The weddings never stopped and more and more are in the making. One thing that we can’t stop thinking about is that everyone should get ready for a lot more weddings — not that they ever really went away. The papers and magazines are backing us up since New York Times, the New Yorker and a lot of the press are anticipating the boom in the wedding industry – and we’re here for it!
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic celebrations small and large still went forward, though from our experience, and our colleagues’ experience a huge number of couples, pushed their weddings to 2021 and 2022. Many others lost deposits, tore up guest lists, moved ceremonies outside or to warmer climates, and changed the way we celebrated. This was a black page in the wedding industry, one we’re recovering from, one we’d gladly put behind us.
An industry market report — which vividly showed the suffering finances of the wedding industry in 2020 — predicts that all will change, come the summer of 2021, and there will be a significant increase in wedding revenue this year. Couples are already booking their vendors as the dates are clearing up. Weddings have always been emotional, but adding personal boundaries around safety and health, confusing government guidelines and the finer points of air filtration systems to the mix has pushed families and wedding vendors to the edge. Throw a destination wedding in the mix and its own set of limitations and you got yourself a not so pretty mess to navigate.
Months and Months in the Waiting
Everybody in the wedding industry is more confused than ever. Wedding professionals are now also acting as health, infrastructure, and grief experts, adept at negotiating fraught moments and achieving the impossible pretty much every day.
As vaccinations and hope spread across the world, the race to schedule weddings is on. A true wedding boom! It’s a relief for a huge industry that has suffered during the pandemic. From a small-business perspective, it’s devastating to see the effect the pandemic had on everyone in the wedding business. After all, weddings drive income for caterers, decorators, planners, florists, musicians, makeup artists, clothing designers, hairstylists, photographers, videographers, dance instructors, cleaners, limousine drivers, and many other professionals that are slowly beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Many of our planner friends expressed relief that the future won’t be filled with Zoom weddings and are hopeful that the vaccine will allow their industry to revive. If there’s a word we’d never want to hear again, it’s ‘pivoting’. What we do on a wedding basis is very tactile. Many wedding professionals have zero aspirations to move what they do to the digital world. We think that what all people want is to gather and get sweaty on the dance floor. To rejoice together, to hug again, to reunite, to celebrate life together. And we missed it terribly.
Clear Your Weekends – Wedding Boom is Here
Scary, stressful times throughout history tend to lead to increased marriage rates. The coronavirus pandemic is no different. According to an October Brides’ survey of 4,000 engaged couples, 82 percent said that living through the pandemic has made them even more eager to get married so they could face this — and other storms — together. Fifty-five percent said the pandemic changed their expectations for marriage, and they’re prioritizing their relationship above anything else.
Life No More on Hold
For many couples rescheduling, canceling, or pivoting their wedding day was simply a nightmare. We were zooming a bride the other day and she said something that we think many couples want to hear. She said that “I didn’t want to put my life on hold. What became clear to us is the important thing is that we get married. It wasn’t about the big party, or having 100 people around us. We didn’t want to wait and see anymore. We just wanted to get married.” The said couple is having an intimate elopement in Greece this summer and we couldn’t be happier to be there for them and capture all the beauty.
Also, many couples simply don’t wait to wait any longer for their life to start. Many of our clients are saying things like the pandemic forced them to reassess what was important in their lives and that they didn’t want to wait for their lives to begin anymore. If two people are optimistic about each other, the pandemic might prompt them to finally take the leap and get married – how the wedding boom is created.
For many couples, the deeply personal nature of weddings makes planning in a pandemic even more difficult. At the end of the day, it’s about them and not necessarily about the guests. Many couples don’t want to postpone their lives anymore, are trying to move into a new home, and want to have a family soon. For couples that are getting married to start a family, having to wait for more than a year may cause anxiety. That’s why a lot of people are speeding up everything, cutting down on unnecessary guests, booking their vendors, and having a smaller but more meaningful wedding.
Wedding Boom in Phycology
Adding some phycology to the mixture, it’s not surprising. When you’re scared, anxious, or overwhelmed, you feel out of control. Your body and mind are experiencing sensations you don’t know how to manage. So to compensate for this feeling, people tend to find other ways to feel in control. This is why some people make big changes or major decisions during times of fear. Getting married during a pandemic feels like a guarantee of safety and stability. Many of our couples also say that if your relationship could survive the pandemic, then it could survive anything. Couples have been stuck inside for small spaces for months, under major duress. This year has been the ultimate test of a relationship. Many couples talk to us and say that since we still love and respect each other after being cooped up together during the worst nine months of our lives, then we know he or she is the one.
A big breath of fresh air for wedding vendors
We, like all our fellow wedding professionals, are currently relieved things are starting to look up. Owning a small business that depends on weddings, through a pandemic that targeted this area like no other, is hard. We’re thrilled to see light at the end of the tunnel and getting to meet new couples whose weddings we’re capturing soon. And you know it’s true love when it lasted so long. And that will show magnificently in the photographs!
Cheers to the new wedding season!
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