Wedding Planning
Fast Wedding Facts, Trends, and Tips
The wedding industry pulls in $25.3 billion per year. I’ll just give you a minute to absorb that. The wedding industry includes dresses and tuxedos, catering, banquet halls, rentals, flowers, photography, limousines, cake, invitations, favors and so on and when you consider that over the past two decades between 2.25 and 2.40 million weddings occurred in the US alone, and the average cost of a wedding is $20,000 to $25,000, well you can see how those numbers add up.
Chances are you’ve stood up in a wedding, attended a few, drove past one letting out of a church or synagogue (85% of all weddings are still held in a place of worship), or have had one (or two) weddings of your own. A great deal of planning, orchestrating and financing goes into weddings. In fact, the average bride (and mother, sisters, and mother-in-law, no doubt) need 7-12 months to put together a wedding for an average guest count of 189 guests. When you take into account that the most popular months for weddings are August and June, well, you can just feel the competitiveness in the air as brides battle for the best florist, banquet hall and limo.
Parents and the engaged couple have more time to prepare for the wedding, since the average engagement is now a year-and-a-half, which is 11 months longer than engagements back in 1990. During this time couples may consider having a destination wedding over a traditional wedding, where the guests travel to a fun location and blend a vacation in with the wedding. This can be done on an island, Las Vegas, cruise ship, anywhere really. Destination weddings have grown from only 3 percent of weddings per year to 11 percent this year. Destination wedding or not, Hawaii is still the most popular honeymoon destination, and the length of honeymoons extends each year. Now we all know that over half of all marriages end in divorce, but the good news is that 67 percent of second brides still get a diamond engagement ring.
Guests of weddings may be happy to know that the trend in receptions is to enhance the guests’ experience by making the table arrangements entertaining, food better, and including more activities to make the celebration a time for family to reconnect. According to Hallmark, sales are highest in May through August for their wedding cards. To give you some insight into the minds of brides, as a guest, before you seal that wedding card envelope, keep in mind that brides hang onto wedding cards and will be especially fond of those with handwritten and heartfelt personal messages. And of course don’t forget that the value of a gift is always enhanced with fancy wrapping and presentation.
There you have it: facts, trends and tips about weddings collected by the biggest names in the wedding industry like Hallmark and Knot.com. Now, the next time you’re involved in a conversation that isn’t going anywhere you can blurt out fascinating wedding trivia. This is not recommended on first dates—it may seem desperate.
Written by econtent
Reprinted with permission by WeddingPearl.com
