First comes love, then comes marriage. But in between comes a tour through the $70 billion-a-year bridal business, a.k.a. planning a wedding.
It is unfamiliar territory for many visitors, which can make for a perplexing visit. Brides-to-be find themselves navigating a process that can seem strange and breathtakingly expensive.
“I felt like I was hemorrhaging money,” said Shawna Snukst, 29, of the Gold Coast, who is managing director of a Chicago consortium of academics who serve as business consultants. Her Sept. 3 wedding rang up at more than $50,000. “Everything was so completely overpriced. I was appalled.”
Jennifer Sheehan was amazed at the number of what she considers unnecessary items she could buy for her July wedding. “The wedding industry makes up needs that don’t exist, like a knife to cut the cake. Who needs that?” said Sheehan, of Westmont, interim coordinator of the women’s program at William Rainey Harper College.
And Erin Menninger, 28, who lives on the North Side with her husband and baby, felt ripped off after her wedding last March. Her $2,000 dress arrived too short, and had glued-on beads that started falling off when she steamed it before the ceremony.
“The industry is just scammers,” she said. “It’s like funerals. You have no choice. You have to get a casket; you have to get a dress.”
There are, of course, plenty of brides who feel perfectly happy about their wedding planning experience.
Bridal horror stories are rare, said Carley Roney, editor in chief and a founder of an online wedding site, www.theknot.com. “Given the number of people getting married and the traffic on our site, while those stories are shocking, it’s one in 500,000,” she said. “I am impressed with how few complaints there are.”
By the time they start shopping for gowns, brides are generally prepared for the cost, said Ann Cervantes, manager of the Bridesmart discount store in Schaumburg.
“On average, most girls who read up in Modern Bride [magazine] get a feel for what the prices of wedding gowns are,” she said.
When Bride’s magazine recently polled its readers, 9 out of 10 said their wedding-planning period was the happiest time of their lives.
The others are the kind of people who contact the Better Business Bureau of Chicago and Northern Illinois every year at high wedding season. “In April and June, we start getting complaints,” said Michelle Brown, retail administrative services manager of the bureau. “It’s usually about the dress.”
Planning a wedding brings together several highly combustible elements: High cost–the average price of a Chicago wedding is nearly $20,000–high emotion, a unique industry and customers who have never encountered it before.
“If you’ve never hosted a party for 200, you don’t know what’s involved,” said Millie Martini Bratten, editor in chief of Bride’s magazine.
“There are huge misconceptions about what goes into these products,” Roney said. “Yes, a wedding dress is more expensive than a regular dress, but when was the last time you went for three fittings and had someone sitting there sewing something (specifically) for you?” And some of the pain is self-inflicted, said Teri Agins, author of “The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business” (William Morrow, $25).
“I was married, and I didn’t spend a lot,” said Agins, who covers fashion for the Wall Street Journal. “I thought it was a waste of money. But for a lot of people, it’s the whole Cinderella thing.”
It was a strange thing for Lauren Gillman, who got married in July. She was perplexed by a common practice in upper-end salons: Customers cannot look through the dresses themselves.
“They bring the dresses to you,” said Gillman, 27, a North Side financial analyst. “You make hourlong appointments, and you can only try on five or six outfits in an hour.”
She found it unsettling. “I didn’t know what I wanted. Some dresses are fluffy, and I’m a more simple person. But the saleswomen are saying, `This is your day to look like a princess.’ They brought all these puffy dresses.
“I felt under a lot of pressure. The following week, the dresses were going to triple in price.”
Mass confusion
Why not let customers look through the racks?
To keep brides from getting overwhelmed, say salons.
“We have thousands of dresses in stock,” said Charles Horvath, sales manager at Exclusives for the Bride in Chicago. “It’s really more confusing if a customer goes through it. We cut their time on the first visit by two-thirds.”
The practice allows stores to give more selection, said Agins. Stores that keep gowns on the floor have to sell those gowns in order to turn a profit; but stores that keep gowns in back rooms can offer more styles than they could afford to keep on the sales floor.
There are also practical considerations for not letting customers handle gowns. “They get dirty; they’re white,” Agins said.
The Better Business Bureau’s Brown suggested another reason: “They don’t want you to see the dress, see the manufacturer, price the dress and go to their competitor and buy it from them,” she said. “They’re basically protecting their business so they can stay in business.”
In fact, some brides have noticed that tags have been removed from dresses.
The bridal industry is a highly competitive business that is less lucrative than the public may think, Roney said.
Stores must contend with competition from the Internet and with savvy consumers who get stores to bargain against one another on the price of a dress.
“Which would be fine if they were making double [in profit] off these dresses,” Roney said. “But at the end of the day, they go down [during bargaining] till they have a 10 percent margin, and that ultimately isn’t enough to sustain their business.
“Particularly on the bridal fashion side, there aren’t a lot of people getting really rich off this industry. A lot of mom and pop stores are closing because of the superstores.”
On the other hand, she said, brides are indeed sometimes subjected to high sales pressure. “There’s a lot of, `Do it now, or it won’t be ready in time,'” she said. “Those are sales strategies that everyone uses, but I think you feel particularly vulnerable when you’re a bride.”
What about the prices of bridal gowns?
Snukst still doesn’t understand why her dress cost $3,000. “That’s a god-awful amount,” she said. “I really like it, but I don’t know that it was worth that.”
Her resentment was fueled by her repeated discoveries of cheaper prices online. Snukst, who in her business helps companies use the Internet, spent hours shopping online. Some of the items she bought turned out to be chintzy-looking, she said, but others saved significant amounts of money.
A bridal store, for example, quoted her $1,500 for a veil. She got one on eBay for $75. “It’s not the same quality veil, but it’s not a thousand-dollar difference,” she said.
Menninger figured that for $2,000, her dress’ beads should have been sewn on, not glued. And she was furious that her gown had arrived so short that she had to buy flat shoes, though she really wanted to wear heels.
The store, House of Brides Couture, offered to see whether the manufacturer could make a new one, Menninger said. But with two weeks to her wedding, she didn’t want to chance it. She accepted a $200 rebate, and took the dress.
“There’s no way that dress was worth $1,800,” she said. “I can’t imagine it cost that much more [to make] than my bridesmaids’ dresses, which cost $300 and were very nice.”
House of Brides owner Eva Buziecki said through a publicist that she did not want to get into a public dispute with a customer, but that the vast majority of the thousands of women who buy their gowns at the company’s six stores every year are satisfied customers.
Though House of Brides was a target of a WMAQ-Ch. 5 investigation in 1999 focusing on customer complaints, the owners subsequently met with the Better Business Bureau and changed some practices, said Brown. House of Brides has been a member of the bureau for more than a year, with almost no complaints.
What’s behind the price tag
As for the general cost of wedding gowns, it is a function of fabric and design, Buziecki said. “Silks are very expensive,” she said. “If it’s a lace designed by the designer, it’s going to be more expensive; and if it’s a well-known designer, it’s very expensive.”
“The average wedding gown carries 10 to 12 yards of fabric,” said Bridesmart’s Cervantes. “Especially if the fabric is imported from Italy, it can be expensive.”
Then there is labor. “People don’t understand the amount of man-hours that go into making a gown,” said Horvath. “Most of our gowns are hand-embroidered, hand-beaded. We had one where it took 200 hours to bead just the bodice.”
But the price is not always a literal reflection of cost, said Brown. “In the long run, they’re not worth that amount of money, but what are you paying for? . . . You’re paying to have that moment . . . to have this dress for that wedding. It’s built around emotions.”
After the gown is bought, there is another expense–alterations. Which leads to a question in some brides’ minds: Why does a custom-made gown even need alterations?
Because unless they cost upwards of $10,000, they are made to order, not made to measure, said Horvath.
In other words, designers are not cutting a pattern for you personally. They have patterns for their styles in various sizes. The store measures you to see which size of a particular style you fit most closely.
The designer tries to wait to get several orders for, say, a size 8, Horvath said–which is part of the reason it generally takes 20 weeks to get a gown–and then cuts them all at once.
Still, women wear clothing every day that is not made to measure, and not altered beyond an occasional hem. Why the extra nipping and tucking on bridal gowns?
“You settle for a lot when you buy most ready-to-wear,” said Agins. “Most people are not that persnickety about fit and size.” With a wedding dress, they are.
They will typically pay a set fee regardless of how much work needs to be done–typically $180 to $225.
Why so much? Because it can involve extensive work, said Horvath: “Even a hem–you’re hemming at least four layers. If you’re going with a full-skirt gown, that’s 12 yards of fabric. . . . It’s not like hemming a pair of pants.”
Stores charge for alterations, Roney said, to discourage brides from repeatedly changing their minds about a hem. But she thinks stores should throw in routine alterations for free. “It seems to me that having a dress altered should be part of the cost of it, considering how much they’re spending,” she said.
Throughout the wedding planning process, Snukst had the impression that she was spending more because she was buying for a wedding. Wedding-themed versions of things like single-use cameras and balloons that she bought online, she found, were more expensive than their non-bridal equivalents.
So does the word “wedding” induce an immediate markup in price?
No, says Bride’s magazine’s Bratten. “Most services are either fairly priced or they don’t stay in business,” she said. “It’s like anything else; if there’s extra decoration for a bridal camera and you like that, buy it; if you don’t, buy something else.”
It does cost more to get a bridal bouquet than to send a bouquet to a friend, said Roney. But that is because the bridal bouquet involves more service.
“You’re not just calling the florist and having them do something; you’re going to meet with them four times,” she said.
“There’s a little bit of preconception that [bridal stores] are trying to rip you off,” she said. “But I think people need to be a little bit stronger. You’re shopping; you’re in control. But you have to educate yourself before you go in.”
SOME TIPS FOR SAVING MONEY AND PRESERVING YOUR SANITY
– Educate yourself on what things cost and establish priorities. You can buy less expensive versions of things that aren’t as important to you.
For example, Hannah Ben-Zvi, 29, a North Side pediatrician, put the big bucks into photography, a klezmer band and kosher catering for her wedding last April. But she made her own version of 72 place cards–a bouquet of painted wooden tulips with names attached on office supply store tags–for about $10 total. And she made her own invitations. They cost about $75, compared with the $600 estimate she was quoted.
You also can consider low-cost wedding gown alternatives such as consignment resale stores, thrift shops or a white ballgown.
– Don’t pay in full up front, even if a vendor claims that that is the policy.
Vicki Rappatta, of South Holland, membership manager of a medical society, said that House of Brides in Oak Lawn insisted that she pay in full before they would order her gown from the manufacturer. She spent the week before her wedding in February desperately trying to get her shawl and veil. They finally arrived only four days before the wedding.
“This really upset me,” she said. “I was having migraines. You’re talking about the week before your wedding.”
House of Brides responded that she must have paid in full voluntarily, because store policy requires a 75 percent deposit. Because the shawl and veil came in late, a spokesman said, the store gave her a price break.
Rappatta said she was offered a price break only on alterations, and that was because the store repeatedly broke appointments for fittings.
Lori Bolas, a spokeswoman for the Illinois attorney general’s office, said her instincts led her to question a lot of things before she got married in August. “I was not going to pay 100 percent down for a videographer and have somebody not show up at my wedding.”
– If you do not get something you paid for, ask for restitution.
If you don’t get satisfaction, contact the Illinois attorney general’s office or the Better Business Bureau of Chicago and Northern Illinois, both of which mediate such disputes.
– Keep in mind that you don’t have to have a big-ticket wedding.
“You can get married at a free outdoor location like the Rocky Mountains . . . or a back yard,” said Millie Martini Bratten, editor in chief of Bride’s magazine. “You don’t have to have 200 people; you can have fewer. You don’t have to have favors; you can write everybody a personal note.”There’s no one way to get married anymore.”
— Barbara Brotman
