NO ONE Wants to Talk About The SCARY Stuff, But Wedding Insurance is a MUST

Listen, no one wants to talk about this, okay? No one wants to talk about the father, the bride getting cancer before the wedding. No one wants to talk about the groom getting Covid or the venue going out of business, or the photographer getting your deposit for the engagement photos and then ghosting you and deleting his entire business off of the Internet and you're left with no recourse. No one wants to have these conversations about your wedding day. And if you've been around for any semblance of time here on this channel, you know, I love to focus on having a beautiful and successful and stress free wedding planning process, but there are some things we literally cannot see coming. And that's where the importance of today's video comes in. It's an interview with probably one of my favorite CEOs I've ever met in the industry, and that's Dustin with Bright Coinsurance. Before I turn you off with the word insurance, okay, before I do that, remember what we covered in the beginning. A bride's dad getting cancer and then possibly needing to postpone a groom getting Covid, a venue going out of business, or a photographer ghosting a couple after taking a pretty hefty deposit. Those are all very real scenarios that happen to very real couples that don't have coverage. And that's what today's video is all about. Now, we don't do a whole lot of interviews here on this channel, but this one is super important and I need to draw it to your attention. Trust me when I say you're going to want to stick around for this one and see just how amazing this coverage is. Most couples want to avoid this word and this topic altogether. But I promise you, if you stick around to the end of this video, you will see why I get so passionate about the products and services that Brightco offers. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today I have a fantastic special guest with me named Dustin Lemick, the CEO and founder of Briteco. Dustin, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. Good.

Today we're talking about something that either sometimes scares people or intimidates them, and that's insurance. Wedding insurance and jewelry insurance.

Yeah, that's. That's exactly right. Wedding insurance and jewelry insurance. Insurance in general can be looked at as a scary word and you know, people are confused about it. It's not transparent, and people just generally don't love insurance companies. But I am here to tell you that there are good Insurance products that are useful and helpful and, and can help you in a bind.

You know, there's one word that you just said that I feel like was really, really important that's transparent. And I feel like the second someone logs onto your website, they're like, yep, this makes perfect sense. I understand everything that you're saying. It's, it's all very clear. You guys have a lot of transparency. It's really easy to grasp what insurances you offer and what you cover just by scrolling around the website.

Absolutely. So like one of the things when I founded this company, I, it was really, really important to me to sort of buck the trend. And I was seeing on my side that it was confusing and it was hard to buy policies specifically in like the jewelry space and the wedding space and it was like ridiculous. There's no need for, for that. And so one of our core missions was to simplify and create transparency to the coverage to jewelry insurance. You know, think engagement ring insurance, wedding band insurance, and then also wedding insurance. So like wedding liability and wedding cancellation. And so when, yes, when you go to our website, it's very clean. We try to be very straightforward, very simple, easy to digest.

Yeah. Now you started off jewelry insurance, correct?

Yeah. So actually I came from the jewelry world. My family. Yeah. So my family has retail jewelry stores in Chicago. I was a third generation jeweler and.

No way, I swear to God, what a perfect segue.

Yeah. And I, I transitioned to the insurance side because we did work when I was in the jewelry industry, we did work for insurance companies and it was a disaster. Like the things we were just talking about, it was not a good process and you know, it was just hard for jewelers, hard for consumers. I'm like, this has got to be better. And that was really kind of like the impetus to starting Brightco. And you know, we founded the company in 2018, so we've been around for a while now. But yeah, that's, that sort of was my, my background. And so when we founded Brightco, really part of the core thesis was to make it better, better coverage and to simplify the whole thing.

Oh yeah. When I, when we first got engaged, I didn't even want to consider doing jewelry insurance because it sounded complicated. And I had a moissanite ring and so I was like, it's just not, it's not worth it. I knew someone that had jewelry insurance. Literally one person that had ever spoken to me about it and she lost her diamond and she was like, I'm so glad we have insurance. But she had this big old diamond that was worth insuring. So for me I was like, that doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't do that. And then I'm going over the list of things that you cover and lost. Lost engagement rings is one of them because I lost mine gardening and we just never, we got a metal detector. Never found it. I would have been the perfect case study. Have jewelry, insurance.

I cannot tell you how many stories that we have of loss or disappearance damage. We cover all of that. The crazy thing is the cost of it is super reasonable. So it's like, I don't even think people understand that. It's like, like on average, to give you an example, for like a ten thousand dollar engagement ring.

Yeah.

It costs somewhere between like fifty to seventy five dollars on average a year.

Shut up. Shut up.

No, it's like super reasonable.

No. Yeah, I mean that's great. But like people don't know this. They hear the word insurance and then just go running. And instead you could just pay this very, very nominal amount yearly. And that's for a $10,000 ring. Like that's, that's incredible. That is very affordable.

It's very affordable. And it has really good coverage too. And it's just, I don't. And one of the other things too that people are, there's a misconception is like some folks are like, oh, I've got coverage through my homeowners and whatever. And it's like I would tell people, double check that if you think that's the case because usually the coverage is not adequate. And for like whatever, 50 to 100 bucks, let's say it's kind of a no brainer.

You pay more on Netflix yearly than you do for covering your engagement ring. Like a lot of people, Starbucks bills or. I've been really into Dutch bros recently. I probably spend more than that getting coffee out of the house. That's incredible. Those are very affordable rates, I can tell you.

I definitely spend more on coffee for sure. Like I'm in a question. My wife will definitely agree to that as well and so will my kids. But yeah, it's super reasonable.

Yeah. What's your, what's your poison of choice when it comes to coffee?

It depends. I'm in Chicago, so when it's cold out, I am an Americano type person. I steamed oat milk to stevia. When it's warm out, I definitely do iced coffee. Do like a cold brew or something like that.

Oh yeah, I, I love me a good dirty chai. That's Pretty good.

Yeah.

I'm also an iced latte kind of gal, which. Not too frou frou, but I used to work at Starbucks, so I did all the frou frou drinks for a long time. So, yeah, a good. A good iced latte. There's one at Dutch Bro that's called the Annihilator, and it's chocolate macadamia nut, and it's chef's kiss. It's so good. Okay, but that is so not important. But now I'm. Now I want more coffee. What else is jewelry insurance cover? Because obviously we're talking engagement ring, but you also mentioned wedding bands. And, you know, if there's other heirloom pieces that someone's wearing on their wedding day, are there other things that you guys cover as well?

Yeah, we cover kind of the whole gamut. So we'll do, like, earrings, studs, tennis bracelets, watches, you know, like, engagement rings and wedding bands, like I mentioned. And then the coverage itself is. Is pretty comprehensive. So, you know, I mentioned. We mentioned loss, theft, damage, mysterious disappearance. That's the big one. Which is. Happens all the time, which is just, like, it's gone. I don't know what happened to. Wasn't stolen, you know, but I just. I had it two days ago, was on my finger, and now I. I don't know what happened to it. Yeah, like, going back to, like, the misconception with homeowners, like, they won't cover mysterious disappearance like we do. And that's a huge one. So, sure, we cover all different types of jewelry, and, like, that's that kind of broad coverage that we could offer.

That's. That's awesome. Especially because, I mean, if you have these pieces that are sentimental or special and you want to have those covered, and with coverage costs like that, like, it's almost silly not to. So maybe I'm putting on record right now if I do end up because I'm wearing a fake engagement ring. Even more fake than the moissanite, if you could imagine that. No, just kidding. Moissanite rings are great. I love them so very much. I will absolutely be getting ring insurance because I'm the type of person that, like, if I don't get Apple Care, I'll drop my phone. It's gonna happen. Yeah. No, I. Now I am a walking disaster. This is the exact kind of thing that I needed, like, 10 years ago. So thank you for bringing this to the scene. We really appreciate it.

Of course. No, of course. It's. It's a passion of ours, and we are out to, you know, revolutionize and bring a really good product to customers.

And make it super simple and not a headache to go through. And I think that's one of my favorite parts of what you guys do. Now. You recently also just transitioned into doing wedding and event liability insurance, is that correct?

Yes, we, we all, we do, we offer wedding liability and wedding cancellation products. So what kind of what we went through was we were looking at, I mean, we do a huge amount of business with engaging ring insurance like we talked about. And we knew that folks were obviously getting married and going into the wedding ecosystem. And we wanted to see if there were any insurance products that were sort of the same as the jewelry product where it was like this bad process and like very gray and murky and all that stuff and boom, boom, boom, like bing. It was. These wedding products were super stale and the same kind of thing where it's like not transparent. Super confusing. Like, yeah, don't understand it. And we're like, all right, we need to fix this too. So we, we did a lot of market research before we built the wedding insurance products. And so what, what does that mean? Well, we, we interviewed and we spoke with literally hundreds of planners and hundreds of venues to try to understand, like, what are your pain points?

Yeah. And, and what I, I also love that your coverage basically sells itself because you offer certain things that I can't name another insurance company that does. You know, allegedly we. Because obviously I haven't examined every single policy out there, but you offer things like five day coverage. Covid cancellation. Gosh. What are some of the other ones you offer? So many unique. Or cancel for any reason. Cancel for any reason. That is wild.

Yeah. So we, we built this product from the ground up. So, you know, one of our co founders at Brightco, he's a fully credentialed actuary and we want to always bring the best product we can to the market, provide real value and offer coverage that makes sense. And so, yes, that means things like we cover pets that are at the, at the, at the ceremony. We will. We offer cancel for any reason. Which is exactly like it sounds. You can cancel. I mean, I believe we're the only ones that offer this. You know, that is really good peace of mind. We also, Covid is, you know, as you pointed out, Covid I. One of the reasons that cancel. That cancellation insurance became such a hot, hot topic recently was because of COVID and no one was covering it and people lost a ton of money. And so we like, that was so important to Me personally, to make sure that we did cover Covid, because that's when you need it. And so I also. I think we're the only ones that cover that as well. So there's real value in these products.

And it's. It's not just. As I was reading through, it's not just the couple, but it could be someone that's pivotal to the wedding day as well. Is that correct?

It's absolutely correct. So it could be an immediate family member to the couple. It could be somebody that's, you know, important to the wedding itself. You know, a bridesmaids, a groom, groomsman, a grandmother. We would cut any. If they got ill for any reason and they needed to, like, look, I need. Really need my grandmother. Gosh, she's the closest person to me. She has to be in my wedding, you know, and you needed to postpone or change the date, whatever. Yeah, that will be covered.

Gosh, Dustin, what a gift. And I don't say that lightly because so many people get really, really worried about their event or, you know, we have couples whose grandma does get Covid and then can't make it, and then they're just absolutely heartbroken on their wedding day. This is the things that you offer. These are gifts for couples to just breathe easier so they don't have to worry about it. Yeah. I mean, I just think that it's such a. It's such an intense topic for so many people, because I touched on this earlier, but, like, we have so many insurances in our lives that we have to have that adding an optional one sounds like a headache. But when you run through the list of, you know, the things that could go wrong, of course, we as vendors, we know. We know. We've seen it. We've seen the things. We've seen the drunk groomsmen crashing into a door. We've seen, you know, someone slipping into falling. We've seen a dog chewing on a pillow. We've seen all of these things that happen behind the scenes. And of course, we want to doom and gloom our couples. We don't be like, oh, yeah, you better get wedding insurance. Because the last wedding I was at, this guy, you know, broke a door, and, you know, he had to pay for it or whatever. You just don't. You don't want to scare your couples into. Into getting this insurance. But when you at Brightco make it so simple and almost foolproof, we can give that and send our clients that direction with that peace of mind of just knowing it's not just the big Stuff we don't have to sell them on. Hey, if your venue catches on fire, you know, or if your grandma gets sick with COVID and can't make it. Guess. Oh, well, sorry. Your wedding's kind of screwed. It makes it so much easier to quote, unquote, like, sell it to our clients.

Yeah. I mean, and you're right. It doesn't. It's. This is not just for the big stuff, the, you know, venue burning to the ground kind of thing. There's a lot of coverage that it offers. You know, somebody spills something and damages carpeting, that ends up being a few thousand dollars. But, yeah, the liability piece, it covers general liability. So if something were to happen at the. At the venue, and then it also cover, like, general property or broad property damage. So think if one of our partners had this situation where one of the bridesmaids was in the restroom and was sitting on a sink pedestal. Oh, no makeup. Yep. And the pedestal broke. And so there was some flooding. I mean, it wasn't, like, catastrophic thing. It wasn't. But it also. There was some damage and it caused.

Yeah.

And just, like, whatever. So you just, as the wedding couple, like, you don't want to have to worry about.

Yeah.

Coming out of pocket. I mean, just. You don't want to have to worry about it. So those are the things that we kind of COVID Yeah.

And I think one of the examples that I saw was, like, a dog had a mess on the carpet, and it needed to be cleaned. Like, it could be that simple. It could be, you know, fire sprinklers going off, or it could be. I actually had a. Unfortunately, this poor bride tripped, fell, and hit her head on a window. She was okay by the grace of God. But there was this giant wagon wheel break in this window. It was huge. And they were like, those sorts of situations where, of course, no one's manifesting this. No one's wishing that for your event. But if it is something as simple as a bridesmaid is just not thinking about it.

The whole idea here is just that it's. It's peace of mind so that you don't have to worry about something happening and just getting a bill at the end of the day from the venue, nobody wants that. Like, nobody wants to spend all of this money. And then, you know, you obviously. Your budgeting and all of that. And then after the wedding, you realize somebody broke a chandelier or, like, a sink pedestal in the bathroom broke. And now I owe another 5,7000, whatever the number is.

Yeah.

You just don't want to worry about that. And so for the cost, like so the lie, we offer two products. We offer a liability insurance product which is, covers general liability and some broad property damage. And then we also offer a cancellation product. The liability product, the base liability product is 120 bucks. The cancellation product for like an average wedding of like a 30 call. I think the average cost of a wedding in the United states is like 30,000 around there. 30 to 35,000.

Yeah.

I'll be looking at like 200 bucks, 250 bucks for that. So like, these are not big line items. And it's like, nope, get this peace of mind. And then in the event, God forbid, something does happen, everybody feels a lot better about it. It's like, oh, thank God the insurance company is there to step in and financially make sure that I don't have to spend ten grand more out of pocket or whatever it is.

Yeah. And some of the things that you cover with that cancellation policy, I mean, what are these? Like if a florist goes out of business and your deposit's gone? You know, we've, we've seen situations where a vendor like ghosts a client and we're like, I, I'm so sorry. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to help you. I'll help you find somebody new and we'll rework the budget and that's the best that we can offer them. Your cancellation coverage covers that.

Yeah. So like that reworking and finding the new florist or what, whatever the, the vent the vendor was, you know, you're gonna, there's going to be costs, additional costs. Yeah, for sure. You're going to lose your deposits on the no show from the first. Like, let's say you put down five grand, you're like, what's going to happen to that? Like, we will cover that. Those financial, the financial component of it. And yeah, that's just one thing that we can remove from the concerns and from dealing with those issues. And it's like you kind of want to remove that, the liability there, like the financial component of it. And that's what we step in to help do. And you know, I mean, I was reading, I saw an article the other day. So it's not just vendor no shows. There was a venue that literally like went bankrupt. And they, it was, I think it was like, it was some country estate type venue in, I think it was on the east coast. And they were, they just canceled everything basically overnight. And so some folks like had Their wedding coming up in a couple weeks.

Like, oh, my gosh.

So. And they lost money. And so, like, you know, they. These folks were able to find new venues, rearrange everything, obviously, massive headache. But, like, again, the financial component, you can mitigate that part of the risk.

Yeah, because. Because a lot of the. At least a lot of the content I do online is to help budget couples and something catastrophic like that they can't come back from. There's no money left.

It's a disaster. Right.

Yeah.

And so, like, for a small cost, and it helps peace of mind for everybody. It helps the venues knowing that they have coverage. Sometimes the venues obviously, as we know, require it. And then for planners, too, it's like, okay. Like, that removes a really hard part of a conversation if something was to happen.

Yes. None of us want to have that conversation ever. No, no. It's the heartbreaking stuff is the stuff we never want to talk about. We don't want to talk about someone like, falling on your wedding day. We don't want to talk about your venue going out of business. We don't want to warn you about those things because it's. This is. I try really hard to never say this is the best day of your life, but it's one of them. It's up there probably top 10. Right. So we want to make sure that you are covered, especially when you're shelling out tens of thousands of dollars. So to have such a small fee cover potentially such a big, big, sad thing that could happen throughout the planning process or on your wedding day, I think it. I think is instrumental.

Yeah. And I mean, look, we all know there's enough stress around all of this, right? Like, if we can remove stress, we. We should. If it's easy to do.

Yeah, absolutely. So I know we've touched on a couple of, like, the. The really cool things that you offer, but give me the basic mechanics of the coverages that you offer.

Yeah, totally. So, like, like I mentioned, like, we offer two different insurance products here. We offer wedding or event liability product, and then we also offer the wedding cancellation product.

Yeah.

So what are those things? You know, like I've said, there's, like, confusion sometimes. So the. The wedding liability product is two parts. It's a general liability, and I'll give you an example there. And also some broad property coverage. So the general liability is basically, you know, slip and fall, like somebody gets hurt, or like those kinds of things where there might be some liability that arises that would end up potentially falling on the. On the honorees of the wedding couple. Then there's also the property piece of that, which is what you would think of, which is somebody damaged a chandelier or a piece of artwork or the carpet or et cetera, et cetera. So those are kind of the high level, you know, parts of the liability coverage. Now the cancellation coverage is totally different. Yeah, that is kind of like what it sounds like. It's, it will cover for cancellation. A lot of times you're looking at like, if somebody gets ill and it doesn't have to just be the wedding couple who can get ill. It could also be a direct family member or somebody really important to the wedding party. And also it can cover postponement as well. So it's not just cancellation.

Yeah.

And we've, I've seen examples of this like where somebody is like, look, it's just, we're still getting married. We just need to push it out three months. Like the timing, just for whatever reason the timing is off, we need to buy three more months. Well, there's some financial component that could be an issue there. And then also the last part of that is it can cover vendor no shows and things like that, which is.

Yeah.

Never fun.

No, no, absolutely not. And I had a call with couples last night and one of the brides was talking about how her future husband might be deployed soon or around the time of their wedding. And so she's like, do I, do I just change the date? Like, what do I do? And I did not know that you covered postponements. So now I'm definitely going to contact her as a follow up to be like, just kidding. Here you go. You're actually going to want to get this because we have those situations and we've got, you know, brave men and women that are serving our country and then get deployed it. And it gets, it's so sad for those that are trying to plan for their weddings. And so the fact that it's not just cancellation, but it's postponement is such a, an intentional product that I think a lot of couples, especially in those spaces could benefit from.

Yeah. And I agree with you. We would cover, we would cover that. And also the vendor no show stuff is, is a big deal too. I mean we've all seen those examples where the florist like, I mean, God forbid, I mean it doesn't happen all the time, but like, you know, that's not something that's fun to deal with. And so there's a financial component of financial loss component to that.

Yeah.

Which we would Cover that as well.

Yeah, we. Or like in Facebook groups. How many times you see, I mean you're probably not in a lot of wedding planning Facebook groups unless you're still doing market research. But an experienced wedding Facebook group person. There are stories of my photographer ghosted us, did our engagement photo shoot, took our money, never saw him again. Cut, like literally deleted their business profile, their website's gone. We don't know how to. We don't recourse is to get our money back and we don't know how to pay for a new vendor. That is real and it does happen.

It definitely happens. So it's pretty broad coverage.

Well, Dustin, thank you so much for your time and most of all, thank you for listening to us. I know I wasn't a part of the interview process, but I feel like by osmosis I was. Because everything that you're saying, I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, that was awful. Oh yeah, that sucked. So thank you for taking the time to talk to vendors, to listen to vendors and to intentionally create an insurance technology based product that makes our lives easier.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And if anyone wants any more information, they could just go directly on our website. We've got a ton of educational information. Or they could reach out to us. The URL is just bright co B R I T E co. Our phone number's on there as well. If you want to just call us, we're happy to chat.

Wait, like an actual phone number with.

Real, real phone number where you can talk to a person?

What's that like? It's crazy in today's day and age. No, brilliant, brilliant. And I also, I gotta say like, if you are, if you just want to go, I highly recommend just poking around the website to inform yourself of the different policies. You guys keep it real clean, real straightforward. So you'll leave knowing exactly what the product is. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. And thank you for revolutionizing the wedding insurance space because we needed you.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

That's all we have for today's video. Guys. Thank you so much for stopping by. As Dustin said, you can find all of the information about BrightCode down below in the description box. Let me tell you as a wedding professor, for the cost and the coverage, you will find nothing else out there on the market. And you can take that to the bank. I don't know why I said that. I don't normally say phrases like that. But don't take my word for it. Go check them out and see for yourself. And until next week. Bye, guys. Sam.