Are inquiry rates low? Today’s episode takes a look at the current state of the wedding industry, especially regarding lack of inquiries over the last few years. I’m sharing my research and why I feel hopeful that we will soon see the industry blooming again. 

The Focused Photographers Podcast was created based on the idea that the most incredible tool for learning is a deep dive into any given topic from multiple perspectives. Join us every other week as we explore important topics, with host Daniel Moyer and a variety of guests offering different perspectives! Make sure you’ve hit that follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast player to get notified each week as we air new episodes!

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REVIEW THE SHOW NOTES

The gray cloud over the wedding industry (1:08)

Wedding industry trends after 2020 (3:19)

The engagement gap (5:14)

What to do in the meantime (11:03)

Stay focused (14:02)

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/17/business/signet-proposals-comeback-2024/index.html

https://priceonomics.com/how-long-do-couples-date-before-getting-engaged

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/fashion/weddings/wedding-boom-year.html

CONNECT WITH DANIEL MOYER​

Website: https://danielmoyercoaching.com/

Wedding Instagram: @DANIELMOYERPHOTO

Business Instagram: @GETFOCUSEDPHOTOGRAPHERS

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-Dan

Review the Transcript:

Hey friends, welcome to the focus photographers podcast. I’m your host Dan Moyer. Today’s episode is about the gray cloud that is hanging over our photography industry, singing over the wedding industry, especially. There’s just this lack of inquiries, lack of new couples, lack of engagements, whatever you want to call it.

And I’m going to put my flag in the ground and I think go into this and discover what I think it’s from based on some of the numbers, based on some of the research I did about this industry, about engagements. And what I learned. So I’m going to try to keep my feelings out of it as much as possible and just go off the data.

So thanks for joining with me today. I hope that this episode is somewhat of a positive episode that you leave it somewhat hopeful. Uh, when I’ve shared this in a newsletter and some of the other places that I’ve shared these thoughts, people said, wow, this is actually sort of a hopeful message. So I’m hoping that it rings true with you.

Um, then you get something out of this episode. Let’s do it.

So as I was saying, there’s this gray cloud, this big, heavy. Messy grossness that’s hanging over top of our industry and just feels like it’s just raining on everyone’s parade. New leads are way down, barely anyone is booking. And I’m talking like, you know, between the individual conversations I’m having and conversations I’ve seen on Facebook and different photography communities.

This is everybody from new photographers all the way through to photographers have been at it for 20 plus years. There’s just this shift happening and nobody can put their finger on exactly what is going on and what the next generation of couples and families want. This episode is really going to be about weddings because that’s what I know best.

That’s who I coach. Mostly I coach, you know, family photographers as well, but this is, this is really, I think affecting weddings a lot. The explanations for why no leads are coming in and why there’s this lack, I think is Pretty varied from what I see between threads and Facebook and just all, all the articles I’ve read.

It’s, it’s all over the place, but some of them are, and maybe, you know, you’ve heard some of these same ones that it’s, it’s inflation and it’s the economy, right? That’s a huge one that I see right off the bat that everything’s expensive. Uh, groceries are expensive and just know people are not spending money on luxury items like weddings.

Um, another one I saw was It’s Jen and Z and they don’t care about marriage or photos. I saw another one that said, um, it’s a new crop of young photographers and they’re saturating the market and they’re, they’re cheap and they’re just snatching up all the inquiries. Oh, I know that when I saw was that everything is actually fine and most photographers actually price themselves out of the market in 2022 and now just aren’t booking.

And then the last one that I, I think I’ve seen actually pretty recently as like within a day or two ago was that there are actually a ton of couples who met and formed during the pandemic. They used, uh, these platforms, online platforms to meet and create lasting relationships, but their parents don’t want to shell out money or it’s Gen X or Gen Y or Gen Alpha or whatever.

And they just don’t want to spend the money. It’s economy. It’s the inflation. It’s all comes down to these same things. I think it’s, it’s a perfect storm of all of these and it’s none of them. And I’d really want to take a look at this from a different perspective. And that’s from the numbers. So let me back up.

Let’s back way, way back up. 2020 was supposed to be my 10 year anniversary of business. I was like, Planning a client event to go to the affiliates game and have like a bunch of my past clients show up and do this like big hurrah. Well, we all know how that turned out. 2020 and 2021 were absolutely terrible for photography businesses.

If you’ve been in business since before then, you know, I’ve seen slowdowns and things in the 10 years prior to that, but this was Just was just something else. Uh, totally unrelated to what anybody has ever seen. Like I’ve like so many of my photography friends who have been in the industry for 15, 20 years, they all have said the same thing.

This is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. Everybody goes through dry spells, but this is different. As restrictions eased after 2020 and 2021, the doors blew wide open in the wedding world. And the most weddings happened in the United States since 1984. And just as a note, I’m going to include all of the articles and places that I found these numbers and all that stuff.

I’m going to include them in the show notes. If you want to dig a little bit deeper and check it out, you know, I highly encourage you to. So these couples who got married in 2022 were likely couples who had met pre pandemic. They were probably, you know, 2018, 2019, maybe early 2020. And they just, these were all couples who met during that time, um, and either had to postpone, uh, or were like, they saw the window to get married and then like made it happen.

But regardless, The pendulum swung really far in one direction toward people getting married. So many weddings. Well, then weddings dropped off a cliff because 2023 last year was really, really tricky. Now here’s, here’s what I want to start laying things out, right? Once the pendulum swung really far in the other direction and weddings dropped off a cliff, that gap has yet to fill.

And here’s where the numbers are really interesting. So let me walk you through these. Okay. And Based on a lot of consumer data and behavior and all that kind of stuff, the average time from dating to engagement is 3. 25 years. Most research suggests between two and five years. My wife and I, we were four years before we got engaged.

Four years? Nope, two years. And then five years till we got married. That’s what it was. Anyway, between two and five years is what most consumer data and consumer behavior suggests. There’s a wedding gap because there’s an engagement gap. There’s an engagement gap because nobody was meeting three years ago and people may have been meeting, but it’s taking them longer to get to this point where they’re getting You can say that you know somebody who you’ve talked online with or whatever, but until you have spent time with them, it still takes a while for people to move from dating online, dating wherever to getting married.

I actually have a bunch of couples who still met pre pandemic or early pandemic, and they are getting married now. There was an engagement gap because like I said, nobody’s meeting three years ago. And I’m going to dive into some numbers. On average, about 2. 8 million couples get engaged every year in the United States.

In 2022, that number slipped to about 2. 5 million and continued lower before leveling out to around 2. 1 million in 2023. Listen to that. It leveled out in 2023. That’s 30 percent lower engagements. And that was last year. That’s not low engagements in 2020. That’s not low engagements in 2021, not low engagements in 2022.

That was last year. The effects of the lowest amount of engagements was last year. And that’s because it takes a while for people meeting up to catch up to when they get engaged. Our day to day lives may feel pretty close to pre pandemic, right? Like we, we have all of these like normal things that we’re used to doing, but our businesses and people’s relationships have yet to catch up.

And I think this is where the hope comes in because. I don’t have and you and I don’t have the finances to like dig into like how people actually behave. And what are the milestones that people get to when they start to actually get engaged? And we just don’t know, right? We’re sort of at the mercy for when couples reach out and when we see people get engaged or whatever.

But there are companies like Signet Jewelers, which is the parent company of Zales and Kay Jewelers and Jared and Diamond Direct. They were the ones who I think I saw maybe like 2021 or something. They were the ones who really blew it open that said, wow, engagement ring sales are massively declining, but they recently came out with another article that said by 2025, we should see a spike in proposals again.

And this is the tune that I’ve been singing for the last year or so in conversations on, you know, social media and conversations with individuals. And that’s that this CEO of Signet Jewelers. Her name is Virginia Drossos. I think is how to pronounce her last name. She confirmed my suspicion by saying, why are we so confident that engagements will recover?

She said, our confidence is based on 45 proprietary milestones we track to measure a couple’s journey towards engagement. Not every couple experiences, all 45 milestones we track, but we know that once they reach 25 to 30 of these milestones, they become statistically significantly more likely to move on engagements.

Companies like this spend millions of dollars between marketing and tracking all these things and customer data and customer behavior so they can recognize shifts in the market. They spend so much money to understand proposals. And if they’re confident, I’m confident. I think that, well, one, I think that I would really love to know what those 45 milestones are.

Um, there was only one little peek into what one of them was, and that was in one of the articles that I’ll link where the CEO, um, mentioned that if you take your significant other to a concert, that was one of them, and obviously like meeting each other’s parents, that was a second one. But this is something that I think is really important to hear that if these large companies are saying, you know what?

There’s this huge dip. That dip was actually last year. Um, but we believe that as we start seeing time go on that we’re going to see this curve back up because the people who are meeting in 2023. Two years later, those that like younger section or the couples who are, you know, on that earlier side of the engagement around maybe two years, they’re going to start getting engaged again.

I’m seeing just a small amount of momentum pick back up with, uh, inquiries in my wedding photography business, but it’s still really lean and everybody I’ve talked to is still saying that it’s not coming in for next year. So I’m putting my flag in the ground and saying, I’m willing to bet that end of this year, Early 2025 is when we’re going to hopefully see couples getting ready to get married.

End of 2025, 2026. This was a hunch that I had. And I’m glad that as I start to see, uh, when you look at the engagement ring sales and some of these other, uh, wedding adjacent industries, when you start looking at what they’re saying and these big companies that are putting money behind this, it’s a little bit hopeful when big companies like this say, Hey, we’re going We’re recognizing this too, but we’re going to see something coming up and we’re going to see, you know, a spike.

We’re expecting a spike in late 24, 25. That I think gives me a little bit of hope. Of course, who knows what’s going to happen with inflation and the presidential election and all these different things, throw it out there. But I still believe that people are going to continue to get married. But here’s where things get interesting.

What do we do now? If you, if you feel maybe like the slightest bit of hope, what do you do? Because that doesn’t solve what’s going on right now. That doesn’t solve, Hey, I really need some weddings right now. I think when things get really tough is when we have to, when we have to, Batten down the hatches.

And when we have to stay really focused and what I’m doing in my personal businesses and what I’m coaching my clients to do is to block out the noise, the panic, the FUD. Um, if, like I said, if all these big companies who have all this money to spend on consumer data and consumer behavior saying we’re going to see this come back, then We have to get prepared for when that wedding pipeline fills again.

So we block out the noise, we block out that panic. We block out the FUD and we start cleaning house. We start auditing and refreshing our business. We start implementing systems. So when the pendulum swings back the other way, we are prepared. Um, this I think looks like, you know, Uh, where are you bleeding money?

Where are things that, you know, in times of, of lots of extra and a lots of abundance, which like, okay, we’ll spend money on that. We’ll spend money on this. Like this is easy peasy. Maybe it’s time to look at new album companies. Maybe it’s time to look at your day to day systems. So you’re able to create systems to do more SEO and more blog posting.

It could be all these things, but it’s time to just take a step back and look objectively at your business at what’s going on. So that way, like I said, when the pendulum does swing back in the other direction and that pipeline starts to fill up again, you are ready. There will be a return to normal, but it’s not going to be, it’ll be a new normal, right?

It’s not going to be the old normal that we had seen before. It’s not going to all of a sudden be like the good old days, but until then we need to be ready for when that pipeline fills again. And then we have to learn what these new perspective clients expect. But until then, I’m going to assume that it’s the same core desires that I talk about all the time on this podcast, and that is to be seen, heard, and understood.

Authenticity is a really big thing with these generations coming up, right? Like I’m thinking about when I was walking through Target and I saw these big ads, big displayed photographs of women in bikinis and things like that. And down at the bottom right corner, it said, unretouched photograph, right?

That’s interesting. If Target, this giant company is putting specifically on their unretouched photograph. Um, I think the next generations coming up are going to be extremely marketing savvy and they can tell if you’re BSing or if you’re nickel and diming or if you’re inauthentic. I think this is going to be the time when our intention speaks most.

If you authentically, that feels like such a buzzword. If you have the intention of showing up and serving people on a deep level, I think that’s never going to go out of style. And if you just show up and allow people to feel seen, heard, and understood, that’s going to be a really big thing. But if you take anything away from this episode, if I can just wrap up this episode in one nice, neat little bundle, it is to stay focused right now.

It is, Really, really difficult out there. Speaking from somebody who’s been at it for 14 years, who got friends who’ve been at it for longer, it is really tricky right now. There are some unicorns who are getting lots of inquiries. Good on them. The vast majority, the vast amount of us are not receiving what we are used to.

Most people quit when things become difficult. But stick with it. Everything good and worthwhile is just on the other side of discomfort. It might feel like it’s never going to come back. But if you keep putting in the effort, putting in the energy, if you keep finding ways to add cash flow to your pipeline, you’re going to be ready and all the better for it when things come back.

If you have questions about this, if you’re like, Hey, you know, I’m, uh, I like this idea of cleaning house and implementing some new systems. That is what I’m here for. I’m working with photographers for as long as a year and as little as three months on everything from, Hey, I just need to adjust some work life balance things because this feels really heavy on me and I’m not sure what to do to doing some very minor website changes and some different, uh, SEO and, um, and website tweaks for copy.

I’m working with a bunch of photographers on just these very basic things, uh, to get themselves ready to build systems. So they’re not overwhelmed, they’re not burnout, that they can block out these things that are causing them stress. Um, and just see this situation with new eyes. If that’s you, if I, if you feel like I’m speaking to you, go to danielmoyercoaching.

com slash contact. Um, and just. Right. Me an email. We’ll set up a time to hop on a discovery call and see if we’re a good fit until then. Stay with it. It is really difficult to stay with something that you’re not sure is going to work out. Um, but if you think this is a Alex Hormozy quote, but if you think in terms of like days, weeks, months, you’re always going to be set up for fail.

But if you think longterm years, five years, decade, you will always fail. Always succeed. All right, friends. Hope this helped today. I hope you find this like a little bit hopeful. Maybe there’s a little spark in you. If that’s you, I’m really hoping that this gave you a little something. Thanks so much for tuning in today.

Make it a great day and I’ll talk to you again.