Why is the wedding industry so hard to disrupt?

At the end of the day, this article isn't investigative journalism. It's not different from articles where they obtain a quote from an email or phone call with a university professor on some topic, without a critical analysis of that professor's research focus, conflicts of interest, etc.

So little jounalistic quality/scientific integrity.

This is very important to keep in mind. Never mention that you are working on organizing a wedding. Renting chairs? It's just for a party. Getting flowers? It's for a birthday. Vendors will almost always apply a huge markup when they hear "wedding".

I would compare it more to, a regular cake has like, 2 9's SLA of being what you wanted. But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected.

So that's what they pay for. If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me. I'm unwilling to pay 4x as much for something, just to chase a very diminishing improvement.

I don't agree on your why. The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence. It's in the same ballpark as a present to your fiancée (remember the rule of thumb for the price of the engagement ring: three times the gross monthly earnings whatever they are- which means: expensive by any standard). And I suspect this is valid across many cultures, so I'd say the reason is more or less anthropological. Thriftiness is rarely valued when it comes to these things.

Most regular cakes are small affairs. If you go to that same baker and ask for a 3-tier, ornately decorated cake that will feed at least 50-100 people and has a keepsake decoration on top, it'll be more.

Cakes like that are a different beast. They require special recipes so they don't collapse themselves. I know professional bakeries are able to spend less time than I did making my sister's wedding cake - a 3-tier affair - but they are still a decent amount of work and effort. Doubly so if you are paying the baker to transport and assemble the cake.

So yeah, of course wedding cakes are expensive, depending on the bells and whistles. But so are equally decadent cakes with the bells and whistles.

Thankfully, since then there is a new baker on the block.

Note and important that the baker is not insulated in any way from the aggravation and the bad feelings as a result of a problem. They will hear about it and they will live it. This is pretty much true for any small business. In other words if you are Comcast the CEO is well insulated from the pain and agony of any customers. Ditto for Airlines and so on. But the front office staff and/or the people who actually take the calls. Sure they hear about it and sure they might perceive it's a problem but they are not hearing the actual customer pain and getting aggravated. The baker will have someone come into the shop and they will see and feel the pain directly.

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).

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.

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.

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.

In the case of a couple planning their wedding, what exactly do these service providers know that the couple does not? How much food ordinarily costs, when catered? How much a particular venue space usually rents for, for an evening?

I'm not sure you could get the venue owners to drop rates, because it sure doesn't seem like many have much of a demand shortage. Wedding venues seem to be booked way far out in advance, and don't seem to have any issues with vacancies. And I'm sure they are well aware of each others' rates.

Anecdotally, I also see large disincentives to lower costs for the other major services. Musicians who play weddings do so because the gig pays well, not because playing crappy covers is what they really want to do. Pretty sure the same goes for photographers - if the wedding business wasn't so lucrative, they'd probably just go do something else with their lives. They're all professional, but I'm not sure many would identify as a "wedding singer", just "musician" or "photographer". But, I'd guess they too are very aware of each other's rates, which gives them no reason to work for less money.

Not sure what there's to "disrupt" here other than culture. And if there's one true rule I've learned: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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.

I've attended a wide gamut of weddings over the years. Some are in the above vein, others are much more informal affairs, still others make the wedding a small family affair and have a bigger casual party as a separate event.

It's such an important day, people want to make sure they'll be taken care of as special, unlike say, a cleaning service.

The venue was the next most expensive coming in at a flat rate of a few thousand

Everything else was pretty inexpensive by comparison although it does add up

If the typical mobile, prepared in advance, reduced menu restaurant with no real physical footprint can charge per plate what the finest tradition restaurants charge then there is clearly room for disruption.

Just as a comparison, the most expensive group dining option at Ruth Chris (selected for no reason other than I like their food) is $115 a plate. That is less than 2/3rds what we paid per plate at our wedding for something called "beaph" and looked like an old shoe.

My breakdown of the three largest expenses was about 40% food, 20% clothing and 10% the honeymoon.

These days, "disrupt" is really just fig-leaf language for "How do I get me a piece of those sweet, sweet margins?"

I think this is a similar situation to the often extreme costs seen in the Death Care Industry (Funeral and Mortuary services), just with the opposite end of the emotional spectrum being taken advantage of. People get invested in what they think society sees as necessary or appropriate and are driven by an emotional high/low into not really thinking about what they (or their passed loved ones) really want. They are driven by the emotional state to ignore expense and do whatever they can to convince both themselves and others of their feelings/intent, be that the love and promise of a new marriage, or the love and respect for someone who has passed.

Weddings, by their very nature are Affective Events. They are events that reproduce social relations and emotions in the attendees. As such, the decision making process is lead by emotions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As for customs, there are various electronic entry lanes for immigration and I haven't actually had a bag looked at by customs for years.

It's absurd and repulsive.

It's like we took only a single generation to forget how it was done for 3000 years across most cultures.

Yes, the elite always had big weddings, but most people didn't.

My grandparents and their peers: you go to the Church with family and friends, and then there's a reception at the cottage (considerably more people come by to say hi) where the ladies have sandwiches made. Uncles and aunts play music, people dance a little bit and then go home.

It's another negative aspect of cultural secularization that people don't even realize is happening because they have no context.

One day, after weddings have been corporatized, it's possible future generations think that getting married a 'The Starbucks (of weddings)' is normal as well!

Some of them will invent words like 'holistic' and 'organic' to buck the trend, when they don't even realize is what they mean to say is: "old timey, tradition wedding". Which just doesn't sound very cool or progressive ...

0_0 Wow, brides don't even get awarded a pronoun by you?!

In a more humanistic universe, the traditions around marriage means the wedding celebration is generally considered the most important party you ever arrange, so costs are expected to be greater.

Anecdotally, american culture also seems to use wedding spending as a straight up status indicator, comparable to having an expensive care. A notion that is undoubtedly supported by the industry that has much to gain by getting prices as inflated as possible.

Dowries existed in a time where women were not valued, because taking them on might be seen as an expense. So men got some 'free stuff' in addition.

Also, to be fair, men got the inheritance, so a dowry could be viewed as a kind of inheritance for the bride as well.

As far as 'cost and perception' - my feeling is that this is mostly not being driven by the groom's need to sacrifice, rather by bride's need to have 'perfect weddings'.

Personal experiences are not entirely scientific, but I've been to probably a couple of dozen weddings and in 100% of the cases, the grooms were not hugely interested in the organization, and were a little wary of all the spending. The brides were keen and eager to plan, to make the experience whatever they were. Marriage magazines etc. cater almost exclusively to women, for example.