course Chinese dinner will take place under a specially constructed marquee.

Nuptials aside, you are tuned into The Sherwin Lee Show. Calling the shots is the 31-year-old executive director of DoWed, an “experiential weddings” company – as he describes it – that he started four years ago as a creative response to soporific ballroom affairs with cheesy slideshows and unexciting menus.

The boisterous bachelor says: “I hate boring wedding dresses. Cut cake, change gowns, that’s it. I like to do something different each time, no matter what the budget.”

This wedding, which costs about $25,000 for about 200 people, is a simple affair by his standards. His most lavish project to date cost around $100,000. A wealthy Chinese couple had flown him to London to organise a bash at the Ritz-Carlton there.

Wedding planning services, he says, are getting wedding increasingly popular among Singaporeans, many of whom are marrying later and have more money to spend on professionally tailored weddings. Becoming a wedding planner requires no official accreditation.

One bride who behaved unreasonably all the time revealed, in a fit of tears, that she did so because she felt inferior to her husband’s family. Another would ring him at 2am to ask if she was “making the right decision”.