For Love or Money : Weddings Generating $23 Billion in Annual Retail Sales
J. Michael Derem wasn’t trying to romance the wedding industry. But when couples started reserving the yacht he had originally bought for entertaining corporate parties, he took notice.
Next he began a service that lined up exotic Southern California estates--including two built like medieval castles--that could be leased for wedding parties. “At that time, I think it was when Princess Di and Prince Charles got married . . . (people) got enthused with the fact that weddings were in again,” he said. “Think fantasy.”
But then, having found no easy way to reach the growing market of Southern California couples planning their nuptials (there were 150,000 couples married here last year), Derem started Southern California Bride magazine in 1986.
With the magazine and an annual bridal show, Derem is tapping into a market that generates about $23 billion in national retail sales, including an estimated $2.3 billion worth of business in Southern California.
It is a business traditionally dominated by big department stores and small businesses like florists, caterers and photographers. But as the boom in weddings continues, more and more entrepreneurs like Derem are cashing in on new products and new services.
The wedding industry has grown to accommodate these new enterprises. “People are looking for different ways to get married,” said Philip Youtie, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., bridal shop owner and vice president of the Bridal Marketers Assn. of America. “There are umpteen new items for weddings. Everyone wants their wedding to be different.”
But many of these businesses that want to cash in fast on weddings may run the risk of failure, he noted, since success is often dependent on an established reputation and word-of-mouth publicity.
By Derem’s estimate, the revival of big weddings started five years ago and has grown to include some 10,000 wedding-related businesses--many of them small, part-time operations--including everything from video photographers to balloonists. Some of these businesses use bridal shows, or fairs, held frequently throughout Southern California to show off their wedding wares.
Hannah Tomita, who has operated her florist shop for 28 years in La Canada Flintridge, said the turning point in her wedding business came about five years ago, starting with a booth at a bridal show.
“The last five years, every weekend there’s nothing but weddings. We do five a weekend,” Tomita said, adding that her wedding business during that time has become year-round instead of during the traditional spring months. Tomita starts each wedding client off with a two- to three-hour consultation. To furnish a ceremony with flowers from her shop costs an average of $800 to $1,500.
Videotaping is another area that seems to have taken off. Michael Castillo of M. C. Video Productions says he’s seen a “great increase in the last three years. This last year has been tremendous.” Castillo, who charges about $600 for taping a ceremony, said he has four to six weddings per weekend. Derek Whitt, a salesman for the company, said that while a video camera in a church was once considered taboo, “the spontaneity is captured really well,” and clients like that.
Georgann Cooper, a florist for 10 years, recently founded Georgie’s Balloony Toons and says she’s been “doing a wedding every week.” With balloons, she fashions arches, canopies and even life-size bride and groom figures for her clients.
“The balloon craze is just starting,” said Cooper. “We figure in five years balloons will be as much a part of a wedding as flowers--bouquets and everything.”
Cooper, who works out of her Van Nuys home, said what her clients like the best about balloons is the price. The average cost for a wedding festooned with balloons is about $200, she said, while a standard flower package can cost anywhere from $500 to more than $1,000.
Dave Politte originally bought his horse-drawn carriage to give historical tours of downtown Fullerton. It wasn’t very profitable, Politte said, but people who saw the carriage on the street asked him if he did weddings, and that’s where his focus has been ever since. An hour’s service runs between $350 and $450.
There’s even a growing business in wedding consulting.
Gerard Monaghan, president of the Connecticut-based Assn. of Bridal Consultants, said “the concept of wedding consulting has been around a long time, but it has picked up the last 10, 15 years because of changing socioeconomic patterns.” When Monaghan and his wife took over the association in 1981, they had one member. Today they have about 225.
Vicki Giannone, a wedding consultant in Burbank, said her services can cost anywhere from $295 (a flat rate for a consultation) to $1,500 (about 15% of a couple’s wedding budget).
Being a good consultant involves organization, planning and psychology, Giannone said. The consultant must be sensitive to a customer’s needs, but “you have to wear a different hat with retailers, where you need to be strong and aggressive to get the best deal.
“What really upsets me is that there’s a lot of people out there who planned their daughter’s wedding and now want to do it for a fee . . . . It seems everyone wants to be one.”
Many people get into the field because it takes so little capital to start a consultant business, she said. “People think going into it, it’s going to be easy. They don’t realize it’s running a small business.”
Youtie of the Bridal Marketers Assn. said that in the past few years there has also been a sudden rise in the number of fledgling bridal shops including some that ride the wave of the growing wedding trade for a while and then go out of business.
“As far as retail shops, our whole industry has had a problem,” Youtie said from his Fort Lauderdale office. “The Small Business Administration sent out a bulletin about a year ago and recommended the bridal business. In the last year or two there has been double the amount of bridal shops. They didn’t know what they were doing so they decided to discount. Bridal shops never discounted before.
“In this area we had eight bridal shops. Now (a year later) we have 18. In Pittsburgh, they used to have 22 bridal shops. Now they have 52.
“In South Florida, we’ve had five new bridal shops; two of them have already gone out of business,” Youtie said. “A little store can go and buy $20,000 to $30,000 worth of wedding gown (samples). That can take all the money they have. If you sell a good sample, it may take a couple of months to reorder, and by that time the season’s over” or the style is outdated.
Other bridal businesses have endured. Bridal City has been located in the Bradbury Building on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles since the 1940s. It not only outfits brides and grooms, but makes many of the dresses as well. The store is finding that Latino weddings are a majority of its business these days.
Shop manager Lydia Ramirez said costumers are buying elaborate dresses and other ornate items for the ceremony. Among the items that are frequently part of a traditional Latino Catholic ceremony, she said, are the laso , a beaded rope placed around the necks of the bride and groom; symbolic coins placed in a decorated box, and ornate Bibles.
Bridal City is often called on to outfit large wedding parties, frequently between eight and 12 couples, she said. The store once clothed a wedding party that included 55 couples, Ramirez said. “When they get an idea of what they want, they’re willing to spend whatever it takes to make it nice.”
The boundaries of the wedding trade are wide, notes Derem, of Southern California Bride. “The bridal industry is really a bigger industry than you and I think . . . . Everybody focuses on (the wedding and the reception). But there are five other wedding-related parties.” These include engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelor parties, rehearsal dinner, and if it’s an especially upscale production, an out-of-town guest party.
“People, of course, buy clothing for those parties. They buy gifts, invitations; they hire caterers; they go to restaurants, hotels. I think there’s another couple billion dollars there,” he said.
“We’re in a fantastic industry. We’re in the right place at the right time.”
Wedding entrepreneurs report that the bride and groom they are selling to now are a few years older than they were five or 10 years ago, and with the majority of couples, both bride and groom are working.
Readers of Bride’s magazine spent an average of $10,385 on their weddings in 1986, according to a reader survey by the publication. This figure includes the details of a traditional church wedding, from apparel to limousine service. Another industry estimate, figuring in low-budget weddings that might not show up in a survey of Bride’s magazine, estimated three years ago that nationally newlyweds spent about $2,500.
Though church weddings are becoming more popular, they aren’t exactly putting civil ceremonies out of business. At the Los Angeles County Courthouse, an average of 30 marriages are performed a day.
Those involved in wedding-related businesses report another trend: Because newlyweds are increasingly older and more established, the bride and groom are paying for part or all of their ceremonies.
“Today the working girls are paying for it. They’re saving their money and buying top of the line,” florist Hannah Tomita commented.
Dawn Drayden, a 25-year-old systems technician at St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach, and her fiance, Bryan Murray, are paying for almost all of their wedding, which she predicts will cost more than $10,000.
“We really prefer it that way. I don’t like spending money more than anyone else. I don’t plan on doing this again. It’s going to be memories galore, and you can’t replace that with going to the courthouse,” Drayden said.
