Separating fact from fiction so you can run your wedding business more effectively.
Photo by Cameron Clark
When it comes to the business of luxury weddings, there’s a lot of conflicting information out there.
Some of it is valuable and backed by true expertise, some of it is based on narrow anecdotal experience or faulty assumptions, and some of it is just made up completely by people who have little-to-no experience with luxury at all.
Today, we’re debunking seven common myths about working with luxury wedding clients and separating fact from fiction so that you can run your wedding business more effectively.
How much does a luxury wedding cost?
Before we dive into the myths of working with luxury wedding clients, here are some definitions:
Luxury Wedding Budgets: $96,000 - $500,000, not including the honeymoon
Ultra Luxury Wedding Budgets: $500,000 or more, not including the honeymoon
HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals): net worth of $1M-$5M in liquid assets
VHNWIs (Very High Net Worth Individuals): net worth of $5-$30M in liquid assets
UHNWIs (Ultra High Net Worth Individuals): net worth of $30M+ in liquid assets
The wedding budget definitions are from Splendid Insights, the wedding market research firm I founded in 2009 as a sister company to Think Splendid.
We have been tracking the consumer behavior of real brides and grooms for the past 14 years and scientifically validate all data to ensure accuracy. For 2023 weddings, we surveyed 52,738 people over eight months in six languages.
(You may have read in Xochitl Gonzalez’s article in The Atlantic that approximately 13,000 weddings in the U.S. cost $1 million or more in 2022. This statistic is from our research – we are not guessing.)
The net worth classifications are from the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) and have widely been adopted as a guideline by financial professionals worldwide.
Under these classifications, "liquid assets" excludes the primary residence as well as personal assets such as art, yachts, and planes. Wealth managers in the U.S. are required by law to report when changes in a client’s net worth moves them into a different category.
Not every bride or groom from a VHNW or UHNW family has a luxury or ultra-luxury wedding (some elope and only spend less than $100 on the marriage certificate or choose to have a scaled down affair), but the majority do.
For the purposes of this post today, when I say “luxury clients” I’m referring to clients having either a luxury or ultra-luxury wedding, unless specifically noted otherwise.
Myth #1: Luxury clients don't negotiate
Luxury and ultra-luxury wedding clients actually negotiate more often than couples spending less on their nuptials.
In fact, 56% of luxury wedding clients married in 2023 expect their vendors to negotiate, and that number is the same for the ultra-luxury brides and grooms.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if a client wants to negotiate money or contract terms, it means they can't afford you, don’t respect you or your process, or that they're being "cheap."
Sometimes these things are true, but most often they are not:
In many cultures, negotiating is a sign of intelligence and respect. Check your internal bias in this area.
Refusing to negotiate is seen as disrespecting the client’s intelligence or business acumen and essentially calls them stupid. I think we can all agree that calling a potential client stupid is not the best way to win their business.
If a person's job requires negotiation, they tend to see doing so as a part of conducting smart business. Refusing to negotiate with these types of clients sends them a signal that you are not a smart business person and decreases their trust in you and your brand.
A few examples of careers that require frequent negotiating: attorneys, sales executives, CEOs, representative managers and agents (TV/music/literary/fine art/etc), real estate professionals, project managers.
You have to remember that this is not about you personally. Very wealthy people often have people trying to take advantage of them, sometimes even by those they considered to be their closest friends. If a close friend or colleague betrayed them out of greed, why would they automatically trust a wedding professional they’ve never met?
Many wealthy clients have their attorney review all contracts before signing. Sometimes the negotiating terms come from the attorney, who the client already trusts and pays to protect their best interests.
If negotiating intimidates you, reframe it as an invitation to collaborate. At its core, that’s all it truly is.
Negotiation is someone saying, “I want this to work, let’s figure it out.”
That’s a maybe, not outright rejection. You can work with a maybe.
Sales and negotiating are skills, which means you can improve them and level up.
And, like anything in life, the more you do something, the better at it you get and the less afraid of it you become.
Free your mindset, free your life.
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If you have the luxury of leaning into the comfort zone of your fear because you have the privilege of your mortgage being paid regardless of your personal income — whether through a spouse with a great job or parents or investments or some other source — try doing what I call the “Breadwinner Exercise.”
The Breadwinner Exercise:
If you alone were 100% responsible for every dime needed to support your household — with no outside help (no income from a spouse or partner, no alimony, no child support, no incoming insurance benefits, no investment dividends, etc) — would your current approach to sales and negotiating help or hinder you in bringing in enough money to cover it all?
If it would hinder it, what specifically needs to change?
Myth #2: Luxury clients always hire a professional wedding planning company
67% of luxury wedding couples and 77% of ultra-luxury wedding couples hire a professional wedding planner.
I want to touch on this because not hiring a professional wedding planning company does not necessarily mean these couples are planning their own weddings.
Some luxury and ultra-luxury wedding clients just use the venue’s catering sales manager (there are multi-million dollar weddings at private country clubs every weekend that are fully planned — not just coordinated — by the club’s catering director).
Sometimes they may hire a friend who is an interior designer or a friend who plans marketing activations for a beauty brand.
For UHNWIs, the wedding is sometimes planned by the client’s estate manager, executive assistant, or the in-house event planner at their family office (many of which handle much more than just financial affairs).
I personally know several event planners for UHNW family offices who previously had their own wedding and event planning firms and were recruited to work exclusively for their respective employer family. Closing their doors and going to work for one family is a way to keep doing what they love while not having the headache of running their own business.
These planners are GOOD at their jobs and the only reason they may not be planning their employer’s entire wedding themselves is because they already have a full plate with the normal events they’re responsible for.
Yes, this means you may be referred, vetted, or hired by a trusted member of the family’s staff, and not a professional wedding planner.
Your networking and marketing strategies should not be solely limited to wedding planners or other professionals in the wedding industry, especially if you focus on the ultra-luxury wedding market. Doing so will cause you to miss out on a lucrative niche segment of the luxury and ultra-luxury wedding markets.
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Marketing: What do you currently do to network with luxury client referral sources outside of the wedding industry? What is one thing you can do this coming quarter to improve this?
Sales: Does your sales process allow for collaboration for professionals assigned to plan an event who do not own professional wedding planning companies?
Myth #3: Luxury clients don't use Google to find their wedding vendors
73% of luxury wedding couples and 71% of ultra-luxury wedding couples in 2023 hired at least one of their wedding vendors from just an Internet search.
Anecdotal marketing advice says, "My leads from Google can never afford me, so this isn't how luxury couples find their wedding vendors."
The fact of the matter is that the majority of luxury and ultra-luxury engaged couples DO actually hire from Google — and this has held true year over year since 2009.
The top five vendor categories hired by luxury and ultra-luxury wedding clients via Google search last year were:
Wedding Invitations and Stationery Designer (Luxury & Ultra-Luxury)
Wedding Planner (Luxury)
Wedding Venue (Ultra-Luxury)Wedding Photographer or Videographer (Luxury)
Wedding Planner (Ultra-Luxury)Floral/Event Designer (Luxury)
Wedding Photographer or Videographer (Ultra-Luxury)Wedding Venue (Luxury)
Floral/Event Designer (Ultra-Luxury)
You know who else uses Google to find luxury wedding pros? The in-house planners at UHNW family offices as well as ultra luxury planners looking to bring in talented wedding pros that their competitors aren’t also using.
Some planners pride themselves on “discovering” wedding pros and being the one who puts them “on the map” even if that vendor has been in the industry for a while.
If you're only getting low-fit leads from Google searches, it means something is off in your Method and/or Message and usually comes down to one or a combo of these:
Your website isn’t communicating your brand differentiation, relevancy, expertise, or the level of luxury in the way you think it is, so it is not appealing to your target client
Your SEO isn't focused on the right search terms for your target market segments within the luxury space which means your site isn’t getting found on Google at all
Your website design and user experience was based only on what looked pretty, not on behavioral psychology about information overload, decision fatigue, how people actually interact with websites, etc. Design is never just about how something looks, it is also about how it functions.
When you're creating your wedding marketing strategies, avoid making assumptions that are based on the confirmation bias of an individual or the selection bias of a small group of vendors.
Also remember that successful wedding marketing rarely comes down to just one thing. It’s not a matter of only having a smart SEO strategy or only networking with luxury wedding planners and venues or only having solid relationships with magazine editors (or hiring a PR firm that does). It’s typically a combination of several approaches (aka your marketing mix).
SEO also helps with brand awareness which can be a key ingredient in being able to charge higher rates as well as a requirement for other business goals you may have such as a book deal, TV show, your own product line in Nordstrom or Target, etc.
The people telling you that luxury wedding pros don’t get booked through Google are incorrect. Full stop.
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Marketing: Where might you be allowing confirmation bias or selection bias to drive your marketing decisions?
Marketing: 15 minutes a day adds up to more than two 40-hour work weeks per year. If SEO is something you’d rather DIY than outsource, consider allotting 15 minutes each day to the boring stuff that pays off like compound interest (renaming galleries, renaming photo titles (and re-uploading), de-indexing blog tags (tip: Squarespace has a one-click toggle button that does this), writing blog posts, submitting changes to Google Search Console, etc).
(A Splendid Note: while I may share some basic SEO tips and advice with consulting clients if I can see that area is hindering their other goals, SEO is not a service I sell. I do not have a financial stake in telling you it works for the luxury and ultra-luxury levels.)
Myth #4: Luxury clients want to delegate everything and not be involved in the wedding planning process
While it is true that HNWIs and UHNWIs are more used to hiring experts to help them, fully delegating everything is more of a generational trait than a financial trait.
The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1980 and with it they rolled out a new standard on how schools were to approach teaching and learning: group work.
While Generation X, Boomers, and the others before them grew up in a school system that focused on individual study, Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha grew up with a a focus on learning in groups.
This approach made its way to other countries and is even used in higher education (Harvard and other universities call these groups “pods”).
The sayings, “there is no ‘I’ in team” and “two heads are better than one" were drilled into their heads. Assignments and group projects had to be completed together and if someone didn’t pull their weight, it often impacted not just their grade, but the grades of everyone else in the group.
These younger generations learned early on that they were not only expected to solicit feedback and the opinions of others, but that filtering through all the feedback for the best ideas is how you create the best outcome.
Because of this, the brain’s neural pathways on decision-making for millennials and Gen Z are very different than the ones for Gen Xers and Boomers.
An extremely simplified explanation: neural pathways – how your brain connects all the different info it brings in – are strengthened through repetition. This means the decision-making methods someone learned and was immersed in growing up is how their brain is “wired” to make decisions.
If you are in your mid-forties or older, you very likely approach decisions differently than your younger clients do. This does not mean you are right and they are wrong, or vice versa. It simply means you were taught differently so your brain developed a different approach.
It is not unusual for Millennials or Gen Zers to want to review your proposal with their family and friends or to run each and every one of your ideas past their group chat. It does not matter that you have more expertise and creativity stored in your pinky nail than the group will ever have on the subject in a lifetime.
This does not necessarily mean they don’t trust you. The need for multiple points of feedback in order to ensure the best decision is hard-wired into their brains.
When it comes to wealthy Millennial and Gen Z clients who may be more used to paying others for help, they will be involved in the portions they want and delegate the rest not only to you but to their own trusted staff members. This means you may be dealing with more of an entourage than you expected or are used to.
If the client has their own event planner on staff, you may be working with them (this is often the case with billionaire wedding clients). You may also be working with their estate manager or their executive assistant (who generally make mid six-figures or higher and are entrusted with everything including bank account numbers).
The client may be looped in and attend the meetings they want (a cake tasting) but will delegate the work to someone they already trust and who they have trusted for years. And if their staff member doesn't like you, you're toast.
One luxury planner I know had to deal with 10 of their client’s staff members approving every invitation proof and requiring changes – and none of those 10 people were the bride or groom. This was an aspect of their multi-million dollar wedding that the couple was happy to delegate to their own employees who were tasked to work alongside the planner.
That same couple was personally at every single catering tasting and very granular in their involvement, including instructing the celebrity chef to “halve the soy reduction” in a certain dish.
If your marketing reinforces that you take everything off the client’s plate, you are not going to connect with the majority of today’s luxury brides and grooms who grew up valuing collaboration and the joy of coming up with new ideas.
These types of clients may not be the right fit for you and that's legitimate — but this also means you might be better off targeting older clients with money who may be marrying (or remarrying) later in life.
Get Splendid:
Marketing: Does your messaging match what you want for your business and who you want to work with? If not, what needs to be adjusted?
Sales: How does your current sales process help or hinder the decision-making abilities of your potential clients
Splendid Sales Tip: When you send a proposal to a potential client, saying something like, “I’ll give you a couple days to review it and bounce it off your family and friends” not only shows you understand them, it can also lessen any subconscious anxiety they may have about making the decision on their own (“Oh, I don’t need their input, I’ll look it over and decide.”)
Operations: How can you adjust your workflow or process to allow for clients who need more time or input on their planning decisions?
Operations: How can you adjust your workflow or process to accommodate HNW or UHNW clients who assign their own staff members to work with you?
Myth #5: Luxury clients trust their wedding vendors without question
Hold on, can you hear that?
It’s the sound of everyone who has worked in the luxury wedding industry for longer than 20 minutes dying of laughter at the idea their clients have never questioned their expertise.
Yet, I’ve seen so much luxury wedding business advice lately that has absolutely no basis in reality.
Too many wedding pros are operating with the unspoken expectation that every client should come fully graduated from therapy, with no hangups and all issues resolved, flawless communication skills, healthy and functional family dynamics, fully able to trust without question.
These are impossible standards for anyone to meet, especially at the age wedding clients tend to get married. Show me a 30 year old who couldn't benefit from at least an hour of therapy and I will show you someone who is lying to themselves.
Wedding clients are still human and they bring their cumulative baggage to the table, just like everyone else.
While luxury clients may be more used to hiring experts to help them, that does not mean they will automatically trust you.
Gen Z, in particular, does not trust easily.
This is especially true for American Gen Zers who grew up in the era of mass shootings (over 630 in the US so far in 2023) and going through active shooter drills at school.
These drills may be for protection, but they also literally trained an entire generation to be aware of suspicious behavior from others — including their peers — at all times.
You don't go through 12 school years of the repetition of those drills without your brain developing neural pathways focused on skepticism and self-protection.
Just like millennials feel bone-deep that tomorrow is not promised to anyone because of September 11th happening in their formative years, Gen Zers feel bone-deep that harm can come at the hands of anyone. As a result they are much slower to trust.
Saying, "Just trust me, I'm the expert" doesn't work too well with today’s brides and grooms and getting offended when they don't trust you or your ideas or recommendations right away means you will spend a lot of time not booked.
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Marketing: Review your website and social media. How does what you currently share inspire trust?
Marketing: Are there ways you can improve how you show (not tell) potential clients that you are trustworthy as an expert?
Myth #6: Luxury clients expect their wedding vendors to also live a luxury lifestyle
Luxury wedding clients expect you to be an expert in your specific field, to anticipate their needs and meet their exacting standards, to be educated on brands, etiquette, hospitality, and luxury service details, and to understand the nuances that may come with working together.
They are not fooled by a person’s attempts to blend in as “one of them.”
Your UHNW clients know that you likely do not have $30 million in liquid assets, that you don't own a private jet, that you're not off on your solely-owned private yacht during the slow season.
In addition, please do not buy into the related myth that you have to “look luxury to sell luxury.”
It is true that you DO need to look well put together and well groomed for whatever your personal style is.
If your budget means you have to choose between a designer dress or tailoring a nice but less expensive dress, spend your money on the tailor.
When hiring, wealthy clients will notice a chipped manicure or an outfit that doesn’t fit, but they typically are not swayed by the Prada or Loewe label on your bag.
This is not to say that you can’t (or shouldn’t) spend on luxury goods if you enjoy them, just that it is not a requirement in marketing to or working with luxury brides and grooms.
You don’t have go into debt trying to “keep up with the Joneses” in a misguided belief that a luxury client only hires people who share their lifestyle.
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Marketing: Does what you wear for work reflect your personal style and brand you as someone who pays attention to detail?
Operations: Would what you spend on “looking luxury” be better spent on another area of your business?
In the US, you cannot write off a dress or suit you wear to work a wedding or the outfits you buy for an industry conference. They do NOT count as uniforms for tax deduction purposes. The IRS’s rule of thumb is that if you could wear it outside of work, you can’t deduct it on your taxes (it does not matter to them if you never do wear it outside of work — you still can’t write it off). These laws got more strict under the “Trump Tax Plan” that Congress passed in 2017.
You generally can write off the company branded polos or t-shirts you order for your delivery or production teams as a marketing expense.
Myth #7: Luxury clients won’t hire you if you follow up on a proposal because it makes you look desperate or not exclusive enough to be a luxury brand
The idea that you shouldn’t follow up with potential clients has caused incredible harm to luxury wedding professionals. It has negatively impacted sales (and subsequently future referrals), self-worth, and professional relationships between industry peers.
Following up on a proposal doesn't make you look desperate or thirsty, it makes you look like a professional doing their job.
HNWIs, VHNWIs, and UHNWIs optimize for time more than any other type of client and they will spend on it. These clients tend to be busy with the types of jobs that provide them the level of wealth to have a multi-million dollar wedding in the first place.
Most importantly: they are hiring you to make their lives easier or better in some way.
Not following up with a potential client shows them that you don't value their time and that you are not the person who is going to take on the workload and make their lives easier.
The idea that if a client really wants you they will reach out after you send the proposal is a nice idea in theory but not always how real life plays out.
Emails get buried (and only 79% of emails get delivered at all), people reply to you "in their head" and forget they didn't actually type it out, or work and life in general gets in the way.
A potential client’s wedding is not the only responsibility in their life and you and your company are NOT their highest priority – especially when they are still interviewing other wedding pros before hiring.
Their life DOES NOT revolve around you, nor should it. Weddings are your full time job, not theirs.
Think of it this way: if a planner charges a fee of 20% of the wedding budget and a potential client’s budget is $1 million, is that planner really NOT supposed to send a measly follow up email for $200,000? Bffr.
As an industry, we have seriously lost the plot in some areas.
If you’re 100% booked out with your dream clients and are still turning down perfect-for-you inquiries left and right, then sure, maybe you can skip following up (you also need to raise your prices, but that’s a conversation for another day). That is not the situation for 99.9% of industry professionals.
Yes, rejection is scary and doesn’t feel great, but that’s part of entrepreneurship.
Stop self-sabotaging and calling it self-care. Get over yourself and go get your money.
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Sales: When it comes to following up, what falls through the cracks most often? How can you improve this?
Sales: While on the initial sales call/meeting, consider setting a 15-20 minute follow-up call with your potential client for a couple days after you send the proposal so that you can “walk through the proposal” with them and answer any questions they or their family may have from reviewing it. You’re not only being proactively helpful and not leaving them to their own assumptions, you’ll cut down on potential clients ghosting as well.
Offer a couple times they can choose from. “I’m going to send you a custom proposal on Tuesday for you to review and bounce off your family and friends. I’d love to connect again on Thursday or Friday to walk you through the proposal and answer any questions you or your family may have. Does 1 or 3 pm on either of those days work for you?”
Do not send a Calendly link for this — giving them homework does not make their lives easier. Try to book the followup while still on the initial phone/Zoom consultation.
Yes, this is more work than simply sending an auto-response or a pricing PDF. Welcome to the business of luxury. High end = high touch.
Written by
LIENE STEVENS
Liene Stevens, the founder and CEO of Think Splendid, is an author, speaker, award-winning luxury business strategist and behavioral psychologist.
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Founded in 2005 and trusted by clients in 97 countries, Think Splendid is the global leader in wedding business consulting.
We provide strategic guidance to industry leaders, luxury brands, hotels, and tourism destinations that serve high net worth and ultra-high net worth brides, grooms, and wedding guests.
