Jamie Wolfer, a wedding planner and designer, breaks down why rental costs are so high. Beyond the item itself, you're paying for sales consultations, mockups, transport, on-site setup and staffing, teardown, cleaning, inventory checks, and the rental company's overhead like rent and utilities.
My feed is inundated with people saying the wedding industry is a scam, and I think that that's coming from a lack of understanding with pricing. I'm a wedding planner, designer, and entrepreneur, and I know a lot about wedding pricing, and I think we just need to break it down a little bit. Let's start with rentals. There have been a few videos saying that the rental price is astronomical for items and that it's the same price as buying the item. Okay, let's break it down. When you go to a rental company to get items, there is a salesperson who is going over the items with you, giving you quotes, giving you options, and gets you to the point of making the deposit. Then once the deposit is made, leading up to the wedding, there are multiple revisions. Typically you might change your mind on something, your guest count goes up and down, there's back and forth, maybe there's a mockup. There are hours and hours of time put into the conversations. Often a COI, a certificate of insurance, needs to be given to the venue. So there's administrative paperwork that needs to happen. And then we get to the wedding week. There are people that need to clean and count and put everything into a truck. They have to put it in the truck carefully. It has to be transported to the venue. It then has to be unloaded at the venue item by item, unwrapped, set up, put where it goes. Often the planner needs something adjusted a little bit, so there's people doing on-site labor making things happen. And then often there's an on-site person making sure everything is going smoothly. And then at the end of the night, everything has to be cleaned up. Every single fork has to be counted by hand, put away, and then brought back to the warehouse where it needs to be unloaded from the truck, washed, inventoried. And if something has been damaged, it needs to be problem solved because maybe it needed to go out the next week. And then it needs to all be put back in an organized fashion so that it can go out for for the next event. This is not including any of the overhead, the rent, the utility bills, all the admin things that need to happen to run a business. And so guys, that's why things cost money, because labor needs to be paid at a fair rate and things take a lot of time besides just the physical item that's arriving.
