Why is the wedding industry so hard to disrupt?

&gt;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.<p>Uhhhh... I absolutely hate when the media uncritically (or at least without context&#x2F;a disclaimer) parrots The Kont&#x27;s &quot;Real Weddings Survey&quot; as meaningful, because, IMO, this number is somewhere between very misleading and complete bullshit.<p>Some issues:<p>-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&#x27;t signing up for wedding websites and subscribing to wedding magazines.<p>-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&#x27;t even included in the data set to offset the Chelsea Clintons.<p>-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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;human-interest&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;average-wedding-cost-published-numbers-on-the-price-of-a-wedding-are-totally-inaccurate.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;human-interest&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;average-wedding-cos...</a>

I spent some time researching this mostly because I was curious, but basically the answer to &quot;why are weddings so expensive&quot; and also &quot;why is it so hard to disrupt the wedding industry&quot; are largely the same in my opinion:<p>Because people have extremely high expectations for the major expenses of a wedding (venue, flowers, band, etc.).<p>The joke (and I even see it here) is that you can go to a baker and say &quot;I want a cake&quot; and they&#x27;ll say &quot;$20&quot; but if you say &quot;it&#x27;s for a wedding&quot; 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.<p>So, it&#x27;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).

At least Vox has pointed it out: An app&#x2F;website cannot replace a building for a venue. An app cannot replace the band. It cannot replace the photographer.<p>What can it do? Attempt to be a middleman that extracts wealth from the sellers&#x27; margins.<p>In this case, the workers are not &quot;gig economy&quot; but professionals. They cannot be bullied nearly so easily as Uber can do with lopsided agreements and pittances in money to the desperate.<p>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 &quot;experience&quot;, the two groups will bypass the middleman app&#x27;s rent seeking through direct negotiation.<p>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&#x2F;or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...<p>Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, &quot;dates&quot; 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 &quot;streamline&quot; 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.

As someone who is planning a wedding, I don&#x27;t really see what they are trying to &quot;disrupt&quot;? I am thinking the major costs for a wedding are:<p>- Rings - Dress (wedding dress&#x2F;men&#x27;s dress) - Venue - Food - Cake - Photographer - Music&#x2F;&quot;DJ&quot;&#x2F;MC - &quot;extras&quot;<p>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.<p>So it feels like where they are disrupting are the &quot;nice to haves&quot; (expensive dress, cards, etc.) and not focusing on the &quot;need to haves&quot; (Food, venue, etc.)

Companies that use &quot;total spend on weddings&quot; as a proxy for their total addressable market are either naive or disingenuous.<p>For couples having a &quot;big wedding&quot;, 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&#x27;t going to be able to replace any of those.<p>The companies mentioned in the article are actually tackling wedding line items that represent a much smaller fraction of the wedding&#x27;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.<p>They&#x27;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 &quot;advertising budgets of other wedding vendors&quot;, not &quot;total wedding vendor revenue&quot;.

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&#x27;s just how it is, and you won&#x27;t get someone to change that with &quot;facts&quot;. Many things can get disrupted, but when the entire industry is based on emotions, you can&#x27;t change people&#x27;s minds.

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.

I don&#x27;t claim to know that much about it, but nothing I&#x27;ve heard suggests that there&#x27;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.<p>Maybe the planners would like and be willing to pay for some tool that helped them organize things, but there&#x27;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&#x27;t start by saying I am going to spend $30K. It just comes out in drips. Like $500 for flowers, etc.

I&#x27;ve worked in the wedding industry.<p>You have <i>one chance</i> 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&#x27;ve ruined it for them and they will talk about it for decades to come.<p>There is no &quot;fail fast&quot; in this realm. Tread lightly.

It’s because there is no “wedding” industry. There is an events industry with its various subsets.

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&#x27;t want.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t able or willing to accommodate without a drastic price increase.<p>It would&#x27;ve been really difficult to build a platform that vendors would fill out fully because there are probably dozens of questions to ask.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are other reasons as well, but that was the biggest pain point for my wedding.

Fiddler On the Roof has it: TRADITION.<p>People get real salty if they&#x27;ve done something for generations and then suddenly you want to change things (or more likely things changed around them). See all rural politics.

I have a theory and so far it’s always been true.<p>Things that people don’t do frequently never get fixed!<p>Examples:<p>DMV<p>Customs<p>Weddings<p>Buying a mattress<p>Real estate<p>Anytime you come across high prices and broken processes check it against this rule.

A few aspects of weddings <i>have</i> been disrupted:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p><i>Companies</i> spend $30,000 on events. But most <i>people</i> 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&#x27; food (which for me was the best part of wedding planning) and meeting the potential photographers in person.<p>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.<p>EDIT: A lot of people don&#x27;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 &quot;disrupted&quot;. But I&#x27;d venture to guess that most people spending large amounts of money on their weddings <i>enjoy</i> the current aspects of the process.

The answer is definitely brides. 5k is &quot;cheap for a wedding dress,&quot; and 8k is &quot;cheap for a venue.&quot;<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s because my partner and I avoided <i>the Wedding Industry(TM)</i> entirely, as are every other couple we know who want to avoid paying through the nose to act out other families&#x27; stereotypes of a &quot;good&quot; wedding, all to make <i>our</i> families miserable.<p>So we never employed anyone who Works on Weddings, and years later, our friends still insist it was the best wedding they&#x27;ve ever been to. All for ~$6,000.

Here is how we cut our wedding bill for 120 people from 45k to 10k!<p>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!)<p>So we sacked him and did it for 1&#x2F;4 of the cost:<p>- 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&#x27;t make it midweek.<p>- 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.<p>- Celebrant - A friend who did weddings in a another region was able to register with the city council to be our celebrant. Zero cost.<p>- Fancy dress - As a joke to the wedding planner&#x27;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.<p>- Flowers - The previous evening, the venue was used for the Dutch &#x27;Wildlife Photographer of the Year&#x27; awards presentation. The friendly venue manager kept their flowers for us. Zero cost.<p>- Wedding cake - Decided we could do without this if people had nice post-ceremony drinks. Zero cost.<p>- 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.<p>- Photographer - A friend asked if she could take photos. Problem solved at zero cost.<p>- Band&#x2F;dancing - Neither of us wanted this. Lots of clubs nearby for people who wanted to go out afterwards.<p>I definitely recommend booking a standard restaurant for a wedding dinner. Don&#x27;t go to a specialist wedding venue!

Why?<p>Because you&#x27;d have to AirBnB the destination, Uber the guests there, Blue Apron the food&#x2F;cake, Facebook the invitations&#x2F;web site, etc...<p>IOW, what I&#x27;m saying is you would have to be multiple startups in one.

If you used economies of scale to bring down the cost of a wedding, then weddings would be very similar, and it&#x27;s doubtful that&#x27;s what the customers want.