The Knot is feeling its age.
The wedding industry titan, which was founded in 1996, released its annual Real Weddings Study yesterday. The survey of more than 25,000 couples married in 2019 is rife with apologies.
“Don’t let this number scare you—it’s an average!” reads the subhead for The Knot’s article announcing the new average cost of a wedding in the U.S. That number, by the way, is $33,900.
“Before you start hyperventilating, keep in mind that the average wedding cost is just that: an average dollar amount, which has been calculated by combining the total cost of tens of thousands of weddings, then dividing that sum by the number of couples surveyed,” the article quickly explains.
This hedgy tone couldn’t be more different from The Knot of yesteryear.
When The Knot announced the results of last year’s Real Wedding Study, the press release was almost triumphant: “In 2018, the national average cost of a wedding was $33,931. Couples are financially and emotionally invested in their weddings—not just to wine and dine guests ($2,564 average cost of libations per wedding; $70 average catering cost per guest), or dance the night away in gorgeous attire ($1,631, average wedding gown cost), but to celebrate their love in a big way with the ones they cherish most (136, average number of guests).”
In this year’s coverage of the study, The Knot isn’t encouraging couples to “celebrate their love in a big way.” Instead, it rather rushes to remind them that the surveyed couples “come from all over the U.S. and have entirely different wedding budgets, locations, head counts, and styles. What they end up spending naturally varies—a lot.”
The pandering tone brings to mind a certain cinematic moment:
“I’m not like all those other wedding websites,” The Knot pants. “I’m a cool wedding website! Promise!!”
Why the desperation? The times, they are a changin’ and, as The Knot’s own survey reports, those changes threaten to leave antiquated companies like The Knot behind for good.
What The Knot ignores
XO Group, the media and technology company that owns The Knot, merged with former rival WeddingWire in 2018. The deal was for $933 million, and created the company, The Knot Worldwide.
Because The Knot Worldwide is privately held, it’s hard to know what exactly it’s worth but we can get a pretty good idea from the most recent public financials I could find. Those numbers report that XO Group made $43.1 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2018 alone, up 6 percent from the same period in 2017. At last count, the U.S. wedding industry in total made $72 billion in annual revenue.
Clearly, The Knot isn’t hurting for money. But that might not always be the case.
For too long, couples have swallowed the reality that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is more than 30 grand. “Well, that’s just what these things cost,” they say as they take out “wedding loans.”
The Knot makes the completely unreasonable pill of modern wedding planning easier to swallow by downplaying outrageous spending and giving only passing mention to the realities that engaged couples face as they plan their weddings.
In an article about how weddings have changed in the past decade, The Knot doesn’t talk about anything that institutes like Pew Research Center report engaged couples — who are often Millennials and, increasingly, Generation Z — are actually thinking about: student loans, climate change, institutional racism.
Instead, The Knot quotes weddings vendors who say things like “Today, it’s about having that ‘wow’ moment” and then goes on to recommend “champagne flute escort display walls and decadent edible experiences (think: experiential hors d’oeuvres, coffee, margarita, and late-night burrito bars).”
The Knot minimizes truly interesting trends — like a move toward more sustainable weddings, which only gets a static, un-hyperlinked bar graph in the 2019 Real Weddings study — in favor of links to articles of couples “showcasing their personality through colorful attire” and “even including pets in their ceremony—ring bearer anyone?”
I like fresh outfits and cute dogs as much as the next person but come on? Really? The best you can give me is a stat about how 17 percent of couples are “incorporating monograms throughout the day”?
How people react
When The Knot shared the average cost of a wedding in 2018 through a Facebook post, people responded by tagging their loved ones and laughing.
“I think not lol,” Alexa Vinkler told Justin Vinkler. “I agree lol,” Justin replied.
“Show Dad,” Selena Hanzel told Yvonne Garza Arndt.
“Sure you want to get married? Lol,” Sierra Danielle Hall asked Matthew Melton Cetnar.
The comments go on and on. They are nearly universally about how outrageous the dollar amount that The Knot announced with a drumroll is.
The Knot knows what’s up. They know what people are saying on Facebook. Why else hedge their own articles with lines like “Don’t let this number scare you—it’s an average!” and “Before you start hyperventilating…”?
But instead of offering couples real solutions for real problems — instead of acknowledging WHY couples are hyperventilating at all — The Knot links to weddings in treehouses. They say couples are just really into “personalization.”
“Couples are investing in hyper-personalized events infused with meaningful details, like their go-to movies or their favorite date-night food,” says The Knot. “Today’s couples want their wedding to be a true expression of their unique love story and for guests to leave saying, ‘That was so them.’”
What The Knot completely ignores — or maybe doesn’t even realize? — is that a couple’s “true expression of their unique love story” increasingly means not taking out a new credit card to pay for their wedding. “That was so them” is short-hand for “take your $33,931 average and shove it.”
If you’re The Knot, the changing reality of wedding planning has to be scary. It has to be hard to post your fancy survey and be met with 198 comments about how ridiculous it is.
What this all means
Change in the wedding industry won’t happen overnight. It might not even happen in my lifetime. What with the fresh birth of the monolith that is The Knot Worldwide, The Knot will continue to be a powerhouse in my industry for decades to come.
But not forever.
The Knot’s own survey predicts as much. It’s right there in black and white: If The Knot doesn’t adapt, it will die.
Because that’s what The Knot’s 2019 Real Weddings Study actually tells us: Couples deserve better and, finally, they’re beginning to believe it.
And that is a change worth celebrating.