>According to The Knot’s annual survey, the average wedding in 2017 cost $33,391, a slight dip from $35,329 in 2016, but still more than half of the median annual household income in the United States.
Uhhhh... I absolutely hate when the media uncritically (or at least without context/a disclaimer) parrots The Kont's "Real Weddings Survey" as meaningful, because, IMO, this number is somewhere between very misleading and complete bullshit.
Some issues:
-Selection bias - only includes people who sign up for wedding websites, (or in the case of Brides magazine’s “American Wedding Study,” subscribe to wedding magazines) which, by definition, excludes people who have reasonably priced weddings. People whose weddings are a BBQ in the backyard aren't signing up for wedding websites and subscribing to wedding magazines.
-Reporting on average without including median, which is much, much less. One million dollar wedding can skew the average very high, and like I said before, the low side isn't even included in the data set to offset the Chelsea Clintons.
-Conflict of interest - the wedding industry itself is the only one reporting these figures and the wedding industry has a vested interest in reporting astronomical numbers because it gets you primed to spend spend spend.
Often times, it is the reports themselves that mention average and not median. If you want their full data set, you usually have to pay out the nose for their 'premium service' or whatever.
At the end of the day, this article isn't investigative journalism. It's not different from articles where they obtain a quote from an email or phone call with a university professor on some topic, without a critical analysis of that professor's research focus, conflicts of interest, etc.
Very good points. Reminds me of the DeBeers-sourced "average cost of engagement ring" and the auto-industry's "average cost of new car" figures. It also takes advantage of the colloquial interpretation of "average" as meaning "normal". I think it all comes down to the endemic "journalism by press release" nature of a large portion of news media. But good journalism costs a lot of money, and the public is generally reluctant to pay for it in these relatively low importance subjects. That leaves the playing heavily tilted toward industries that are willing to spend to push their own narratives.
And ignores cultural aspects Indian (Asian) weddings can be Huge - in the UK in my relatively small county town we had one a few years back that had 600 guests.
I spent some time researching this mostly because I was curious, but basically the answer to "why are weddings so expensive" and also "why is it so hard to disrupt the wedding industry" are largely the same in my opinion:
Because people have extremely high expectations for the major expenses of a wedding (venue, flowers, band, etc.).
The joke (and I even see it here) is that you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly, the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection.
So, it's not a huge surprise to me that wedding vendors have been hard to disrupt - it seems logical to assume that mass market usually comes with a reduction in quality compared to bespoke (or at least a bespoke-like experience), and people mostly refuse that and are willing to pay a huge premium for weddings (begrudgingly, admittedly).
Most regular cakes are small affairs. If you go to that same baker and ask for a 3-tier, ornately decorated cake that will feed at least 50-100 people and has a keepsake decoration on top, it'll be more.
Cakes like that are a different beast. They require special recipes so they don't collapse themselves. I know professional bakeries are able to spend less time than I did making my sister's wedding cake - a 3-tier affair - but they are still a decent amount of work and effort. Doubly so if you are paying the baker to transport and assemble the cake.
So yeah, of course wedding cakes are expensive, depending on the bells and whistles. But so are equally decadent cakes with the bells and whistles.
In addition to that, weddings are very seasonal. Prices are often only a fraction if you get married out of season (e.g. getting a photographer during the week in winter). Vendors specialized on weddings have to make most of their annual income on maybe a dozen weekends per year.
I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of a Bridezilla.
I would compare it more to, a regular cake has like, 2 9's SLA of being what you wanted. But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected.
So that's what they pay for. If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. I'm unwilling to pay 4x as much for something, just to chase a very diminishing improvement.
This is exactly right. My wife worked in the wedding industry for a long time and so she was aware of this when we finally decided to tie the knot. For each vendor we spoke with we only told them we were having an engagement party. We got the prices and then later revealed that this was for a wedding. We advise all of our friends that are getting married to do the same. You can save a decent chunk of change.
Wedding photography is another somewhat similar example. I've shot weddings for friends who just wanted some decent memory pictures. In school, I also shot a couple weddings for friends of friends for a small fee who were economizing. Or you can spend many thousands of dollars. In this case, it's not so much that wedding photography is a particularly high margin occupation but it's another example of going with a higher-end service than many people would consider for anything else in their lives.
Because it’s (supposed to be) once in a lifetime. No reason to risk THE day in your life to save some “pennies”, you won’t get a second chance. That’s the feeling everybody involved in the industry is making money on.
> you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100
This is very important to keep in mind. Never mention that you are working on organizing a wedding. Renting chairs? It's just for a party. Getting flowers? It's for a birthday. Vendors will almost always apply a huge markup when they hear "wedding".
> the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection.
Note and important that the baker is not insulated in any way from the aggravation and the bad feelings as a result of a problem. They will hear about it and they will live it. This is pretty much true for any small business. In other words if you are Comcast the CEO is well insulated from the pain and agony of any customers. Ditto for Airlines and so on. But the front office staff and/or the people who actually take the calls. Sure they hear about it and sure they might perceive it's a problem but they are not hearing the actual customer pain and getting aggravated. The baker will have someone come into the shop and they will see and feel the pain directly.
> the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly...
I don't agree on your why. The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence. It's in the same ballpark as a present to your fiancée (remember the rule of thumb for the price of the engagement ring: three times the gross monthly earnings whatever they are- which means: expensive by any standard). And I suspect this is valid across many cultures, so I'd say the reason is more or less anthropological. Thriftiness is rarely valued when it comes to these things.
At least Vox has pointed it out: An app/website cannot replace a building for a venue. An app cannot replace the band. It cannot replace the photographer.
What can it do? Attempt to be a middleman that extracts wealth from the sellers' margins.
In this case, the workers are not "gig economy" but professionals. They cannot be bullied nearly so easily as Uber can do with lopsided agreements and pittances in money to the desperate.
They can try to make it easier to connect these professionals with couples, but since people like to talk directly with these professionals and get the planning as part of the "experience", the two groups will bypass the middleman app's rent seeking through direct negotiation.
So the industry resist control by a tech company, simply because you cannot distill the whole process into swipes in an app + a credit card. This means the tech company needs service. It cannot have explosive tech-only growth where the only things needed are another few devs and more rented cloud servers.
Startups win on creating efficiency: saving time and/or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...
Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.
There are a lot of properties in common with real estate: for buyers the experience is rare and intense, at a huge information disadvantage. For service sellers, the transaction is repeated endlessly, in the same local market with the same people. There are many incentives and opportunities for service providers to work together to resist disruption.
Considering that the biggest expense of a wedding is the venue, then services (band, photographer), I could see the direct correlation to real estate.
I'm not sure you could get the venue owners to drop rates, because it sure doesn't seem like many have much of a demand shortage. Wedding venues seem to be booked way far out in advance, and don't seem to have any issues with vacancies. And I'm sure they are well aware of each others' rates.
Anecdotally, I also see large disincentives to lower costs for the other major services. Musicians who play weddings do so because the gig pays well, not because playing crappy covers is what they really want to do. Pretty sure the same goes for photographers - if the wedding business wasn't so lucrative, they'd probably just go do something else with their lives. They're all professional, but I'm not sure many would identify as a "wedding singer", just "musician" or "photographer". But, I'd guess they too are very aware of each other's rates, which gives them no reason to work for less money.
Not sure what there's to "disrupt" here other than culture. And if there's one true rule I've learned: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Where is the information asymmetry? Let's boil down weddings to needing to book a venue and have catering. The same could be said for planning a family reunion. You'd contact numerous venues and catering services and get the best prices, and then your event is planned.
In the case of a couple planning their wedding, what exactly do these service providers know that the couple does not? How much food ordinarily costs, when catered? How much a particular venue space usually rents for, for an evening?
Many of those can be rolled up into a venue (i.e. the venue supplies food, DJ, Cake, etc.), and personally, my fiancé nor I want to spend a lot of money on it.
So it feels like where they are disrupting are the "nice to haves" (expensive dress, cards, etc.) and not focusing on the "need to haves" (Food, venue, etc.)
And, if you come right down to it, the bulk of costs comes down to cultural/family expectations for a traditional formal wedding with a couple hundred of your closest friends of the sort I used to work part-time for a (old-line Main Line Philadelphia) caterer as a teenager.
I've attended a wide gamut of weddings over the years. Some are in the above vein, others are much more informal affairs, still others make the wedding a small family affair and have a bigger casual party as a separate event.
> (i.e. the venue supplies food, DJ, Cake, etc.), and personally, my fiancé nor I want to spend a lot of money on it
That's where we were at - we ended up renting out a restaurant for the evening - as long as they made what they normally make for an evening they were happy to have less people come in. They went all out on the food as they were feeding 30 people with it instead of the usual restaurant crowd. Our wedding cake was a nicer version of their regular chocolate cake (again, included in the food cost). Our music was the restaurants usual music. It was an excellent.
In regards to the dress, if you're non-traditional there's a ton of off-white non-wedding dresses that look perfectly acceptable and cost a tenth of the wedding varieties.
How much a plate will it cost for food? $125, $150 more?
If the typical mobile, prepared in advance, reduced menu restaurant with no real physical footprint can charge per plate what the finest tradition restaurants charge then there is clearly room for disruption.
Just as a comparison, the most expensive group dining option at Ruth Chris (selected for no reason other than I like their food) is $115 a plate. That is less than 2/3rds what we paid per plate at our wedding for something called "beaph" and looked like an old shoe.
Food was by far the biggest expense of our wedding. My wife and her family did want to go all out, and it came to about $100 a head for food/drink (I forget if I rolled out the venue price out of that exact number). For a nice meal for a bunch of people in New England that's not even that bad of a price
The venue was the next most expensive coming in at a flat rate of a few thousand
Everything else was pretty inexpensive by comparison although it does add up
You can't put a website in front of it and call it disruption. Every one of those things you mentioned gets bought after you have physically spoken with someone to give yourself the confidence they are legit.
It's such an important day, people want to make sure they'll be taken care of as special, unlike say, a cleaning service.
Companies that use "total spend on weddings" as a proxy for their total addressable market are either naive or disingenuous.
For couples having a "big wedding", 80%+ of the cost goes to: catering, venue, photographer, dress, flowers. All of those require a business with a local presence - a web startup isn't going to be able to replace any of those.
The companies mentioned in the article are actually tackling wedding line items that represent a much smaller fraction of the wedding's budget: stationary, registries, wedding websites, and wedding planning tools. Median spend for websites and planning tools is probably $0, because most couples are fine with free website creators (often provided as a loss leader) and Excel spreadsheets.
They're also aiming to collect referral fees or advertising spend from the vendors that actually provide the big line items. However, the total market there is "advertising budgets of other wedding vendors", not "total wedding vendor revenue".
Because weddings are based on emotions, not based on money or logic. The average wedding in San Francisco is $80,000, which is fucking insane. But it's just how it is, and you won't get someone to change that with "facts". Many things can get disrupted, but when the entire industry is based on emotions, you can't change people's minds.
Exactly this. They are buying a fantasy, a dream. Who wants a $500 dream? They are only doing this once and it is the most important day of their entire life so money should be no object!
Also, status. Emotion + status = $$$$$. There's a sense of self-worth for a lot of women superimposed straight onto the event itself because everyone knows it's for the bride more than anything else. Don't have a big to-do with a lot of pomp and circumstance and she feels like she's not worth it.
I’m honestly surprised yours is the only comment so far that mentions emotions in this discussion (I also didn’t see a mention of this in the article).
I think this is a similar situation to the often extreme costs seen in the Death Care Industry (Funeral and Mortuary services), just with the opposite end of the emotional spectrum being taken advantage of. People get invested in what they think society sees as necessary or appropriate and are driven by an emotional high/low into not really thinking about what they (or their passed loved ones) really want. They are driven by the emotional state to ignore expense and do whatever they can to convince both themselves and others of their feelings/intent, be that the love and promise of a new marriage, or the love and respect for someone who has passed.
There's often a Principal/Agent problem too : the people deciding how fancy/big the wedding should be are not always the people supplying the funding. Then the funding folks have reputational risk from appearing "cheap" in the eyes of the Agents. This keeps them from limiting the funding.
this x 1000. Decisions are not based on rationality, but totally based on emotions.
Weddings, by their very nature are Affective Events. They are events that reproduce social relations and emotions in the attendees. As such, the decision making process is lead by emotions.
Because people have these movie weddings in their minds and are willing to pony up anything for a day to remember. Personally I find the whole experience rather sad and very very overrated. I have been to many weddings and opted out of the entire experience when it came to ours. Best decision I’ve ever made. Wife mostly feels the same but occasionally wonders what it would be like to have a traditional wedding. I don’t know, maybe the fact that I’ve been to so many weddings in itself has ruined the experience for me? Everyone I’ve even seen married never seem to have a great time - there is always a ton of stress, discomfort, expense and cliches that feel rather silly. I know women are the ones who mostly look forward to this, so hopefully they are getting their money’s worth and that day to remember.
Anecdotally, my family threw a large traditional wedding for my sister, and it was magical. Three years later, people still tell us it was the best event they've ever attended.
Don't assume that everyone who has an expensive, traditional wedding hates it - that's as bad as turning up a nose at affordable or quirky weddings.
I don't claim to know that much about it, but nothing I've heard suggests that there's that much room for automation in the industry. Every wedding is a one-off with at least some custom requirements, and none are ever repeated. Where does an app or website come in? The experienced people in the industry know who to trust to get it right, who can do what, and roughly what it costs. They have the human ability to take care of the small problems without bothering the family, and know what issues to escalate to them.
Maybe the planners would like and be willing to pay for some tool that helped them organize things, but there's probably too much individual customization needed to make any such solution practical to build cheaper and better than Excel or something.
I think when people spend $30K on a wedding they don't start by saying I am going to spend $30K. It just comes out in drips. Like $500 for flowers, etc.
IDK, perhaps it's cos we're 31 and 32 so a bit more mature and had been warned and been able to talk to friends who've done it. But once we got enough info to get an idea of cost per head for food, venue hire fee, we then put together a spreadsheet and were bang on. YMMV, but it's really not that hard to anticipate most of the costs.
You have one chance to get it right for your clients - there are no do-overs. People only get one wedding day and if you screw it up, you've ruined it for them and they will talk about it for decades to come.
There is no "fail fast" in this realm. Tread lightly.
The surface area of weddings as a solvable problem is insane, partially because the variance in what people want out of a wedding is huge, and since the cost is usually so high, people are less incentivized to compromise on what they do and don't want.
Then it becomes a configuration problem. You could build a platform that connects couples with wedding vendors, but you might struggle to make that platform flexible enough to allow people to search for all aspects of what they're looking for. Food is a good example of this. When I got married, I had 3 separate dietary requirements I had to meet, which most caterers weren't able or willing to accommodate without a drastic price increase.
It would've been really difficult to build a platform that vendors would fill out fully because there are probably dozens of questions to ask.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but that was the biggest pain point for my wedding.
People get real salty if they've done something for generations and then suddenly you want to change things (or more likely things changed around them). See all rural politics.
- Registries: the article itself talks about Zola, for example. Although traditional registry sites (e.g. bloomingdales, bed bath and beyond) seem to still have most of the market in my experience.
- Invitations: You can still go to someone local for this, especially if you need something customized, but more and more people are creating their invitations online.
But there are a bunch of pieces of the wedding that are stubborn to change. Other major expenses include venue, catering, photography, flowers and music/entertainment. But finding these things, which often involves driving out and meeting with someone face-to-face, or at least talking to them over the phone, is part of the process that people love about weddings.
Companies spend $30,000 on events. But most people spend $30,000 (or whatever your wedding costs) are paying for the experience of planning the party. My wife insisted on driving out to sample caterers' food (which for me was the best part of wedding planning) and meeting the potential photographers in person.
If this was strictly a business transaction, then yes, an app could probably make this more convenient. But the process is part of the experience that people seem to like.
EDIT: A lot of people don't see the rationality in having a big, expensive wedding that takes a long time to plan. My brother had close friends and family at a restaurant and it was great. If more people did that, then the wedding industry would be "disrupted". But I'd venture to guess that most people spending large amounts of money on their weddings enjoy the current aspects of the process.
The answer is definitely brides. 5k is "cheap for a wedding dress," and 8k is "cheap for a venue."
Why must these things be so expensive? You might as well ask why engagement rings are so expensive, or why dowries used to (and in some places still do) exist.
The parties involved see this as an existential purchase, not a practical purchase. The cost and and sacrifice you must give up is a reflection of the value of the bride. Skimping on a cost or a service is seen as an admission that the bride lacks value.
Well, I think it's because my partner and I avoided the Wedding Industry(TM) entirely, as are every other couple we know who want to avoid paying through the nose to act out other families' stereotypes of a "good" wedding, all to make our families miserable.
So we never employed anyone who Works on Weddings, and years later, our friends still insist it was the best wedding they've ever been to. All for ~$6,000.
Here is how we cut our wedding bill for 120 people from 45k to 10k!
Our wedding planning experience got off to a bad start when we told our wedding planner we had no specific budget. He took that to mean an unlimited budget... and came back with a plan for a 100 person medieval-themed party in fancy dress, complete with monogrammed plates and dancing midgets. Total cost around 45k euros. (The midgets alone were 1.5k!)
So we sacked him and did it for 1/4 of the cost:
- Timing - Switch to a Thursday, with an afternoon ceremony and evening dinner. No problems getting a venue. We decided not to stress about people who couldn't make it midweek.
- Venue for ceremony - The venue was a medieval cloister in the middle of Amsterdam. By doing it on a Thursday afternoon, we paid their standard rates for a business meeting. We made friends with the venue manager. He was able to provide post-ceremony drinks and nibbles at much cheaper rates.
- Celebrant - A friend who did weddings in a another region was able to register with the city council to be our celebrant. Zero cost.
- Fancy dress - As a joke to the wedding planner's medieval idea, we surprised our best man etc with ridiculous medieval fancy dress. A cheap way to help everyone laugh even more at their speeches.
- Flowers - The previous evening, the venue was used for the Dutch 'Wildlife Photographer of the Year' awards presentation. The friendly venue manager kept their flowers for us. Zero cost.
- Wedding cake - Decided we could do without this if people had nice post-ceremony drinks. Zero cost.
- Dinner - Booked out a nearby restaurant for the night. They could seat 80. That worked fine as from the 120 guests, many families with kids appreciated the option to go home after the post-ceremony drinks. The restaurant arranged all the catering at their standard reasonable prices. Very nice meal served by professional staff. Zero stress. After dessert, everyone gathered at the bar area and talked and enjoyed themselves til 1am.
- Photographer - A friend asked if she could take photos. Problem solved at zero cost.
- Band/dancing - Neither of us wanted this. Lots of clubs nearby for people who wanted to go out afterwards.
I definitely recommend booking a standard restaurant for a wedding dinner. Don't go to a specialist wedding venue!
[+] [-] astura|7 years ago|reply
Uhhhh... I absolutely hate when the media uncritically (or at least without context/a disclaimer) parrots The Kont's "Real Weddings Survey" as meaningful, because, IMO, this number is somewhere between very misleading and complete bullshit.
Some issues:
-Selection bias - only includes people who sign up for wedding websites, (or in the case of Brides magazine’s “American Wedding Study,” subscribe to wedding magazines) which, by definition, excludes people who have reasonably priced weddings. People whose weddings are a BBQ in the backyard aren't signing up for wedding websites and subscribing to wedding magazines.
-Reporting on average without including median, which is much, much less. One million dollar wedding can skew the average very high, and like I said before, the low side isn't even included in the data set to offset the Chelsea Clintons.
-Conflict of interest - the wedding industry itself is the only one reporting these figures and the wedding industry has a vested interest in reporting astronomical numbers because it gets you primed to spend spend spend.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/average-wedding-cos...
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, this article isn't investigative journalism. It's not different from articles where they obtain a quote from an email or phone call with a university professor on some topic, without a critical analysis of that professor's research focus, conflicts of interest, etc.
[+] [-] qzw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wgerard|7 years ago|reply
Because people have extremely high expectations for the major expenses of a wedding (venue, flowers, band, etc.).
The joke (and I even see it here) is that you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly, the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection.
So, it's not a huge surprise to me that wedding vendors have been hard to disrupt - it seems logical to assume that mass market usually comes with a reduction in quality compared to bespoke (or at least a bespoke-like experience), and people mostly refuse that and are willing to pay a huge premium for weddings (begrudgingly, admittedly).
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|7 years ago|reply
Most regular cakes are small affairs. If you go to that same baker and ask for a 3-tier, ornately decorated cake that will feed at least 50-100 people and has a keepsake decoration on top, it'll be more.
Cakes like that are a different beast. They require special recipes so they don't collapse themselves. I know professional bakeries are able to spend less time than I did making my sister's wedding cake - a 3-tier affair - but they are still a decent amount of work and effort. Doubly so if you are paying the baker to transport and assemble the cake.
So yeah, of course wedding cakes are expensive, depending on the bells and whistles. But so are equally decadent cakes with the bells and whistles.
[+] [-] dx034|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|7 years ago|reply
I would compare it more to, a regular cake has like, 2 9's SLA of being what you wanted. But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected.
So that's what they pay for. If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. I'm unwilling to pay 4x as much for something, just to chase a very diminishing improvement.
[+] [-] stevenking86|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudul|7 years ago|reply
This is very important to keep in mind. Never mention that you are working on organizing a wedding. Renting chairs? It's just for a party. Getting flowers? It's for a birthday. Vendors will almost always apply a huge markup when they hear "wedding".
[+] [-] gist|7 years ago|reply
Note and important that the baker is not insulated in any way from the aggravation and the bad feelings as a result of a problem. They will hear about it and they will live it. This is pretty much true for any small business. In other words if you are Comcast the CEO is well insulated from the pain and agony of any customers. Ditto for Airlines and so on. But the front office staff and/or the people who actually take the calls. Sure they hear about it and sure they might perceive it's a problem but they are not hearing the actual customer pain and getting aggravated. The baker will have someone come into the shop and they will see and feel the pain directly.
[+] [-] Udik|7 years ago|reply
I don't agree on your why. The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence. It's in the same ballpark as a present to your fiancée (remember the rule of thumb for the price of the engagement ring: three times the gross monthly earnings whatever they are- which means: expensive by any standard). And I suspect this is valid across many cultures, so I'd say the reason is more or less anthropological. Thriftiness is rarely valued when it comes to these things.
[+] [-] dotancohen|7 years ago|reply
Thankfully, since then there is a new baker on the block.
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|7 years ago|reply
What can it do? Attempt to be a middleman that extracts wealth from the sellers' margins.
In this case, the workers are not "gig economy" but professionals. They cannot be bullied nearly so easily as Uber can do with lopsided agreements and pittances in money to the desperate.
They can try to make it easier to connect these professionals with couples, but since people like to talk directly with these professionals and get the planning as part of the "experience", the two groups will bypass the middleman app's rent seeking through direct negotiation.
So the industry resist control by a tech company, simply because you cannot distill the whole process into swipes in an app + a credit card. This means the tech company needs service. It cannot have explosive tech-only growth where the only things needed are another few devs and more rented cloud servers.
[+] [-] dbot|7 years ago|reply
Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uberman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_tristan|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure you could get the venue owners to drop rates, because it sure doesn't seem like many have much of a demand shortage. Wedding venues seem to be booked way far out in advance, and don't seem to have any issues with vacancies. And I'm sure they are well aware of each others' rates.
Anecdotally, I also see large disincentives to lower costs for the other major services. Musicians who play weddings do so because the gig pays well, not because playing crappy covers is what they really want to do. Pretty sure the same goes for photographers - if the wedding business wasn't so lucrative, they'd probably just go do something else with their lives. They're all professional, but I'm not sure many would identify as a "wedding singer", just "musician" or "photographer". But, I'd guess they too are very aware of each other's rates, which gives them no reason to work for less money.
Not sure what there's to "disrupt" here other than culture. And if there's one true rule I've learned: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|7 years ago|reply
In the case of a couple planning their wedding, what exactly do these service providers know that the couple does not? How much food ordinarily costs, when catered? How much a particular venue space usually rents for, for an evening?
[+] [-] kop316|7 years ago|reply
- Rings - Dress (wedding dress/men's dress) - Venue - Food - Cake - Photographer - Music/"DJ"/MC - "extras"
Many of those can be rolled up into a venue (i.e. the venue supplies food, DJ, Cake, etc.), and personally, my fiancé nor I want to spend a lot of money on it.
So it feels like where they are disrupting are the "nice to haves" (expensive dress, cards, etc.) and not focusing on the "need to haves" (Food, venue, etc.)
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
I've attended a wide gamut of weddings over the years. Some are in the above vein, others are much more informal affairs, still others make the wedding a small family affair and have a bigger casual party as a separate event.
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|7 years ago|reply
That's where we were at - we ended up renting out a restaurant for the evening - as long as they made what they normally make for an evening they were happy to have less people come in. They went all out on the food as they were feeding 30 people with it instead of the usual restaurant crowd. Our wedding cake was a nicer version of their regular chocolate cake (again, included in the food cost). Our music was the restaurants usual music. It was an excellent.
In regards to the dress, if you're non-traditional there's a ton of off-white non-wedding dresses that look perfectly acceptable and cost a tenth of the wedding varieties.
[+] [-] uberman|7 years ago|reply
If the typical mobile, prepared in advance, reduced menu restaurant with no real physical footprint can charge per plate what the finest tradition restaurants charge then there is clearly room for disruption.
Just as a comparison, the most expensive group dining option at Ruth Chris (selected for no reason other than I like their food) is $115 a plate. That is less than 2/3rds what we paid per plate at our wedding for something called "beaph" and looked like an old shoe.
[+] [-] jb3689|7 years ago|reply
The venue was the next most expensive coming in at a flat rate of a few thousand
Everything else was pretty inexpensive by comparison although it does add up
[+] [-] dsajames|7 years ago|reply
It's such an important day, people want to make sure they'll be taken care of as special, unlike say, a cleaning service.
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
These days, "disrupt" is really just fig-leaf language for "How do I get me a piece of those sweet, sweet margins?"
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|7 years ago|reply
My breakdown of the three largest expenses was about 40% food, 20% clothing and 10% the honeymoon.
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|7 years ago|reply
For couples having a "big wedding", 80%+ of the cost goes to: catering, venue, photographer, dress, flowers. All of those require a business with a local presence - a web startup isn't going to be able to replace any of those.
The companies mentioned in the article are actually tackling wedding line items that represent a much smaller fraction of the wedding's budget: stationary, registries, wedding websites, and wedding planning tools. Median spend for websites and planning tools is probably $0, because most couples are fine with free website creators (often provided as a loss leader) and Excel spreadsheets.
They're also aiming to collect referral fees or advertising spend from the vendors that actually provide the big line items. However, the total market there is "advertising budgets of other wedding vendors", not "total wedding vendor revenue".
[+] [-] docker_up|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turc1656|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mreome|7 years ago|reply
I think this is a similar situation to the often extreme costs seen in the Death Care Industry (Funeral and Mortuary services), just with the opposite end of the emotional spectrum being taken advantage of. People get invested in what they think society sees as necessary or appropriate and are driven by an emotional high/low into not really thinking about what they (or their passed loved ones) really want. They are driven by the emotional state to ignore expense and do whatever they can to convince both themselves and others of their feelings/intent, be that the love and promise of a new marriage, or the love and respect for someone who has passed.
[+] [-] dboreham|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xADADA|7 years ago|reply
Weddings, by their very nature are Affective Events. They are events that reproduce social relations and emotions in the attendees. As such, the decision making process is lead by emotions.
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|7 years ago|reply
Don't assume that everyone who has an expensive, traditional wedding hates it - that's as bad as turning up a nose at affordable or quirky weddings.
[+] [-] ufmace|7 years ago|reply
Maybe the planners would like and be willing to pay for some tool that helped them organize things, but there's probably too much individual customization needed to make any such solution practical to build cheaper and better than Excel or something.
[+] [-] ape4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|7 years ago|reply
You have one chance to get it right for your clients - there are no do-overs. People only get one wedding day and if you screw it up, you've ruined it for them and they will talk about it for decades to come.
There is no "fail fast" in this realm. Tread lightly.
[+] [-] thepangolino|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] save_ferris|7 years ago|reply
Then it becomes a configuration problem. You could build a platform that connects couples with wedding vendors, but you might struggle to make that platform flexible enough to allow people to search for all aspects of what they're looking for. Food is a good example of this. When I got married, I had 3 separate dietary requirements I had to meet, which most caterers weren't able or willing to accommodate without a drastic price increase.
It would've been really difficult to build a platform that vendors would fill out fully because there are probably dozens of questions to ask.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but that was the biggest pain point for my wedding.
[+] [-] ratling|7 years ago|reply
People get real salty if they've done something for generations and then suddenly you want to change things (or more likely things changed around them). See all rural politics.
[+] [-] mrfusion|7 years ago|reply
Things that people don’t do frequently never get fixed!
Examples:
DMV
Customs
Weddings
Buying a mattress
Real estate
Anytime you come across high prices and broken processes check it against this rule.
[+] [-] chadash|7 years ago|reply
- Registries: the article itself talks about Zola, for example. Although traditional registry sites (e.g. bloomingdales, bed bath and beyond) seem to still have most of the market in my experience.
- Invitations: You can still go to someone local for this, especially if you need something customized, but more and more people are creating their invitations online.
But there are a bunch of pieces of the wedding that are stubborn to change. Other major expenses include venue, catering, photography, flowers and music/entertainment. But finding these things, which often involves driving out and meeting with someone face-to-face, or at least talking to them over the phone, is part of the process that people love about weddings.
Companies spend $30,000 on events. But most people spend $30,000 (or whatever your wedding costs) are paying for the experience of planning the party. My wife insisted on driving out to sample caterers' food (which for me was the best part of wedding planning) and meeting the potential photographers in person.
If this was strictly a business transaction, then yes, an app could probably make this more convenient. But the process is part of the experience that people seem to like.
EDIT: A lot of people don't see the rationality in having a big, expensive wedding that takes a long time to plan. My brother had close friends and family at a restaurant and it was great. If more people did that, then the wedding industry would be "disrupted". But I'd venture to guess that most people spending large amounts of money on their weddings enjoy the current aspects of the process.
[+] [-] everdrive|7 years ago|reply
Why must these things be so expensive? You might as well ask why engagement rings are so expensive, or why dowries used to (and in some places still do) exist.
The parties involved see this as an existential purchase, not a practical purchase. The cost and and sacrifice you must give up is a reflection of the value of the bride. Skimping on a cost or a service is seen as an admission that the bride lacks value.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|7 years ago|reply
So we never employed anyone who Works on Weddings, and years later, our friends still insist it was the best wedding they've ever been to. All for ~$6,000.
[+] [-] stevesimmons|7 years ago|reply
Our wedding planning experience got off to a bad start when we told our wedding planner we had no specific budget. He took that to mean an unlimited budget... and came back with a plan for a 100 person medieval-themed party in fancy dress, complete with monogrammed plates and dancing midgets. Total cost around 45k euros. (The midgets alone were 1.5k!)
So we sacked him and did it for 1/4 of the cost:
- Timing - Switch to a Thursday, with an afternoon ceremony and evening dinner. No problems getting a venue. We decided not to stress about people who couldn't make it midweek.
- Venue for ceremony - The venue was a medieval cloister in the middle of Amsterdam. By doing it on a Thursday afternoon, we paid their standard rates for a business meeting. We made friends with the venue manager. He was able to provide post-ceremony drinks and nibbles at much cheaper rates.
- Celebrant - A friend who did weddings in a another region was able to register with the city council to be our celebrant. Zero cost.
- Fancy dress - As a joke to the wedding planner's medieval idea, we surprised our best man etc with ridiculous medieval fancy dress. A cheap way to help everyone laugh even more at their speeches.
- Flowers - The previous evening, the venue was used for the Dutch 'Wildlife Photographer of the Year' awards presentation. The friendly venue manager kept their flowers for us. Zero cost.
- Wedding cake - Decided we could do without this if people had nice post-ceremony drinks. Zero cost.
- Dinner - Booked out a nearby restaurant for the night. They could seat 80. That worked fine as from the 120 guests, many families with kids appreciated the option to go home after the post-ceremony drinks. The restaurant arranged all the catering at their standard reasonable prices. Very nice meal served by professional staff. Zero stress. After dessert, everyone gathered at the bar area and talked and enjoyed themselves til 1am.
- Photographer - A friend asked if she could take photos. Problem solved at zero cost.
- Band/dancing - Neither of us wanted this. Lots of clubs nearby for people who wanted to go out afterwards.
I definitely recommend booking a standard restaurant for a wedding dinner. Don't go to a specialist wedding venue!