While the economy is sluggish in many areas, early indications show the wedding industry is not suffering an extensive slowdown. Couples are spending less, sticking closer to their budget, and scaling back where it makes sense; however, most vendors are reporting normal to better business sales.

With all the crazy stuff going on in this world, I am personally proud and grateful for the freedoms and liberties entitled me and my family.

It is easy to forget and become content. Despite the problems we face, our political or religious belief, support America, the United States of America.

We live in an amazing country and we should all be proud to be a part of it.

I hope you and your family have a safe and healthy Independence Day.

We hit 10,000 subscribers!

As we get ready to pass the 3rd anniversary of The Wedding Report (July) we hit our 10,000th subscriber! And really, most of that growth came this year. We went from about 2,500 subscribers at the end of 2007 to now over 10,000 in 6 months.

All I can say is wow and thank you to all that support our work. We have many good things in the works, so stay tuned.

Based on current survey results, 26% of couples get a loan to help pay for their wedding.

The spending distribution now includes the estimated market value. This should give you a better idea of what the markets look like in spending ranges.

I am often asked about wedding cost from previous years. The only problem is that we started tracking cost in 2005, so 5-10 year changes is just not something we know yet. However, there are numbers floating around from several sources all the way back to 1990. Here are the details including removed inflation to show the real growth.

Real growth:
1990 – 1999 -3%
1999 – 2002 +9%
2002 – 2007 +9%

Bottom line; over the past 7-8 years, the industry has seen a real growth in spending of 18%

1990,1999 - Source; Christian Science Monitor; 6/4/2001, Vol.93 Issue 132, p12
2002 - Source; Fairchild Bridal Group The American Wedding

The plan is to offer ongoing webinars of various topics to help provide more details about different segments of the wedding market.

We have made some updates to the lead service. You can now view details about the leads before downloading them. We also added submitted date on all downloads. Check out the new look and feel and let us know what you think.

A good article about a growing trend in the officiant business; friends or relatives getting ordained to perform the service.

We have upgraded the lead service verification process. We now verify mailing address, email address and phone number on all wedding leads. We have also enhanced the mailing address verification process to better detect non-deliverable mailing addresses before the lead gets into the system.

All leads collected after 1/1/08 have been re-verified and updated.