The Trouble with the Wedding Industry
In my opinion, the wedding industry is the best industry in the world to work in - you are working with people on the happiest occassion in their life and, provided you keep your end of the bargain, you should thougroughly enjoy every step of the journey.
Its not all fun and games for a wedding supplier though. For all its good points it has a fairly major downside - the short customer life. In 99% of cases, you will only sell to a customer once, after they’re married that’s it you have to find a completely new person to make your next sale.
That’s the trouble with the wedding industry, successful businesses in every other walk of life build their success on a loyal customer base, but that’s just not possible when you are selling to Brides so you must find another way.
So what is the solution?
There are a variety of different methods that can be used to build a wedding business, but one of my personal favourites is establish and introduce a product range.
If your customer is only going to be your customer once, you need to sell as much as you can to them when you can and to do this, you need to have other products and services to compliment your core offer.
For example a bridal shop normally sells wedding dresses, maybe shoes and sometimes accessories. Shoes and accessories are an absolute must and the shop should also be thinking about things like a guide to choosing your wedding dress, dress cleaning, dress storage, keepsake boxes, memoirs, a guide to keeping you wedding dress and anything else that you think could be added and sold.
Lets say the average sale value of your wedding dress was £1000 and you made 50% margin giving you £500 gross profit per customer as standard. Implementing this strategy would give you the following process and potential profits:
£12 Guide to Choosing the Perfect Wedding Dress
£500 Wedding Dress
£50 Bridal Shoes
£30 Bridal Accessories
£10 Keepsake Box
£40 Dress Cleaning
£25 Dress Storage Box
£10 Wedding Dress Memoir
£657 Total Gross Profit
The beauty of this process is that although the increase in your gross profit is over 30%, increases in Net profit can be well over 50% as there are no expensive marketing and acquisition costs with the additional sales - where would you be if you could increase your Net profit by 50%?
This is a fantastic strategy which is going to be even more prominent in the next couple of years. Whatever product you are supplying, you can add additional products to your offering no matter how abstract you think they may be, I can’t guarantee that everyone will buy them, but I can guarantee that if you don’t have them, no one will!!!
If you are interested in learning more about introducing this strategy and increasing the profitability of your wedding business, then take a look at the Evolution Programme which is an easy to follow, step by step guide to building and running a business selling to the wedding industry.
