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KENTUCKY WEDDING MALL TAKES CAKE FOR BRIDAL SHOPPING

By Sascha Brodsky

Marriage may or may not be bliss. But for most couples, the wedding preparations are unquestionably in the latter category, what with the fevered planning and seemingly endless purchases that have them running frantically before the big day.

Developer Jim Salyers says his one-stop Wedding Mall, which opened in Covington, Ky., last month, can help make it all less painful. “The biggest complaint from brides was that it’s hard going to different stores to buy all the things you need for a wedding,” said Salyers, who also owns a nearby wedding banquet hall. The mall, housed in a century-old building with chandeliers and a marble floor, is the first of its kind in the U.S., according to Salyers. But the growing and lucrative bridal supply market may be ripe for more such malls, sources say.

Occupying 10,000 square feet and costing $1 million to develop, the project was 90 percent leased at its Feb. 3 opening, with a florist shop, an invitations store, a tuxedo rental shop, a café, a Fabulous Furs showroom, and wedding events, photography and video production services providers among the tenants.

The city of Covington, a 10-minute drive from Cincinnati, gave the mall tax breaks and designated a three-block stretch downtown as the “wedding district” as part of an effort to revitalize the area. The district also includes Salyers’ banquet hall and the four-story, 10,000-square-foot Fabulous-Bridal Boutique. The city spent about $300,000 on streetscape improvements and signage.

There is money to be made here, of course. The average wedding is expected to cost $26,800 this year, according to the Association for Wedding Professionals International, a Sacramento, Calif.-based trade group for wedding planners. Nearly $60 billion a year is spent on about 2.3 million weddings in the U.S. And the number of weddings is expected to edge up about 1 percent this year alone. According to theweddingreport.com, some 2,271,910 couples will tie the knot in the course of this year.

That’s enough to keep a mall in business, some would say. It’s even enough for a few malls, if the weddings are in India. Indian development firm Omaxe opened wedding malls in Gurgaon, near Delhi, and at Patiala, in Punjab, last year. Omaxe reports that its 275,000-square-foot malls were packed during November and December, India’s peak wedding season. Each contains about 110 shops and cost about $16 million apiece to build.

In the U.S. wedding spending has risen with people’s confidence in the economy, and the industry catering to weddings has grown in tandem, says Shane McMurray, creator of theweddingreport.com, which provides research for the industry. There are about 8,000 stores in the U.S. selling bridal gowns alone, says Richard Markel, the association’s president. Independent stores still dominate the bridal store industry, but chains are making inroads.

David’s Bridal, the largest retailer of bridal gowns and bridal-party-related merchandise in the U.S., operates about 250 stores across the country and posted about $704 million in sales last year, according to the Directory of Apparel Specialty Stores. (David’s Bridal was one of several wedding-related retailers bought by May Department Stores in recent years. Federated Department Stores, which took over May in August, is now seeking to sell the chain, along with the 500-plus-store After Hours Formalwear and Mr. Tux chains, and 11 Priscilla of Boston stores.)

The wedding business is attracting retailers in Europe too. British supermarket chain Asda is offering bargain-price wedding dresses as well as outfits for the groom and the bridesmaids. The average price of a wedding dress in Britain exceeds £826 ($1,500), but Asda recently introduced dresses that cost around £60 ($100).

The possibilities for retailers seem endless. “Everyone wants to have a unique wedding these days, and to do that you’ve got to spend money,” McMurray said. “They are looking for a twist like unique gifts for the guests.”

Bridal shops now face greater competition from Internet retailers, which, of course, enjoy lower overhead costs and can thus afford to offer discounts, McMurray says. To add insult to injury, brides often try on dresses at their local store and then buy them online for less. Brick-and-mortar bridal stores are trying to counter all this by concentrating on customer service. “Bridal salons are more full-service establishments these days,” McMurray said. “They offer everything from flowers to travel services for the honeymoon.”

Bridal salons can be lucrative, but they are also expensive to start up — somewhere around $100,000, Markel says. The Wedding Mall in Covington had no such problem, because many of its main tenants, including custom stationer Letterheads, are well-established businesses.

Not everyone is convinced that the wedding industry is going to spawn more malls. Many of the items purchased for weddings are already sold in traditional malls, says Jeff Zeigler, executive vice president at Columbus, Ohio-based Continental Retail Development. “There’s a lot of specialization going on inside centers these days,” he said. “Centers are increasingly trying to cluster together retailers of a certain type in the same way the wedding mall is doing.”

Salyers counters that wedding tenants have quirks that cannot be easily accommodated in a regular mall. His wedding mall is open only about 20 hours per week, for example, because most customers want to shop for wedding supplies only on weekends and evenings, Salyers says. But those reduced hours allow the mall to cut operating costs, and he says he makes up for the hours with higher rents, charging $30 per square foot, versus an average of about $10 per square foot for retail space in the surrounding area.

McMurray says he sure could have done with such a wedding mall when he married his wife, Olga, back in 2001. “It was a nightmare of decision making,” he said. A wedding mall “would have been a nice resource to have.”