Wedding season 2021 is in full bloom. Engaged couples whose plans were upended by the pandemic are tying the knot in droves.
Which means those in the wedding industry are scrambling to meet the increasing demand as brides and grooms are now having the weddings they've always dreamed of.
Wedding planner Jodi Raphael likens this summer's bridal season to a wedding tsunami. "There was a switch that flipped on, really we didn't stop," she explains.
Raphael owns Jodi Raphael Events in Newton. She has been in the wedding planning business for 20 years and says she worked right through the pandemic along with her three full-time employees.
"We didn't pick our heads up from March to July last year," she said. "We were rescheduling and getting people replaced, calling places where people weren't answering phones, consoling brides and grooms. ... It was like Groundhog Day every day. It was the same conversations, and we weren't able to get anywhere."
Almost half the couples who had planned to get married last year postponed their wedding until this summer, according to a nationwide survey conducted by The Knot, a popular website that offers guidance on wedding planning. Raphael said her bookings are up 50% compared with pre-pandemic years and noted that everyone in the industry has been impacted by the upheaval.
"There are shortages of paper. There are issues with flowers," she said. "Everything has changed."
Not only is it difficult to order flowers and paper, overall wedding costs are up dramatically from a year ago, according to The Knot. Massachusetts weddings are the third most expensive nationwide, trailing only New York and Rhode Island, at more than $43,000.
Raphael says some couples who are trying to cut down on costs are opting for weekday weddings, adding that weekend weddings are not only more expensive but harder to book. She is now scheduling weddings into 2023. "We are seeing competition amongst brides to book their dates. There is a real sense of urgency," she said.
Stephanie Berenson, who owns Stephanie Berenson Photography, agrees. "Things just went from zero to 100 with masked mandates being lifted," she said.
Berenson started up her Boston-based business full time six months before the pandemic hit. The 27-year-old says she suffers from asthma and sat home for the first three months after the economic shut down and, in order to save on finances, moved back in with her parents.
She says business slowly picked up last summer. "I did a lot of micro weddings last year with 10 people or fewer, just intimate family weddings," she said. "I actually feel like a lot of my couples enjoyed the more intimate weddings because they told me they really got to do what they actually wanted rather than do this big wedding."
Christa and Kyle Audet, who are both in their mid-30s, decided to do both. They had a micro wedding last year and their big dream wedding with friends and family last month. (The Knot's survey showed that 32% of engaged couples took a similar route.)
Christa works in media production and Kyle is a CPA. They live in South Boston and began planning their wedding in 2019.
Neither of them wanted to wait. Their micro wedding was a private ceremony in downtown Boston in June of last year. Christa says it was just the two of them and their Justice of the Peace.
"We were going to meet our JP at this beautiful corner of the Public Garden under this gorgeous tree," she said. "It was a beautiful day, and I'm cool as a cucumber. We walk up to the JP and as soon as she started our vows, I just lost it. It really hit me how real it was, how excited I was and we were really making it official."
She said there were some special elements as well. "Another couple was having their pictures taken and the photographer took a quick photo of us and got our kiss at the end of our vows. She then ran over to us quickly and gave us her business card and said, 'Email me, I've got a photo of your kiss.' It was precious. It was special," she recalled.
But Christa didn't wear her wedding dress. She wanted to save that for a church wedding, complete with 150 guests. It took place last month on June 12th — the exact date of their civil wedding a year ago.
"Everyone was vaccinated. We were able to have a wedding without masks, and to be able to hug and dance and have a walkup bar and all of the planning was worth it, all of the postponements and tough days," she said. "There were tough days that we had leading up to the wedding and everything just fell away."
Berenson says this joy is reflected in all of the couples who she's photographed on their wedding day since the state of emergency was lifted in Massachusetts over the Memorial Day weekend.
"'Love is not canceled' are the famous words that everybody has been saying this year, and it's nice to feel like things are coming back to life, back to normal," Berenson says.
So far she has 25 weddings booked through the fall and several of them are scheduled back-to-back — and the phone keeps ringing.
