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Meet Events Coordinator /Wedding Planner
Paula DeArtiaga

Recently divorced and a single parent, Paula DeArtiaga moved to Florida from Alabama 20 years ago because she wanted a fresh start. Now she has launched herself again, this time to start her own company.

Her first order of business was to join the Association of Bridal Consultants, where she underwent rigorous training to get certified. Paula says her most successful advertising has been through the Internet. She also advertises in bridal magazines and attends bridal shows.

Five years ago her daughter was in college (now in medical school in an Ensign in the Navy) and Paula met the man who soon became her husband. Her "bachelorette condo" in Tierra Verdo no longer fit the bill. She sold the condo and after a "fairy-tale" honeymoon in Venice, Paris and France's wine country, they built a house in New Tampa where Paula has a state-of-the-art kitchen and all the space she needs to host fabulous dinner parties.

A creative type, Paula has taken her longtime interest in cooking to new heights with themed parties where friends and neighbors get to try her latest culinary creations. Each year she puts together a cookbook, which includes recipes named after those who good-naturedly fought the hardest to have a recipe named after them. The stiff competition for naming, though, is the only area where Paula's thinking allows for any notion of competition. With 32,000 weddings in the Tampa Bay area a year, she says she doesn't see how there can be too many wedding planners.

Paula DeArtiaga

Working at a bridal shop and addressing invitations during college was a propitious sign of things to come later in Paula's life.