Visit your local magazine rack, and while you may not see Working Mother or Wired, you can find at least three different bridal magazines. Could there really be that many people getting married that grocery stores and pharmacies must have stacks on hand? Could these magazines be spur of the moment purchases? “Oh, I forgot I have to plan my wedding. I’d better pick up Modern Bride while I’m at the store.”
Could it be that the unengaged among us are buying these magazines?
Delina Pryce says she has been reading bridal magazines since she was in high school.
“I was collecting them for awhile. In college, I would be at an airport or a bookstore and I would pick one up. I always loved bridal magazines,” says Pryce, 27, owner of an editorial services company, in Berrien Springs, Mich.
“I would sit down and tear out the pictures I wanted and put them in plastic sleeves and throw the rest of the magazine away,” she says. Still, she kept about 45 magazines intact.
“I remember always loving them. All the cool stuff you could do [and] the beautiful pictures,” she says.
As Pryce planned for her actual wedding in October, she found she didn’t need to buy more magazines.
“I knew exactly what I wanted before I got engaged,” she says. Still, she would flip through them even though her wedding was already set. “My dream is to be in a wedding magazine,” she says, referring to the real weddings sections most magazines have.
Pryce is not alone in her love of all-things-bridal. In college she found that her roommate also had a yen for these magazines.
“You dream your whole life of this wedding you are going to have. And there [in these magazines] are the pictures you had in your head,” says Caroline Murray, 27, an information technology consultant in Atlanta who is planning her wedding.
Even though the two friends live thousands of miles apart now, they will sometimes sit down on the phone together and go through the latest issue of Modern Bride or Martha Stewart Weddings.
“One of us would be saying, `Ooh, I like that dress,'” Pryce says.
Although the publishers of these magazines don’t have any specific breakdown of their readers, many in the wedding industry agree that there is a segment of people who aren’t planning a wedding, but still like the magazines.
William Brennan, president of Bridal Expo Chicago, points to the numbers. In the greater Chicago metropolitan area, there are 55,000 to 58,000 marriage licenses applied for each year. Yet, local wedding magazines, such as Chicago Weddingpages, have a yearly circulation of 120,000 copies, of which a little more than half are given away as promotional copies.
The pre-engaged reader
Modern Bride has run articles for the pre-engaged, says Antonia van der Meer, editor in chief of the magazine. She points to an article in the December/January issue on how to get the engagement ring you want.
“I call them my brown paper bag readers. They are either in the fantasy stage or in a committed relationship and getting a jump on the planning,” she says.
Some may even take the fantasy further, going to stores to try on a dress, says Shelley Murray, owner of Shelley’s Bridal Couture in West Dundee. When a woman comes into the store, she is asked to fill out a registration card giving the date, time and other wedding information. About 5 percent leave the wedding information spots blank, Murray says, which makes her believe they don’t have a date at all, but are just hopeful.
But there are others who say bridal magazines can serve other practical purposes.
Elvira Perez, director of professional development at the Magazine Publishers of America in New York City, found the gown for her teenage daughter’s Quinceanera, a Hispanic girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, through a bridal magazine.
“There’s not a ball gown magazine out there,” Perez says.
Her daughter ended up wearing a wedding dress for the event, though Perez says, her daughter thought there was an “ickiness factor” about wearing a bridal gown at 16.
Joe Chambers, publisher of Chicago Weddingpages agrees that these magazines can serve other purposes.
“There’s a lot of fashion in a bridal magazine,” he says. At bridal shows, he has run into women who aren’t engaged or are bridesmaids. “A woman will say, `I want a copy, but I’m not engaged.'”
Formed an addiction
Amy Bleier Long, 22, of Hoboken, N.J., has been married more than a year but still finds herself flipping through bridal magazines. She thinks she might be addicted to these magazines. That addiction started even before she got engaged, she says, when she bought a stack to use in an advertising class project.
“I like the magazines because [they] give me great ideas for entertaining in general, not that I have the money to throw a fabulous dinner party,” says Bleier Long.
Currently working in retail, she is considering becoming a wedding planner.
“I do miss it,” she says about planning a wedding. “I liked the creative aspect of it.”
Looking at the magazines before having to deal with the headaches of a real wedding might be “particularly sweet,” van der Meer says. “You don’t have a budget yet and haven’t had a single fight with your mother-in-law.”
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Marriage declines, titles grow
– According to the U.S. Census Bureau, marriage rates have steadily declined over the past 30 years. The number of women marrying in their 20s has seen the greatest drop: Between 1975 and 2000, the percentage of women ever married fell from 63 percent to 30.9 percent for women 20 to 24 and from 87 percent to 61.9 percent for women 25 to 29.
– With national and regional titles combined, Barnes & Noble carries more than 160 bridal magazine titles.
– The Knot Web site (www.theknot.com), launched in 1996, has some 15,000 daily posts. In 2000, the company purchased a regional wedding magazine publishing company and in 2002 launched a national magazine, The Knot Weddings Magazine. The regional magazines, which cover 18 cities, provide fresh editorial content geared to each region. The national and regional magazines, which come out twice yearly, have a combined circulation of 1.46 million.
And because The Knot found that brides were posting on its Web site long after their weddings, the company launched in October a new Web site for the newly married, called TheNest (www.thenest.com). The site is billed as the “new home for newlyweds.”
— M.M.
