You may wonder, is it worth it to participate in a Bridal Show?
Is it really worth your while to buy a booth, spend the whole day talking to prospective wedding clients and hope you get a few leads?
The short answer is, it depends.

Casey Schwartz, co-owner with her sister of Flower Duet, displays some of her work at the Shade Hotel’s annual Wedding Festival in Manhattan Beach on Sunday, January 12, 2020.
(Photo by Axel Koester, Contributing Photographer)
Once upon a time, wedding couples only had one option to learn about wedding vendors: attending bridal shows. Wedding vendors attended many different types of wedding shows regularly during early months of each calendar year known as “booking season.”
Now, with vendor websites, Google Business, Yelp, The Knot, Wedding Wire, Instagram and Facebook, wedding couples don’t need to spend Saturday afternoons in a hotel ballroom meeting a plethora of wedding vendors. They can let their “eyes” do the hard work online. These days, venues hold their own bridal shows to show off their ceremony spaces, bridal suites, ballrooms and receptions spaces. So, instead of big convention center style shows, we participate in this smaller, venue-operated shows.

Erin Cundiff and her wedding planner Mary Claire Orenic visit the Shade Hotel’s annual Wedding Festival in Manhattan Beach on Sunday, January 12, 2020.
(Photo by Axel Koester, Contributing Photographer for the Daily Breeze)
Reasons to Participate in a Bridal Show
We like to go for three reasons in the following order of importance as well as meeting prospective clients:
- Builds relationships with venues. Most of the time, we partner with local venues to show our flowers at their private wedding shows. This does two things. It keeps us on their preferred wedding vendor list which does give us lots of business. We get to showcase our flexible style by providing flowers for their table setups, ceremony setups and lounge areas in return for a “free” booth. It’s called an in-kind donation and it works. We created florals for the table setups and ceremony setup at The Shade Hotel for its bridal show in January of 2020 and Casey was featured in our local paper, The Daily Breeze!
- Builds relationships with vendors. We’ve met some of our favorite DJs, wedding planners, makeup artists and bakers at wedding shows. It’s useful to get to know all types of local vendors so you can recommend them when your own clients ask for help. Participating in wedding shows helps you network with all types of event vendors.
- Learn about what trends are resonating with couples. Most couples take about a year to plan their weddings. What will be trendy in a year might be really different from what is trendy now. We display lots of different “themes” on our tables to see how people react. This helps us gauge where trends are going!