13 ms·

Why is the wedding industry so hard to disrupt?

• thepangolino 8y ago
  It’s because there is no “wedding” industry. There is an events industry with its various subsets.
  • michaelt 8y ago
    Does the fact there’s a shoe industry mean there’s no sneaker industry?
    • empath75 8y ago
      It’s more like there’s no ‘driving to the airport’ industry. There’s a taxi industry that also drives to the airport.
      • acdha 8y ago
        The airport shuttle businesses might disagree on that. The fact that there's a larger more-generic group doesn't mean that a specialty isn't real.
        • gumby 8y ago
          But those are small business rather than a “sector” mainly existing due to external economics which vary rom airport to airport (parking costs/structure) and peoples’ willingness To put up with inconvenience.
        • diminoten 8y ago
          It does mean the specialty is a relatively small market that isn't really worth talking about, though.
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    It's various industries with a "wedding" multiplier. "Wedding" dresses are thousands of dollars, but roughly equivalent normal dresses are hundreds. The minute you say "wedding cake" instead of "chocolate cake" the cost skyrockets.
    • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
      Why would anybody ever share that their cake purchase is for a wedding, then? Wouldn't everyone just say 'give me a chocolate cake' to save money? Unless there's something about the cake design that obviously gives away the context of your request to the vendor --but beyond that-- it seems disadvantageous to disclose the information.
      • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        It really depends on if you want a "wedding cake" or not. If you want a wedding cake, you gotta say it, cause it has a particular look and feel.
        • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
          I'm picturing a multi-tiered cake, but I don't really see anything unique about it. Maybe the designs/patterns they use to apply the frosting are different for wedding cakes? I'll be honest, I haven't seen many wedding cakes. I've seen far more regular cakes. If I went to a wedding, and someone wanted to trick by serving non-wedding cake, I'd be fooled.
          • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
            Oh yeah, we went full regular chocolate cake for ours. Wasn't a "wedding" cake, but was way more delicious.
            • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
              I've been to weddings where people do cupcakes in lieu of cake. Everyone gets dessert faster, since you don't have to cut it up and serve it individually. I was a fan of the planned efficiency. The couple did actually have a small cake for the ceremonial cutting of the cake. Beyond that, everyone was OK with cupcakes, if they cared to eat dessert.
  • gumby 8y ago
    This is pretty insightful. I think I’d refine it slightly as “there’s no wedding industry despite people trying to create one” (cf Condé Nast and their magazine, mentioned in the article). And after expanding the scope, as you do, you mostly get the same recursive problem the article concludes with: most of the expenses go to unconnected third parties like venue, band) who have little opportunity for roll-up.
  • dboreham 8y ago
    "Wedding-Industrial Complex"?
• ape4 8y ago
  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.
  • te_chris 8y ago
    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.
    • astura 8y ago
      The wedding industry is really heavy on the upsell and some people are really susceptible to it, I guess.
• save_ferris 8y ago
  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.
• evrydayhustling 8y ago
  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.
  • uberman 8y ago
    I came to say the same thing, but you said it quicker and probably better than I. Funerals is probably a third such set of services.
    • jawns 8y ago
      Yes, funerals are perhaps the most extreme example, because in many cases you have very little time in which to make the decisions, plus you're in a state of shock or grief and maybe aren't making the most rational decisions. One possible way to disrupt such an industry is by encouraging pre-planning, which helps eliminate the tight time constraints. But while we all know we're going to die, and our preferences around our funerals tend to be based on our individual wishes, it's not certain that we're going to get married, and our preferences around our weddings tend to based on the joint wishes of the couple, so you can only go so far with pre-planning. It would make little sense for you to start pre-planning before you start dating the person who will become your future husband or wife.
      • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        Pre-planning may not be practical with a funeral either. I understand in the case of a terminal illness, but death does happen rather suddenly to a lot of people. For a wedding at least you can book the venue ahead of time.
        • faitswulff 8y ago
          Unfortunately from recent experience I can tell you that there is still a good amount that you can preplan with death, if not funeral, like getting a deal on the headstone or plot of land, signing a DNR and power of attorney ahead of time, or having a hospice care plan, as morbid as those are.
• kop316 8y ago
  As someone who is planning a wedding, I don't really see what they are trying to "disrupt"? I am thinking the major costs for a wedding are: - 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.)
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > (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.
    • kop316 8y ago
      I am leaving it up to the person wearing the dress. She was looking at used, but I do ultimately want her to be happy with it too. Thank you for the suggestion though! We considered the restaurant option as well. But I think we are going to work with one event space that is actually very reasonable and fairly inclusive with everything. The pricing variance between venues was insane (some charged to rent the space, come charged a price minimum, some charged for things other did not, some just had some different requirements).
      • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        >I am leaving it up to the person wearing the dress. She was looking at used, but I do ultimately want her to be happy with it too. Thank you for the suggestion though! I'd never suggest otherwise. My wife couldn't stomach the thought of spending thousands of dollars on a dress, so she went for a cheaper alternative. We were married directly in the restaurant (like I said, we're non-traditional), so it was just the one venue for us. The restaurant was incredibly helpful the whole time - they seemed to really enjoy being able to provide fine dining and change up their menu and venue as well. Just thought I'd offer up my experience. Best of luck with your wedding, and I hope it's the start of a long and happy marriage.
• ratling 8y ago
  Fiddler On the Roof has it: TRADITION. 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.
  • sverige 8y ago
    Even most liberal women become Burkean conservatives when it comes to planning their wedding. I mean, why are flowers required? Why does there need to be some sort of feast? Why is music and dancing required? Why have a public event at all, when you can go to a courthouse, have a judge administer some basic acknowledgement with a couple witnesses, and call it a day?
    • michaelt 8y ago
      It's easy to over-estimate how much average couples are spending, because basic math means you get invited to 50x more 100-guest weddings than 2-guest weddings.
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Traditional weddings in many cultures were not necessarily huge and expensive. In my culture, people just went to the Church and got married, followed by an open reception at someone's house or a hall owned by the Church and the ladies made sandwiches. People danced and went home. They were not big events.
• docker_up 8y ago
  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.
  • snarf21 8y ago
    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!
    • ekovarski 8y ago
      Even the "doing this once" is us giving into our emotions and assuming that absolutely nothing can go wrong in marriage. “Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
      • landryraccoon 8y ago
        Engaged couples have to give in to those emotions though, or the entire fiction of marriage falls apart. If people seriously thought the risk of a marriage going wrong was significant why would they ever get married? So anyone who actually goes through with the wedding has to be completely emotionally all in already. Arguing against giving into emotions is tantamount to arguing they shouldn't get married in the first place.
        • astura 8y ago
          I don't think this is accurate. The risk of business failure is similar to the risk of divorce yet people don't consider starting a business a "fiction entirely based on irrational emotions." It's not, just like marriage is not. And since more unmarried couples split up than married couples, you're actually arguing against romantic relationships entirely. Using this logic, since you usually lose touch with many friends over the years, why have friends at all then? You're probably going to outlive your pet, so why get a pet at all if it's just going to die? Just because something ends doesn't mean it wasn't worth it for the time it lasted and even if it wasn't, taking some risk isn't entirely irrational.
• wgerard 8y ago
  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).
  • ghaff 8y ago
    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.
    • burfog 8y ago
      I just wanted some decent memory pictures, and this is how I inadvertently discovered that I am a good photographer. We put out cameras and asked for photos. I assumed that everybody would take photos just like I do. I had never thought that I was a superior photographer, but the results disabused me of that notion. Nobody paid attention to the background or bothered to frame things well, even when they had us pose for photos. My mother-in-law sent us an enlarged photo featuring an ugly old statue... oh, and us too. It looked like a photo taken to commemorate our trip to visit a statue.
• chadash 8y ago
  A few aspects of weddings have been disrupted: - 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.
• euroclydon 8y ago
  If you used economies of scale to bring down the cost of a wedding, then weddings would be very similar, and it's doubtful that's what the customers want.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  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.
  • brandonmenc 8y ago
    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.
    • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      Sure, I’m not saying everyone has a miserable time. A lot of that likely depends on your standing in society and your family. My observations most likely reflect my standing and of the people I know. I think it’s great if someone is able to have an amazing time!
• mrfusion 8y ago
  I have a theory and so far it’s always been true. 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.
  • tyrust 8y ago
    I'd disagree with the last two. There are now many websites that sell quality mail order mattresses for much less than a brick and mortar store of yore. I don't know how successful they are, but Redfin seems to have improved the process of home selling/buying.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
    Health care is something people use frequently, has broken processes, and high prices, and will seemingly never be fixed.
    • mrfusion 8y ago
      I’d argue the majority of people don’t use it frequently.
      • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
        Maybe not average aged working people, but everybody I know in the 60+ age group (mostly family) usually has regular interactions with the medical system, or at a rate far higher than 25-45 year olds. And there's a lot of older people. As a cohort, there's only slightly fewer boomers than millennials.
        • titanomachy 8y ago
          Old people aren't necessarily the ones in a position to change the system. And the old people with power don't use the public system.
    • dkjshfajskdfa 8y ago
• everdrive 8y ago
  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.
  • diminoten 8y ago
    This is a pretty sexist way to look at it...
    • slothtrop 8y ago
      I don't think it's far from the truth however. Consider the contrived societal expectation, devised by De Beers, to spend 1 month's salary on a ring. You can get an elegant diamond ring for far less, but we make a virtue out of spending in excess here and that extends to the wedding. It's not that men aren't complicit in this, but the more socially desirable the bride, and you know what that means, the more pressure there is to spend.
      • diminoten 8y ago
        That's just... completely untrue, and is definitely sexist. By the way, that De Beers campaign was marketed at the men, not the women, so it's men that are falling for that rule just as much, if not more, than women are demanding it. Putting the cost of weddings at the feet of the brides is ridiculous. For reference, I'm getting married in April, and it's been my wonderful bride who has kept costs way down, compared to my wild spending ideas.
        • monocasa 8y ago
          It was marketed towards both. Men to go out and buy the rings, women not to accept rings 'beneath them'. Advertising is absolutely just straight up sexist in a lot of cases, and people (speaking in the broad strokes that you have to when talking about complete populations) eat that up. I definitely know someone who got turned down because the ring he bought her wasn't expensive enough. Personally I think he dodged a bullet, but that's neither here nor there there. Advertisers use sexist advertising because it works. https://youtu.be/85HT4Om6JT4 https://youtu.be/85HT4Om6JT4
• dbot 8y ago
  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.
  • SiempreViernes 8y ago
    Yes, market size for people who don't want to put a lot of themselves into a wedding but also are willing to put in decent amount of money into paying someone else to do it for them seems rather slim. If you don't want to bother so much about the wedding it seems likely you don't want to pay enough for a middleman to make a profit.
  • LoSboccacc 8y ago
    Weddings are deeply personal experiences. That's the hard part to scale, every one of them is pratically built to order. What I learned on organizing mine is that service providers self organize in networks that refer each other not just as "favourtisement" but because they shared previous jobs and integrated well and that reduces their friction on delivering the client requests. That something that a startup should target more than the end clients. Disrupting wedding planners seems more efficient than disrupting the wedding industry whole.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
    Maybe all of the discrete parts (the venue, the entree, the dessert) are more-or-less commodities, but it's how we package these things together that prevents an end-to-end commoditization of "wedding as a service". It cheapens the experience if planning a wedding is as simple as going to a McDonald's drive-thru. For something that's supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime, I don't think people would want an app where they could just customize a few options, and have an entire wedding planned. The point of it, really, is that it isn't supposed to easy.
    • 8y ago
• astura 8y ago
  >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. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/average-wedding-cost-published-numbers-on-the-price-of-a-wedding-are-totally-inaccurate.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/average-wedding-cos...
  • giarc 8y ago
    I agree with most of your points, but this is a broad assumption that is likely not true "People whose weddings are a BBQ in the backyard aren't signing up for wedding websites and subscribing to wedding magazines."
    • astura 8y ago
      People who are looking to spend money sign up for wedding websites and spend months wedding planning and their free time talking about wedding planning online; people who are looking to have a basic celebration don't get anything from hanging around a wedding website. Picking up a cake from the grocery store bakery hardly requires extensive planning. My wedding reception was a huge party at our house (we have a big house that can accommodate tons of people) and the total cost was maybe $300(?) in food and booze, perhaps a little more, but definitely less than $500. If our house wasn't big enough renting the Italian American Club that's down the street for a day couldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars. The ceremony itself was just the two of us signing some papers in an office at city hall the total cost $100 for the JP and ~$30 for the registration fee. I couldn't imagine signing up for wedding website. Why on earth would I want to? What would I get from it? "inspiration" for toppings on the pizza we ordered? A discussion on the merits of cherry tomatoes vs grape tomatoes in the toss salad?
• brandonmenc 8y ago
  I've worked in the wedding industry. 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.
• kevin_b_er 8y ago
  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.
  • zdragnar 8y ago
    This seems like one of the more salient comments on this thread. When I got married, there's no way that I would have selected any of the vendors through an app. Even if I were inclined to discover them that way, my wife and I met with every vendor in person to evaluate their work, personality (as a proxy for reliability) and discuss pricing. It is an intimately personal affair, and I simply don't see room for a middle man. Even with a wedding planner, the couple getting married still often go through all of those steps. MAYBE what could be done is to provide a party planning system; specify type of occasion, select from suggested categories of vendors, and let the system manage an assortment of the necessary details, including meeting times. Even in this situation, it's going to be extremely location-dependent. Imagine the complexity of organizing data for Door Dash or Grubhub, multiplied by all of the other categories of vendors (venue, supplies, decoration, setup, cleanup, so forth).
• alexhutcheson 8y ago
  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".
• eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  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.
• openloop 8y ago
  It’s doing itself in?
• JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Why? Because you'd have to AirBnB the destination, Uber the guests there, Blue Apron the food/cake, Facebook the invitations/web site, etc... IOW, what I'm saying is you would have to be multiple startups in one.
• stevesimmons 8y ago
  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!
• ufmace 8y ago
  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.