Where Have All The Brides Gone?

I am hearing from more and more vendors that bookings are not just down this year but stupidly, appallingly down. Folks that were used to being double, if not triple booked year after year for every weekend in May with even more on the big Memorial Day weekend have nothing; I mean zip, zilch, zero, nada for the entire month in 2010! This isn’t just one or two random vendors, this is many many in a lot of categories. Florists seem to be getting particularly hard hit.

So what’s the deal? It isn’t that the number of weddings is down that much, a little yes but they haven’t come to a complete stand still. Well, a few trips through Weddingbee and the Live Journal planning forum and I may have the answer. I think DIY is bigger than any of us ever wanted to believe.

I don’t just mean with a few budget brides, I mean across the board. Another thing is that these aren’t just the toilet paper napkin ring crowd, these are full blown Martha Stewart wannabes. These brides are tackling everything from centerpieces and ceremony flowers to bird cage veils and “fauxto” booths. Invitations and Save the Dates are a given. I’m even seeing quite a few make their table cloths, overlays and runners.

I know I have said this before but I don’t know how many of you were listening. Look at your bookings for 2010, you may just listen now.

How can your become a part of this growing phenomenon? What can you do to support these DIY brides AND make a profit off your talents? I was chatting with a floral designer client and I suggested (not for the first time) that she offer classes on how to DIY your wedding flowers. She could do one class on simple centerpieces and another on personal flowers. She has the design room space. She also has an amazing stock of containers available for rent. Let’s add to the mix her personal history of having been a teacher for years with an MEd.

Here are the possible benefits we came up with in our chat. She would make money off of the classes themselves. Each class could showcase her containers for rent. She could order in the flowers for the bride’s weddings, with mark up.  A certain percentage of the students would decide that DIY was too much work and actually hire her to do their wedding.

In a perfect world she could change her entire business model. Hold her classes one or two Saturdays a month. On Wednesday come in for a few hours to receive condition and sort flower deliveries and prepare and pack containers. On Thursday be on hand for the brides to pick up their stuff. If she works it right she could even put a book together. What is not to love?

What is there about your business that you can use to profit from this new paradigm? I know if I was still doing cakes I would be offering custom handmade sugar flowers to go on their cheap little cakes from Costco. I would also be offering a line of plain vanilla cakes that were iced but unstacked and undecorated for them to do whatever they liked with; a blank canvas as it were.

For those of you that are being hit by this; now is the time to rethink your business model. Just because you have always done things a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t change. After all, your target market sure has!

You have got to get on this train or get run over by it.

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