Insider Q&A: How wedding planners are adjusting for Gen Z nuptials

abcnews.go.com:

Tim Chi, the CEO of The Knot Worldwide, attended eight weddings in the year leading up to his own 2005 nuptials

Tim Chi, the CEO of The Knot Worldwide, attended eight weddings in the year leading up to his own 2005 nuptials. After seeing all that stress and emotion firsthand, he started thinking about ways to make wedding planning easier.

“I felt very strongly that the wedding industry needed something user-generated that really helped good vendors stamp their reputation and gave consumers more information to make better buying decisions,” Chi said.

So Chi and three friends created WeddingWire, a marketplace for couples to research photographers, bakers and other vendors. In 2018, WeddingWire merged with its rival, The Knot, to form The Knot Worldwide

The company now connects more than 4 million couples to 850,000 wedding vendors each year. It operates in 16 countries and also runs The Bump website for new parents and The Bash for party planning. In 2022, it reported record revenue of $400 million.

Chi spoke with The Associated Press about how weddings are – and aren’t — changing. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

A. In some ways, so many things haven’t changed. Weddings are a local celebration at the end of the day, and you all come together and you need food and you need entertainment. There’s just a baseline practicality and pragmatism about it that has not changed for as long as people have been getting married. Where the most change has been is how couples go about making those selections or finding vendors. It wasn’t that long ago when we were all just using binders and clipbooks. So the “how” has changed considerably, the digital transformation in all of our lives. But you strip that all away