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My dear couples. I truly, really feel for you. You have been planning your big day for so long, have designed your decorations, shopped for dressses and suits, decided on important details and you probably couldn’t wait for your wedding day to finally be here.
But what came instead was COVID-19. Suddenly, your plans were thrown upside-down. I know it’s a topic you’ve probably heard and read so much about and yet I want to put out some thoughts for you to consider.
For some of you, the appearance of the Coronavirus means that you had to postpone or cancel your wedding altogether. Others are still in that strange limbo where weddings aren’t yet officially forbidden but where regulations might still affect your planning because of the venue or the size of your party. In a previous post I’ve outlined different options you have on how to continue planning. I recommend you read it, no matter in what stage of planning your wedding you are at the moment.
I want to take this blogpost to talk about something else. Something, that’s quite important to me as a small business owner and something that’s most definitely also important for other vendors you might have booked for your wedding. This blogpost is about the topic of postponing your wedding. Above all, I want to let you know how grateful we all are if you decide to postpone instead of cancel your wedding. After all, the wedding is a chance for you to celebrate your love with the most important people in your life! So why cancel?
Your wedding day is a very special day in your lives - and that it should remain! The decision on how you want to proceed is entirely yours. I’m sure it’s not an easy decision and it’s not just about setting a new date but about coordinating your schedules with those of your families, your venue and your venues. There’s new Save-the-Dates and invitations to be sent out, new engravings to be planned for your rings and so much more. That can be overwhelming. Still, I’d like to take the chance to point something out to you that you might not have thought about, especially if you’re planning the wedding by yourselves and without a professional planner.
Postponing is not the same as postponing
Many of your vendors are small business owners. Some might do what they do next to a full- or part-time-job, others built up their whole livelihoods with their businesses. Some might have employees whose wages they have to pay and most of them will see their income shrinking with each new day. This crisis is a challenge for all of us. But maybe a bit more for those who depend on the event- and, in this case, wedding-industry. Whole livelihoods might depend on the further development of this wedding season. Every cancelled wedding means a missing income of multiple hundred to multiple thousand Francs for us entrepreneurs. That’s money that can’t simply be earned in other ways because we cannot work at the moment.
Now you might be saying: “But hey, if we set a new date you’ll still get your money, right?” Right. And at the same time, wrong. We will be getting an income, but it’s an income we would have usually had right now. And we’ll be getting it later, at a time where we might have had a new booking from new clients. And by that, we would have earned double. So if you decide to move your wedding to one of the very popular days like a Saturday in Summer, that means we’ll lose money. And that’s why postponing isn’t always the same as postponing.
A small calculation
I’m gonna try to make that a little bit clearer for you: As a wedding vendor we have a limited amount of days where we can work or where weddings usually take place. Let’s say our wedding season lasts from May-September. That’s 21 weeks. Since most weddings are held on Saturdays, that’s 21 days where we can generate income. If we’re lucky, some of our couples chose a Friday to get married. In general that’s just a small amount of overall clients but let’s say it’s a third of all couples for the sake of this experiment. That means we get 7 Fridays where we’re also booked. That makes 28 days in total. 28 days per year (!) where we have to generate income to last us the whole year. Professional wedding vendors can fill these 28 days up every year.
So where’s the problem, you ask?
If you move your wedding from a Saturday in 2020 to a Saturday in 2021, we lose one of those 28 days. And if only a handful of other 2020-couples does the same our income suddenly breaks in half because from the original 28 days we can only take on new clients on 14 of those day. Fridays and Saturdays in off-season probably won’t become more popular than usual so we’ll only fill a select few of those with new bookings. All this means that we’re suddenly missing a big chunk of our yearly income that we simply cannot earn on other days.
That’s why us vendors need your help - and that’s not just me as a photographer but everyone from florists to DJs to officiants and musicians and others.
What can you do?
It’s actually pretty simple: Consider another day than Saturday for your wedding. This could be a holiday where everyone’s off work anyways or even the day before a holiday. I once photographed a wedding on a Monday before a Holiday and the couple chose that date because they had wanted a special venue and it was fully booked on Saturday’s and Friday’s in summer.
And even if your loved ones would have to take a day off of work I’m sure they’d love to do that for you!
You could also switch up your plans and turn the summer-garden-party you had thought of into a beautiful fall-celebration or even a magical winter-wedding! If you get married outside of the main season (which is May-September) many of your vendors will probably still be available on a Saturday. By chosing one of those dates your chances of re-booking all your vendors are significantly higher.
Of course you can still chose a Saturday during high-season. It’s your day and it should be what you want. But in that case I and other vendors will have to charge you an additional reservation-fee for that date. And that might just help us to keep doing what we love.
Remember: By chosing a day from Sunday to Friday or a Saturday in off-season you might actually save a little business! And wouldn’t that be something truly beautiful in these hard times?
I hope this article showed you a new viewpoint and maybe even started a thought-process you’ll share with others. In the name of all wedding vendors I thank you for reading this and wish you an incredible wedding, no matter where or when it’ll take place!