I went to a large wedding fayre with my (now) wife a couple of years ago.
There must of been 200 stalls crammed into the exhibition centre, more stalls in a marquee, and plenty of wedding cars and even a red double decker bus parked outside.
We were getting married in around a year's time, and we were looking for ideas for our wedding. The perfect solution for engaged couples has to be to head to a wedding fayre, with so many different wedding services together in one place you could wander around speaking with wedding professionals, get handed a few freebies and go home with lots of new contacts and ideas for your perfect wedding day......or so we thought.
Upon queuing up at the entrance we were greeted by a charming magician, showing us a few tricks and handing out his business cards. A magician is a great idea for keeping your wedding guests entertained especially during that gap between your meal and your evening guests arriving for the wedding reception.
Once we finally got to the front of the queue, my fiancee was handed a "goody bag" - I'd describe is as a bag of adverts for wedding services, and then we were asked for £6 each to enter.
This made me stop to think, here we are planning our wedding day, we come to an event to be sold services, and we have to pay to speak to them.
If you go to your local market, do you pay an entrance fee to discuss the price of bananas with the fruit stall holder ? Er......no.
Anyway, in we went, £12 lighter. We were a bit amazed by the variety of wedding services that were on display though. There was everything from dresses to discos, florists to photographers and everything else in between.
Weddings, it seemed, was a massive market, with customers tripped over themselves to spend their hard earned cash.
Our wedding day was pretty much planned, we had the date, we'd booked our wedding venue along with their caterers, we'd booked our wedding DJ and chosen the dress. However, there was still plenty of things we hadn't arranged, so we spent hours speaking with photographers, videographers, wedding florists until we were too tired and out feet ached.
The point I'm making is, why was there so many engaged couples, and often their mum's spending all that money just to get into the wedding fayre in Essex only to be sold more wedding related goods ?
I liked the wedding fayre, I hated the 3 carrier bags of flyers I was given and I left there having booked nothing, and told all the wedding services I'd look at their website and be in touch.
Happy Wedding Planning !