Last year turned everything on its head, and the wedding market was no exception. The changes that took place were both abrupt and uncertain enough to give most in the industry whiplash. Those outside the trade suffered as well, with nearly half of couples who had planned to marry last year deferring their celebrations, according to a survey by wedding-resource website The Knot.
The resulting chaos has left many unanswered questions: Will weddings, postponed or otherwise, take place in 2021? Will the wave of engagements that resulted from the pandemic continue this year? And most importantly, what does all of this mean for the diamond and jewelry industry?
Boom or bust?
Whether 2021 is the Year of the Wedding has yet to be determined, according to experts. While all believe the torrent is inevitable, there are mixed opinions on when that deluge will come.
Among those who postponed, just over half plan to hold their nuptials before June, while 43% are aiming for the second half of the year, The Knot found. On the whole, 2021 is expected to be one of the busiest years for weddings in decades, says Shelley Brown, the site’s fashion and beauty editor. “I think the market will surge. I do know that obviously so many weddings have been postponed, and I think this year will be a boom year for weddings. People are even planning to have their weddings on weekdays because venues are so booked.”
Echoing that sentiment is Sophia Kravchenko, senior manager at consultancy firm Bain & Company, who believes there will be a “revival” in marriage ceremonies this year. “Based on what we’ve heard from the wedding-planning companies we’ve spoken to, we are seeing a huge spike in terms of weddings, starting from the second to third quarters of 2021.” However, for that to happen, she adds, the vaccine rollout needs to be complete and the epidemiological situation has to stabilize.
California-based wedding planner Jillian Bobinski also expects weddings to go ahead this year. “People want to move forward. They want to get married, have children, buy a house, move on with their life,” says the owner of Jillian Nicole Events. “They don’t want to keep putting their life on hold just because they’re waiting to get married. When California lifted their restrictions, my inbox blew up.”
While Bobinski has weddings on her books beginning in June, she says many clients will likely make them smaller to avoid losing money in case of cancellation.
“I feel like [recently] I have been as much a therapist as a planner,” she comments. “Clients were worried about the possibility of another strain [of the virus] or a further lockdown. While I highly doubt that will happen, when people are putting money out, it’s very different. I had a lot of couples [last year] that didn’t get their money back. If they had to move their date, they had to pay for that, too.”
For that reason, Bobinski feels that couples getting engaged this year will wait until next year to get married, as they believe the situation will be clearer then.
The uncertainty has led some others in the bridal industry to change their views on when the marriage boom will happen.
“We got to the end of 2020 thinking, ‘2021 is going to be the year we can bring the wedding back,’ but that’s not proven to necessarily be the case,” says wedding planner Shelby Tuck-Horton, director of education for the Association of Bridal Consultants. While some of her clients are keen to tie the knot soon even if they have to downsize their events, she doesn’t expect a return to normal weddings until at least the third quarter of this year.
“Maybe in the fall, we’ll get a taste of what’s going to happen, but I think more traditional weddings will be more likely in 2022,” she predicts.
Severine Ferrari, founder and editor in chief of wedding site Engagement 101, also sees 2022 as the target year, especially since spring and summer — the most popular times for weddings — are fast approaching, and the vaccination effort is unlikely to be done by then. “All of us in the bridal industry are expecting the number of weddings in 2021 to be lower than the average, as Covid-19 is still going to have an impact this year,” she says. “The boom is going to be next year.”
The Wedding Report has revised its stance on the big revival as well. In December, the site predicted that 2021 would see some 2.8 million weddings, compared to an average of about 2.1 million in 2019 and 2018. Approximately 1.2 million to 1.4 million weddings took place in 2020.
“As for 2021, we thought there would be a surge, but it’s clear now that this will not happen until 2022 or 2023,” says site founder Shane McMurray. “Most of 2021 will be down until we can get widespread distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine or we get the virus under control. [This year] will look remarkably similar to 2020. We believe that the number of weddings will come in between 1.3 million and 1.5 million for 2021.”
Facing the future together
The shock of the pandemic and the tenuous health situation led to a huge rash of proposals in 2020 as more people sought commitment. Many of those who viewed marriage as merely a distant possibility changed their tune following long periods of lockdown together with their significant others and a feeling that the future was uncertain. But was the spike a one-hit wonder or an ongoing trend?
“Everything will have ebbs and flows, but will 2021 have as huge a growth [in engagements] as 2020? Probably not, because it’s an initial reaction,” says jewelry consultant Jackie LeBental-Jones, owner of Barri Luxury Consulting. “But will it hold steady, perhaps, at that level? I think it could.”
Ferrari disagrees. She believes the repercussions of the crisis will keep couples popping the question. “I think the strong engagement trend is going to continue because of all the things couples can’t do due to Covid-19. Proposals will be even more important now, because that’s the only kind of commitment they can make.”
The Knot’s Brown also thinks the trend will continue, but for different reasons. She reports that 63% of people who wanted to propose in 2020 had to change their timing. Of those, 61% pushed off their proposals until later, with only 27% doing them sooner. “I do think that in 2021, we’ll still be seeing the effects of that, just because the overwhelming majority of the affected proposals were postponed, versus happening earlier,” she says.
Ringing in the new year
The ring is an important part of a proposal, and store lockdowns stymied attempts to secure that pivotal piece of jewelry even as the unexpected surge of engagements sparked demand. There were also many couples who were already engaged but were grounded before they could pick out their diamond.
“The bridal segment is around 37% of the diamond-jewelry market, and this is the segment that was hit the hardest in 2020, compared to non-bridal jewelry,” says Bain’s Kravchenko. “We actually think the revival of the bridal market will stimulate the recovery of the total diamond-jewelry market in 2021.”
In fact, she believes growth will range from 6% to 10%, compared to approximately 2% to 3% growth in previous years. “You may assume everybody who wanted to buy [engagement rings] in 2020 had a chance to do so and could have bought online, but a lot of people prefer to go into stores to see, touch and feel the jewelry, according to those we surveyed,” she explains. “So we do assume there was a huge postponement of purchases in 2020 that will actually happen in 2021.”
That holds true for those The Knot surveyed as well. A study of more than 5,000 individuals who got engaged between April and November 2020 found that the pandemic had significantly impacted ring shopping and purchasing.
“I think that we’ll see a ripple effect from people not being able to get their wedding rings, not being able to engage in the ring-shopping process,” says Brown. “I think there is still a lot of security around the idea of going into a brick-and-mortar location, and that was so limited last year. I think there will be an uptick in engagement-ring spending this year.”
Part of that spike, Brown posits, is due to the lower budget needs of a pared-down wedding. “I think it’s a logical leap that if people are downsizing their weddings, and are also not spending much on travel and entertainment, their disposable income is higher, and it’s fair to say they would have more resources to put toward a more expensive engagement ring.”
It’s also a matter of having more planning time with the world on hold. Couples have upped their spending on both engagement rings and wedding bands “because more money is available,” Ferrari says, but also because “they have more time to pick them.”
That trend could end up sustaining the jewelry sector moving forward, she believes. “The [jewelry industry] will keep on growing, because once people are in the habit of spending money on jewelry, it’s unlikely they will turn around and decide they don’t want to spend money on jewelry anymore. The pandemic has refocused people on owning things that have value, and I think it may change the perspective of younger generations like millennials and Gen Z-ers, who were previously spending their money on trips and experiences.”
Tuck-Horton agrees, suggesting that the pandemic has changed things not just for a time, but for a lifetime. “[Things are]not going to go back,” she declares. “And people are going to adapt to the changes, until they won’t be changes anymore. They’ll be reality.”
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - April 2021. To subscribe click here.