The young woman peppers the shell-shocked couple with a barrage of questions: Have your parents met? Are you planning to send out save-the-date cards? Do you have a photographer yet? What about ceremony music? 

It’s a pre-marital interrogation taking place in a dimly-lit corner of a Fountain Valley, Calif., coffee shop, with wedding planner Caroline Chang playing lead investigator.

Chang works through a checklist on her lap and takes meticulous notes as the bride and groom rattle off ideas for their dream wedding. The betrothed, Jacqueline Le and Andrew Yen, have just hired her to coordinate the itsy-bitsy details of their July nuptials, and Chang doesn’t want to miss a beat. After all, in her line of work, she only gets one chance to get it right: Wedding Day.

After an hour into the meeting, the couple’s anxiety wanes.

“I feel so much better,” says Le. “At first, I thought I had to do it all.”

In the last four years, the 25-year-old wedding planner has managed more than a hundred weddings in California, fine-tuning the countless details that demand attention in the months leading up to the big day and extinguishing any last-minute fires that arise during the celebration. While the bride and groom are greeting guests and the new in-laws are beaming from ear to ear, she’ll move heaven and earth to save the top of a melting wedding cake and get a malfunctioning chocolate fountain to flow, all the while making sure her clients are kept clueless to such potential stressors.

She’s like a shock absorber with French-manicured toenails. “Let us remove the stress from your event,” say her promotional materials. She named her business Serenity Events, based on a mission statement to keep couples stress-free and to insure that what should be one of the happiest days of a married couple’s life is indeed happy.

Chang launched Serenity Events six months after she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in sociology and a minor in education. She had originally thought she would become a kindergarten teacher because she always loved kids and had some experience teaching dance. But she soon realized she could not envision herself teaching kids for the rest of her life.

“There’s a certain kind of patience you need, and I thought I had it,” says Chang. “But I didn’t.”

In contemplating alternative careers, she drew up a mental list of her qualities and interests. One thing she knew for sure was that she was organized; her friends in high school dubbed her the “List Girl.” During her college years at Berkeley, Chang often coordinated events for different campus organizations and thought it would be so cool to be a wedding planner.

Fortunately, a friend of her college roommate was a wedding planner and invited her to get a taste of the business. Chang shadowed the planner and instantly fell in love with the process. She decided that this industry could be a perfect fit for her and trained with some professional planning organizations. Her mother, then a swap meet vendor in Orange County, Calif., encouraged her to enter the general workforce, but Chang wanted to launch her own business.