Listening to the really good WedCo Podcast episode with my old mate Shane Shepherd enlightened me beyond expectations for that podcast episode. I now understand why enquiries and bookings are so quiet in 2024.

Explaining the 2024 dip in wedding enquiries and bookings, or the shortening of planning time, Shane references a New York Times article which references the investors letter from the world’s largest retailer of diamond jewellery, Signet.

Signet is experiencing financial headwinds because of the reduction of engagements due to the pandemic.

Disruptions in the dating cycle caused by the pandemic and the pace at which such impacts on engagements are expected to recover.

And the New York Times fleshes out the story like this:

The company is selling fewer engagement rings this year (2023) because, it says, singles who were stuck at home during lockdowns failed to meet their would-be fiancés in 2020.

Fortune Magazine reported it a little bleaker:

There’s now proof of the loneliness epidemic and how COVID devastated dating—a drop in Signet engagement ring sales

Even Australia’s own Michael Hill closed six stores earlier this year, five of those in Australia, and axed senior management roles amid a “challenging period for the business”.

What does this mean?

So the long and the short of it is that the average couple dates for two and a half to five years before getting engaged, then the wedding is somewhere between three and eighteen months away, but that timeline has been extended because not only were people not out meeting their future fiancé in 2020, 2021, and even into 2022 due to fears and worries about getting COVID.

Because new couples were not getting together as much during those COVID years, the subsequent engagements did not appear. Signet reveals that engagements started to dip in 2022 (from 2.8 million in 2021 to 2.5 million in 2022) and bottomed out in 2023 (from 2.5 million in 2022 to 2.1 million in 2023), and although those are American numbers. Those couples who were originally planning to ask the question through 2021 and 2022 also decided to postpone their engagement until things were “back to normal” which also contributed to the decrease in engagements because some of those people did other things like children or mortgages, and many broke up as well.

What does the future hold? We’ll all find out together, but my tea leaf reading says that weddings will come back stronger than ever, we just might have a few quiet months ahead of us yet.