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Behind the scenes at the Association of Bridal Consultants’ “Business of Brides” conference:
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Wedding planners learn how to target the upcoming “Echo Boom” bridal market, estimated at 4,200,000 brides by 2018. “It seems like the less money people have, the more they spend,” says the association's director of corporate relations (page 36).
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“Top Fashion” wedding-dress factory:
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Mead visits a factory in Xiamen, China, where migrant workers who live eight to a room in dormitories turn out 100,000 dresses a year. A skilled seamstress earns six dollars a day making dresses that sell for a national average of $1,025 (pages 98, 81).
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Disney World's Wedding Pavilion:
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Mead explores how Disney built up its now-mammoth wedding program in the 1990s to combat threats to its theme-park preeminence. (“Couples are highly brand-receptive in this stage of their lives...If you handle their wedding and honeymoon correctly you create cherished friends,” says the co-founder of Disney Fairy Tale Weddings, page 71). Note: rental of Cinderella's Coach: $2500 per ceremony.
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Behind the bridal registry:
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Department stores see registries as a means of gaining access to young, impressionable consumers who are forming brand loyalties—what one industry report calls “Your New $100 Billion Customer: the Engaged Woman” (page 117).
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Las Vegas, Nevada:
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Site of 122,000 weddings a year, where competition is so great that hand-billers stalk the courthouse steps and Britney Spears’s swiftly-annulled nuptials are used as a marketing tool (page 170).
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The honeymoon and destination wedding industry in Aruba:
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This Caribbean island is so eager to capture its share of the American wedding market that it changed its marriage laws—now one out of every three weddings conducted in Aruba is for tourists. “I call it the ‘new elopement,” says one industry expert (page 200).
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The phenomenon of “vow renewal”:
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Mead visits Sandals Royal Caribbean Hotel, in Montego Bay, Jamaica—a wedding factory, hosting between 5-10 ceremonies a day, of which 1 in 6 is a vow-renewal ceremony. Brides and grooms get to re-enact the “once in a lifetime” moment of marriage as often as their budget will allow (page 216).
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A class for would-be wedding planners:
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Attendees are taught to size up clients by making house calls—the fancier the bride's home, the bigger the budget—and to persuade brides to attend their “how to plan your own wedding” seminars. “She's going to come out of the course going, ‘Oh, God, I don't want to do that.’ Just show her what it involves and she'll be scared to death” (page 51).
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“Vows” magazine and other trade publications:
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Mead reveals how trade magazines urge retailers to squeeze more dollars out of each bride: “Just when a bride thinks she’ll have to spend no more, it’s your job to remind her that her bridal image looks incomplete” (page 83). The number of brides—about 2.3 million a year—cannot be increased by marketing efforts, and rates of marriage are on the decline, so each bride bears more of the burden of increasing industry profits.
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A seminar for wedding dress retailers in Las Vegas:
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Chip Eichelberger, a motivational speaker, offers advice on the pacing of a sale—“If you get them excited about the three-hundred-dollar dress it’s hard to get them excited about the three-thousand-dollar dress”—and how to act upon “the ‘Oh, Mommy,’ moment,” when a bride falls in love with a gown (page 78-79).
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Hebron Church, also known as “The Chapel on the Hill”:
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A struggling rural Wisconsin church is forced by economic pressures to moonlight as a commercial wedding chapel (page 145), while the ranks of freelance wedding ministers—some with credentials acquired online—who will perform crowd-pleasing “spiritual” ceremonies replete with rituals invented for the camera begin to swell (page 130).
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Gatlinburg, Tennessee:
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The “honeymoon capital of the South,” a Bible-belt mountain destination where there are annually 5 weddings per year-round-resident. The wedding-chapel business was founded in 1979 by the controversial Reverend Ed Taylor, a former Baptist minister. “I think it is dangerous, spiritually dangerous, to use the Lord in that manner—in order to gain business, and to use it as a marketing tool,” says a rival chapel owner (page 162).
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Behind the scenes at the Wedding & Event Videographers Association International annual convention:
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Videographers are advised to double their prices (“I was blind to the fact that people want the best for their children,” says one successful videographer), told how to incorporate comic shots (the “gift steal” and the “runaway groom”), and learn how to slice and dice raw footage into multiple video products to increase profits. The value of video is promoted as “preserving memories” that will otherwise be “lost.” “You have to get [them] initially, before they spend $3000 on napkins” (page 185). |