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Coach on the Couch with Wendy Rivera

Business20-Sep-2021

Wendy Rivera, founder of Do You Speak Bride joined Abi Neill for her IGTV series ‘Coach on the Couch’. Here Wendy discusses the best kept secret about post-Covid brides.

At present, the conventional wisdom in bridal is that post-Covid brides have been negatively affected by the pandemic, which has resulted in them becoming worse customers than the brides who came before them. Comments from this perspective sound like this:

“So many brides just want to have the ‘whole dress-shopping experience,’ which means they’ll shop at five different stores before they even consider purchasing.”

“They don’t really care if they are taking up our time – they are just coming in to play.”

“Brides don’t know what they want, because they are scared about what might happen in the near-future.”

To undiplomatically summarise the sentiments expressed in the above comments, brides are insecure, because they don’t want to miss out on some grand part of the dress-finding journey. They are selfishly focused on what they want, and are driven by fear of the future, which steals their ability to make a decision in the present. Some of this, while harsh, may indeed be true, and I will address this below.

However, I would first like to make an observation that may persuade us to take a second glance at the way we think about post-Covid brides and how we deal with them.

If the mindset of brides could have been so negatively affected by the pandemic, is there any possibility that we ourselves have had our minds negatively affected by Covid as well? After all, our stores, our means of creating a livelihood have been closed for a longer period than anyone could have thought possible. Wouldn’t it be realistic, and in fact, absolutely normal for owners of businesses in such circumstances to alter their customary perspectives? If so, in what ways can we adjust our thoughts about bridal?

We must ask ourselves the following.

Is it truly a new phenomenon for brides to want to shop at five different stores before they purchase?
Prior to Covid, did all our brides conscientiously work to avoid wasting your time?
In this new era as stores re-open, is fear a new emotion that brides previously never felt?

Many of the complaints currently being voiced by bridal shop owners are precisely the same complaints I was hearing from store owners five years ago. However, it seems the pandemic (and the resulting time away from dealing with brides every day) has allowed us the space to convince ourselves anew of the myth store owners love to believe the most: that the real issue, the fundamental problem facing us, is that we aren’t getting our perfect customer.

However, did we ever have perfect customers? Of course not. How do we overcome that, or how did we ever overcome that? We must aim at the right target. We can formulate ways to force the emergence of perfection in our customers, or we can devote our energies to creating perfect experiences for imperfect people. Which goal seems more likely to be accomplished?

As for the goal of perfection, there are plenty of store owners who attempt to force perfection from their customers. With strong policies and rules that are meant to act as behaviour-modifiers, they work to shape their brides’ actions into those of the ideal customer. However, too frequently this instead accomplishes the work of communicating to brides that there is something wrong with them. We tell them they’re probably planning to bring too many people with them, or they may want to stay in our store too long, or they might bring youngsters who will unavoidably spill food and drink to the ruination of priceless inventory.

With respect to constructing perfect experiences, it is one of the beautiful paradoxes of life that imperfect people can have perfect experiences. Witnessing the last light of a glorious sunset, listening to your grandfather re-tell one of his favourite stories, or the first time you held hands with your future spouse. There are moments so perfect that our human imperfections are rendered unable to ruin them, and a bride surrounded by multiple generations of her family as they help her decide what she will wear on the day she begins writing a new chapter of family history is one of those perfect moments.

We can focus on building perfect customers, or we can work on creating the perfect experience for imperfect brides, who truly may be indecisive, insecure, or afraid about the future. In other words, our most worthy goal (and the one most beneficial to our businesses) is for us to learn how to deal effectively with people who have needs. A perfect person has no needs, but I haven’t met one yet. The clientele of the perfect must be genuinely small. The good news is that when one decides to learn to work with imperfect people, one expands their potential customer base. Indeed, I see imperfect people everywhere I go.

Since 2015, Do You Speak Bride has been teaching the 4 Pillars of Bride Country to bridal stores across the globe. These are the four things that all brides need:

Celebration – every bride has a desire to celebrate the unique and special time of life they are experiencing. Not all brides celebrate in the same way, but every bride wants to celebrate.
Security – the one thing every bride brings into her dress-shopping journey is fear – about how they will look, if they will find a dress, do they have a large enough budget, will they spend too much, what will family and friends think, etc.
Positivity – amid planning the biggest party of their lives, with all the most important people attending, encouragement and optimism are ever-welcome friends to brides.
A Story – all of life is a story we write one day at a time, and every bride is keenly aware that her wedding day is a central chapter in the story of her life.

The best-kept secret about post-Covid brides is that they are just brides, whose needs and imperfections are not so dissimilar to their counterparts from the pre-Covid world.

You can reach Wendy at Do You Speak Bride by emailing support@doyouspeakbride.com or via Instagram here.