Yesterday it was announced that Style Me Pretty is shutting down and will be completely taken offline at the end of April. This decision was made by their parent company, Oath (owned by Verizon), and had nothing to do with how the site was run.
With the announcement came a lot of speculation, both about Style Me Pretty, and the wedding industry at large.
Weddings are a $625 billion annual business globally and a feeder industry to lifelong customers for other industries, including travel, hospitality, and retail. Even with the numbers, it is difficult to convince people who are not immersed in the business of weddings day-in and day-out that they matter from an economic standpoint. A corporation’s decision to close one of their dozens of verticals is indicative of their corporate goals, not the state of the wedding industry.
My personal opinion is that people should stop making baseless assumptions about Style Me Pretty itself, especially out loud on social media. The editors behind it are real people who abruptly lost a job they loved this week, and expressing schadenfreude is gross. The kooky conspiracy theories people are starting to spread aren’t helping anyone.
Second, the closure is not an indictment of the wedding industry or anything anyone is or was “doing wrong.” Over half of the wedding businesses operating today were started in 2010 or after, which means that many people in the industry don't have a long-term memory of how wedding marketing has evolved or what it took to get a business noticed before.
In the late 90s, The Knot changed how weddings were marketed by bringing them online. A listing with The Knot was the industry’s first introduction to online vendor directories, and the work their sales people put in convincing people that advertising online could be profitable opened the doors for blogs to offer advertising later on with a built-in base of wedding professionals who already knew it could work.
DIY Bride was the first national wedding blog, followed by Offbeat Wed. Both Khris and Ariel paved the way for blogs to turn into full media companies, with book and product deals. Style Me Pretty followed in this path early on and did it well. These sites were the first to truly level the playing field when it came to a wedding pro’s ability to get published.
Back when exposure was limited to almost solely print magazines, people had to spend double or triple their mortgage payment every month on publicists, with no guarantees they would make it into a magazine’s limited print space. A blog’s ability to publish new content every day, multiple times a day, added not just to a wedding pro’s options for getting published, but also to the places engaged couples could turn to for information.
While it will always be in fashion to complain about the younger generations, the fact of the matter is that millennial and Gen Z consumers do their homework.
Today’s couples read both print magazines and online blogs. They are on Instagram, Snapchat, and yes, Twitter (Gen Z uses Twitter more than millennials, Gen X, and Boomers do, with many tweeting over 100 times a day). As savvy shoppers who are afraid of falling prey to the so-called “wedding industrial complex,” they Google everything and everyone involved in their wedding as well as the wholesale cost of any goods they’ll be purchasing.
The loss of Style Me Pretty is a significant loss to the industry, both emotionally as it helped many people launch their careers, and as an archive of amazing creative work wedding pros have done over the past 11 years.
The loss, however, does NOT mean that blogs and social media are irrelevant, even if you are personally tired of them. It does not mean that everyone is going to shift all of their ad dollars back to print. It does not mean your SEO is going to suffer. It also does not mean that the wedding industry is dying.
The U.S. wedding industry specifically goes through a dip in bookings and sales every time there is a new president, no matter who that president is. Change makes people nervous, and while this may be frustrating for business, it is human nature and something we all need to learn how to work with rather than fruitlessly fight against. This same presidential-transition dip in wedding sales happened in 2008, but because the recession was happening at the same time, that got all the attention and most of the blame. It also happened in 2000, and in 1992 (though that one was largely blamed on a recession as well).
The top reasons for shifts in the business of weddings are always connected to forces outside the industry. Always have been, always will. You don't have to enjoy economics, technology, or politics, but paying attention to these things will help you better navigate consumer changes.
People are still getting married, and will continue to. People are still spending on weddings, and will continue to. People are still using the Internet and social media to plan their weddings, and will continue to.
Marketing your wedding business in today’s world means working smarter and harder. Evolve and diversify as needed, but go easy on the Chicken-Little-sky-is-falling blame game. It is almost always misplaced.
Further Reading: Style Me Pretty and Your SEO (and Why You'll Probably Be Fine)
