Is a SC weddings boom approaching? Here’s what’s expected after a dismaying 2020
After a tough year of couples postponing or canceling weddings, wedding industry workers are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I think 2022 is going to be the year. I think things feel more hopeful now, but I think we’ve all been going through this [pandemic] for a year,” said Jessica Rourke, a wedding planner and professor of “the wedding class” at the University of South Carolina’s School of Hospitality, Retail and Sports Management.
Rourke has been a wedding planner for almost 15 years and normally plans 15 to 20 weddings per year. After the onset of the pandemic last year, Rourke had one wedding canceled and the others rescheduled as many as three times. She is still planning some weddings for this year and next that were supposed to happen in 2020.
Gov. Henry McMaster ordered non-essential businesses to close on March 31, 2020, and issued a statewide stay at home order April 6. Spring is the busiest season for weddings, so many couples were left to reschedule their big events at the last moment.
“Some people are more open to the pivot approach, and then I think some people are still like, ‘I want to have my 250- or 300-person wedding,’ and that’s probably not going to happen in 2021 for a lot of people’s comfort levels,” Rourke said. “I think 2022 will be a really big year for the wedding industry.”
Weddings are a $55 billion per year industry in the U.S. that include a range of services and products, including florists, caterers, tailors, dressmakers, and event venues.
Katie Wilson is a wedding photographer based in Columbia and said she immediately thought about losing her job after news broke in March 2020 that the pandemic had spread to South Carolina.
“I was watching the news and I’m like, ‘Alright I’m not going to have a job’,” Wilson said. “And then a few months go by, and it’s like, people are still in love during a pandemic and are still going to get married and are still going to want to elope and do their thing, so that was a huge relief for me.”
Tom Chinn, manager of 701 Whaley, a wedding venue and event space in Columbia, said he is looking to the future after a tough year for his business. The venue would have normally hosted six to eight weddings in March, but only has three scheduled this month, Chinn said.
“When this all happened, it was like an instant shutdown, and it really hit people in our industry hard, you know— caterers, rental companies, all those companies that support what we do,” said Chinn.
A national wedding services industry study by IbisWorld reported that after a sharp decline, “revenue is expected to surge 33.1% in 2021 as operators accommodate both new and postponed weddings.”
The wedding website theknot.com surveyed 7,600 couples who were planning to marry in 2020 and found that 47%rescheduled their reception to 2021 or later.
Columbia couple Charleigh and Grayson Lowman had their wedding scheduled for March 21, 2020, but knew six days before the wedding there was no way it could happen as planned. The couple got married anyway in a small, backyard ceremony and decided to postpone the reception.
The Lowmans were able to get credits from their vendors to use later and eventually decided on a one-year anniversary celebration. Grayson Lowman said he “more or less wanted to be done with it and not keep kicking the decision on when to have (the reception) down the road.”
Wilson juggled photographing smaller weddings, elopements and a lot of rescheduling last year. About half of her clients rescheduled, meaning she had around 10 weddings change dates in 2020. The other half of her clients had smaller ceremonies. Wilson is still working on weddings that overflowed into this year, but she expects next year to be the big wedding boom.
“I’ve been getting a ton of inquiries for next year, which usually around this time I’d be getting inquiries for the end of this year,” said Wilson. “I think people just don’t want to pick up and change their date like they’ve seen brides do last year, so they’re aiming for next year.”
Another popular wedding venue in Columbia, The Lace House, hosts about 70 weddings per year, according to manager Karen Hedgecock. The venue is already booked for every spring Saturday in 2022.
“We even have a couple bookings in the fall, which is pretty far out, so I do expect 2022 to be a good year,” Hedgecock said.
The sentiment from industry professionals is that people are ready to go back to normal with having large, traditional weddings. With coronavirus cases dropping, vaccines spreading and some of the South Carolina mask requirements lifted, many couples see an end to the pandemic in sight and are willing to wait.
“More than anything, I’ve had more clients kind of being like, ‘I’d rather wait and have what I’ve been envisioning for the past year,’” said Rourke. “We just have big weddings in the South — it’s just kind of a part of Southern living, I think.
“I think this year, folks are looking to have the more traditional-sized weddings that we see at the Lace House; at least, that’s their plan,” Hedgecock said.
While wedding professionals saw many unique trends in 2020, such as hand sanitizer everywhere, increased elopements, shortened guest lists and even Zoom weddings, Rourke isn’t sure those trends will stick around.
“Family members are going to be ready to get together and celebrate in a way that we probably have never seen before,” Rourke said. “I think we’re looking forward to the trend of 2022, just weddings being back and bigger than ever.”
