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The Selling of the American Wedding
Penguin
May 2007
On Sale: May 10, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 1594200882
EAN: 9781594200885
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The 160-billion dollar behemoth that is the American wedding
industry and the psychology behind the expense, stress, and
folly associated with the typical American wedding Using
the American wedding as a rosetta stone, in One Perfect
Day writer Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that
cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks,
has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant,
egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding
production? What is the derivation of the nuptial imperative
upon brides and grooms to observe tradition while at the
same time using the wedding as a vehicle for expressing
their personal style? What does an American wedding tell us
about how Americans consume, relate, and live today? One
Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism
and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding
industry-an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to
the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring
that the American wedding business becomes ever more lavish
and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding
industry-from the swelling ranks of professional wedding
planners to department stores with their online wedding
registries to the retailers and manufacturers of wedding
gowns to the Walt Disney Company and its Fairytale Weddings
program-Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the
bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day and
dissects the myriad goods and services that will be required
for her role within it. Weddings are no longer a rite of
passage, no longer a transition from childhood to adulthood,
or an initiation into a sexual or domestic intimacy, nor
necessarily a religious ritual. The result of this cultural
shift is that the event itself has taken on an
ever-increasing momentousness shaped as much by commerce and
marketing as by religious observance or familial
expectation. The American wedding gives expression to the
values and preoccupations of our culture. For better or
worse, the way we marry is who we are. In researching
One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead goes deep behind the
scenes of the $161 billion wedding industry to discover how
the American wedding is manufactured. Targeting business
conventions, trade shows, factories abroad, and more, Mead
studies the data produced by the wedding industry, for the
benefit of its advertisers, on the consuming patterns of
brides and grooms; reads thousands of words in trade
publications and industry websites to reveal how the
industry thinks and talks about their clients when they are
out of earshot-as "a drunken sailor"; "a slam dunk"; or more
pointedly, "a marketer's dream." Mead reports from:
Behind the scenes at the Association of Bridal
Consultants' "Business of Brides" conference: Wedding
planners learn how to target the upcoming "Echo Boom" bridal
market, estimated at 4,200,000 brides by 2018. ("It
seems like the less money people have, the more they spend,"
says the association's director of corporate relations, page
36) "Top Fashion" wedding-dress factory: Mead
visits a factory in Xiamen, China, where migrant workers who
live eight to a room in dormitories turn out 100,000
dresses a year. A skilled seamstress earns six
dollars a day making dresses that sell for a national
average of $1,025. (pages 98, 81) * Disney World's
Wedding Pavilion: Mead explores how Disney built up its
now-mammoth wedding program in the 1990s to combat threats
to its theme-park preeminence. ("Couples are highly
brand-receptive in this stage of their lives...If you handle
their wedding and honeymoon correctly you create cherished
friends," says the co-founder of Disney Fairy Tale Weddings,
page 71). Note: rental of Cinderella's Coach: $2500 per
ceremony. * Behind the bridal registry:
Department stores see registries as a means of gaining
access to young, impressionable consumers who are forming
brand loyalties-what one industry report calls "Your New
$100 Billion Customer: the Engaged Woman" (page 117)
* Las Vegas, Nevada: Site of a 122,000 weddings
a year, where competition is so great that hand-billers
stalk the courthouse steps and Britney Spears's
swiftly-annulled nuptials are used as a marketing tool (page
170) * The honeymoon and destination wedding industry
in Aruba: This Caribbean island is so eager to capture
its share of the American wedding market that it changed its
marriage laws-now one out of every three weddings
conducted in Aruba is for tourists. "I call it the 'new
elopement," says one industry expert (page 200) * The
phenomenon of "vow renewal": Mead visits Sandals Royal
Caribbean Hotel, in Montego Bay, Jamaica-a wedding factory,
hosting between 5-10 ceremonies a day, of which 1
in 6 is a vow-renewal ceremony. Brides and grooms get to
re-enact the "once in a lifetime" moment of marriage as
often as their budget will allow (page 216) * A class
for would-be wedding planners: Attendees are taught to
size up clients by making house calls-the fancier the
bride's home, the bigger the budget-and to persuade brides
to attend their "how to plan your own wedding" seminars
("She's going to come out of the course going, Oh, God, I
don't want to do that. Just show her what it involves and
she'll be scared to death," page 51) * "Vows"
magazine and other trade publications: Mead reveals how
trade magazines urge retailers to squeeze more dollars out
of each bride: "Just when a bride thinks she'll have to
spend no more, it's your job to remind her that her bridal
image looks incomplete"(page 83). The number of
brides-about 2.3 million a year-cannot be increased by
marketing efforts, and rates of marriage are on the decline,
so each bride bears more of the burden of increasing
industry profits. * A seminar for wedding dress
retailers in Las Vegas: Chip Eichelberger, a
motivational speaker, offers advice on the pacing of a
sale-"If you get them excited about the three-hundred-dollar
dress it's hard to get them excited about the
three-thousand-dollar dress"-and how to act upon "the 'Oh,
Mommy,' moment," when a bride falls in love with a gown
(page 78-79) * Hebron Church, also known as "The
Chapel on the Hill": A struggling rural Wisconsin church
is forced by economic pressures to moonlight as a commercial
wedding chapel (page 145), while the ranks of freelance
wedding ministers-some with credentials acquired online-who
will perform crowd-pleasing "spiritual" ceremonies replete
with rituals invented for the camera begin to swell (page
130). * Gatlinburg, Tennessee: The "honeymoon
capital of the South," a Bible-belt mountain destination
where there are annually 5 weddings per
year-round-resident. The wedding-chapel business was
founded in 1979 by the controversial Reverend Ed Taylor, a
former Baptist minister. "I think it is dangerous,
spiritually dangerous, to use the Lord in that manner-in
order to gain business, and to use it as a marketing tool,"
says a rival chapel owner (page 162) * Behind the
scenes at the Wedding & Event Videographers Association
International annual convention: Videographers are
advised to double their prices ("I was blind to the
fact that people want the best for their children," says one
successful videographer), told how to incorporate comic
shots (the "gift steal" and the "runaway groom"), and learn
how to slice and dice raw footage into multiple video
products to increase profits. The value of video is promoted
as "preserving memories" that will otherwise be "lost." "You
have to get [them] initially, before they spend $3000 on
napkins" (page 185)
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