Header image by Jaye Peg Photography
Sustainable weddings, to us, means a happy experience and stress free planning. Sticking to a comfortable budget is a huge part of that.
If you haven’t been following our sustainable weddings series, you might want to check back or bookmark our recent months’ features:
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- Weddings & Planet – don’t let your day be about ‘stuff’
- Weddings & mental health
- The elephant in the room: weddings’ carbon footprint
- Finding (or being) a sustainable wedding supplier
Let’s talk about wedding budgets
Today we wanted to talk about budgets. The wedding media focus way too much on ‘average wedding budget*’ figures (which we believe are massively distorted) – and this can put pressure on couples to spend more than necessary. This has an impact on mental health, on carbon footprint and on waste at weddings. Why? Because budgets dictate the size of a wedding. If you’re constantly told that a figure of £xxx is normal, you’re likely to be influenced by that in some way.
(In a very subtle way, we all compare ourselves to what’s normal. If you’re a thrifty couple or great at budgeting, perhaps you’ll subconsciously aim to spend about half of the ‘normal’ figure. If you’re both high earners, maybe you’ll think you’d probably spend 30% higher than ‘normal’. But here’s the rub: if someone behind a desk at a wedding magazine is deciding what ‘normal’ is, why should that figure mean anything at all?)
Let’s try something: with your partner, without showing each other, write down what each of you thinks your wedding might cost. Reveal your figures, compare and have a chat.
We’re guessing if one of you has been reading about weddings on websites, blogs or magazines, your figure will be higher.
If you have very different ideas about your wedding budget, there’s a lovely article on Green Union about how to compromise while planning your dream wedding. Working things out together so you’re both on the same page with budgets will help your wedding planning go smoothly. It’s something to do as a team, so agreeing what you can happily afford is really important.
Enough about what you should or shouldn’t spend. Weddings aren’t about money or budgets. Weddings are about celebration and fun – and that’s FREE.
Whatever your budget, high or low, it’s super important that weddings should be
- Common sense spending – the key to keeping things stress-free
- Save first. Give yourselves time and put money in the bank
- Include a buffer ‘just in case’
- Don’t borrow
- Accept any financial gifts with grace (and caution – no strings!)
- Block out pressure to overspend
- Plan as a couple
- Don’t buy wedding stuff just cos it’s wedding stuff! A wedding should be unique and about you
- Full of personality. Make your day about YOU (two)!
As a part of the wedding media in the UK, we want to use our voice to bring a little balance. No one should feel pressure to aim their wedding budget towards a level of spend dictated by the press. Especially with the cost of living crisis we’re in right now, no one should even feel pressure to have a wedding at all. (Elope! Elopements are amazing. Or live together in love – married or not – weddings are optional!)
We want to be a part of a thriving industry which gives couples choice. That feels like a sustainable future for everyone.
And the key to a more sustainable approach to wedding budgets? Focus on personality. Plan and style your day around who you are – not what you see in the wedding media.
It’s all about being YOU. And for most of us, hiring a stately home for a weekend probably isn’t you. (Let alone booking a function / conference room in a hotel for a day.) Right from the start, try not to be swayed by perceptions of what a wedding ‘should’ be. Being yourselves might mean booking out your favourite pub for the afternoon, or having a party at home…
Starting points to help you frame some key wedding decisions around your personalities:
Credit: Jaye Peg Photography, Cumbria
- Think about your venue: where do you like to spend your time? Pubs? Camping? Airbnbs? Abroad? Countryside? With the use of an independent celebrant, could you have your wedding there?
- Photographer: how important are photos to you both? How knowledgeable are you about photography? What style of photos do you love? Perhaps photography isn’t that important to you – and that’s fine. Our recommendation would be to hire a pro if you can afford one, but do shop around, and within your budget always choose based on quality and personality – not price!
- Catering: forget standard wedding food! If formal dining and a sit down meal isn’t your thing, how about a vegan pizza van, picnic baskets, banquet or family style dining?
- Styling: There are so many options from DIY, hire, having all of your family helping, or just using your venue’s own style. Making your wedding ‘you’ could mean splashing out on flowers, or spending on your outfits and keeping decor minimal. Or it could mean a picnic on hay bales at a local farm. Think about your home, and your friends’ homes. Could you grow lavender in little pots for a year and use that for table styling? Plants are super sustainable for wedding decor if they live on after the big day!
- Your outfits: Balance dressing up and wow factor with feeling comfortable. (We’re not just talking about dresses!) A white dress and hire suit are NOT your only options! (Until the 1980s, people just wore their best outfit to get married in. They didn’t buy new, let alone spend £££ on a dress to wear once!) So think about your culture? Charity? Borrow outfits or just be creative. Most of all be You
- Guests: the size of your wedding has a big financial impact. Micro is cool now. Be comfortable rather than showy – smaller weddings generally have more personality!
We’re huge fans of sustainable wedding website Green Union, and we wanted to share some words of wisdom we found on there:
Go through your wedding planning list to see where you could make savings. Eco-friendly favours are a great idea, as is using sustainable decor, including many items you might have around your home like books. Making some changes will help you limit waste, and can help you get better value for your money too.
By making some eco-friendly changes to your wedding, you can enjoy savings that can be put towards other elements, or even your honeymoon. Even making small changes can make a big difference, allowing you to have your dream wedding knowing you’ve done your bit to help the planet too.
More on Saving money while making your wedding eco friendly
Your wedding will be your best day ever.
Remember “Happily ever after” includes the day after your wedding, and the last thing you should be feeling is bogged down in debt as you start married life
A note on those ‘average wedding budget’ figures. I was Googling for something entirely different and came across three separate ‘average’ figures, all quoted by The Guardian, ranging from £7,500 in 2015 to £21k in 2010 and £15k in 2009. It’s not the dates that affect the statistics: it’s the source of the information.
I’ve added these stats to the bottom of this article, because I really, really didn’t want to include numbers at all. Please, take these figures as proof that no one knows what the average wedding budget is. All the research is done by insurance companies and banks, wedding blogs and magazines… they’re all asking VERY different groups of people and that’s how the figures are always so wildly different. ~ Claire
Weddings with plastic and waste are on the way out. It’s time for the industry to catch up: a mini revolution is on the way, and this time it’s not just about trends.
As redundant as polyester chair covers and barbie tiaras, single-use wedding items are starting to sit uncomfortably with couples and suppliers these days. We’re all looking for planet-friendly alternatives, and there are plenty if you just know where to look!
Image credits: Clare Randell. Stationery by Chloe Ainsley Creative – Styled shoot and full credits here
Did you see our 60 simple tips for a more sustainable wedding? Tap here to discover them all!
Wedding suppliers in every sector are looking to be more environmentally aware in how they work. Visit the right wedding shows and seek out sustainable wedding planners, and you’ll soon discover a network of amazing folks ready to create an incredible – and ethical – wedding for you.
We’d love for the majority of wedding suppliers to take huge steps in minimising their impact on the environment. We need the tables to flip; so most wedding brands are sustainable by default! It hasn’t happened yet… but in the next decade it will, and it can’t come fast enough for us!
Why the shift to sustainable wedding suppliers?
We picked the rather glorious brain of lovely Gwenda at Green Union for her thoughts.
“Changes in everyday life are a key thing. The majority of couples I know who have embraced sustainability on their wedding day have done so because they are already doing so in their everyday lives to some degree.”
And of course, with every supplier you choose you’ll want to ‘click’, to have things in common – from your photographer to your florist and cake maker. If you’re all about living minimally, and their showroom is full of plastic and bling, it ain’t gonna work out! If you meet a wedding supplier over a coffee and their lifestyle mirrors yours, you’re onto a winner.
Suppliers know weddings need to catch up!
“Wedding professionals are all too aware that we operate in in the realms of luxury and excess, and collate a multitude of industries which are amongst the most polluting and wasteful in the world into just one day”
That’s why we’re aiming for change. Leading lights we’ve featured on English Wedding include several of our members: Sarah Hoyle Photography, and vegan wedding planner Sian at Amethyst Weddings for example. We’ve showcased ethical bridal designer Sanyukta Shrestha over the last three years because we LOVE what she stands for. And our members are independent wedding brands, those small businesses whose creativity is huge and whose carbon footprint is tiny when compared with the big names of the wedding industry.
We’re focused on YOU – and you’ll change the world!
Gwenda says, “Representing 30% of the world’s population, Millennials are the target audience of most wedding businesses today and they just happen to be the most concerned generation when it comes to environmental sustainability. Millennials are the first generation to have grown up in a world where climate change became a reality…”
Having the internet at our fingertips makes it even easier to find ethical wedding suppliers, via websites like the Sustainable Wedding Alliance and the Natural Wedding Company blog.
Our top tip for finding ethical suppliers to create your dream wedding is to keep looking until you find just ONE amazing supplier. They could be your photographer, your venue, a wedding planner or vegan cake designer. And then ask them who they know.
The wedding industry in the UK is a wonderful little web of connected businesses. Somewhere between instagram and the whole pandemic thing, folks came together and in every town, city and county there are little networks of likeminded wedding suppliers.
Trust us: the most sustainable wedding businesses in your area know each other. They’ve worked together, they’ve had coffees and chatted about weddings and sustainability, and they’re doing everything they can to find clients just like you, who share their values.
The 2020s made us all stop and think
“It cannot be denied that so much of the wedding industry has long been associated with extravagance and excess – which equates to huge amounts of waste and a whopping carbon footprint.
“One silver-lining of the pandemic has been the rise, albeit by necessity, of the intimate wedding… the fact is that is most cases, the fewer the guests, the lower the carbon footprint of travel, the less waste etc etc. The job losses and uncertainty about the future have further curbed excess. Combine this with couples becoming more environmentally aware, sustainability, by a combination of accident and design, looks to become a key feature of weddings.”
The pandemic certainly didn’t pass wedding suppliers by unscathed: it had a massive, devastating impact on thousands of wedding businesses. Everything stopped, and we saw a shift in the makeup of weddings. This triggered all kinds of changes for suppliers, not least a new focus on sustainability.
How to begin a sea change in your wedding business
Gwenda writes about wedding businesses, “There are 2 key areas in which you can become more sustainable – the first is in your lifestyle and at home, the second is of course in your professional life – and both intertwine, especially for those of us who work from home.
“But when you do so, just be honest – no one needs any more unethical ‘green washing’. Absolutely states what you are doing, but also what you’re working towards if you’re not there yet, or what you’re unable to do and why. It’s absolutely ok not to be perfect and not to have all the bases covered – progress is better than standing still.”
Let’s start today.
“Honestly, until every supplier is making more conscious choices in regards to their products and services, there will always be room for more! But it’s important to celebrate all the little moves in the right direction; Anne-Marie Bonneau’s famous quote about how “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” rings just as true to me if you replace ‘zero waste’ with ‘sustainable weddings’. In that eternal balance between budgets and ethics we must all find our place, vendors and clients alike.”
Gwenda has been part of the wedding industry since 2012. “I started off as a floral designer – and I’ll admit to not always having been the most eco-conscious one (no room to grow myself and limited local resources made for a heavy reliance on imports, however seasonally I chose). As the years went by, it bothered me more and more – the result was that in 2019 I switched to dried flowers which could be sourced predominantly from the UK, or better still, gathered fresh and dried myself from close to home. In a fortunate stroke of serendipity, at this same moment I was offered the opportunity to take over the GREEN UNION wedding directory and blog, which (thanks to both coronavirus and arthritic fingers) is now my full-time wedding industry baby!
No one is really talking about the waste generated by big weddings. It almost feels as though you can’t have a big wedding without a huge impact on the environment… as if most of the wedding media are implying it’s just one day: what harm can a wedding really do, and do you even need to think about sustainable wedding planning?
All images in this feature are by the terrifically talented Luke Flint Photography. Discover more from Luke at https://www.lukeflintphotography.co.uk
We know there are lots of you out there who would love to reduce the carbon footprint of your wedding. We believe the wedding media should play a much stronger part in normalising sustainable weddings. Right now, it still feels a little as though they’re a niche choice – but that’s wrong.
Let’s TALK about sustainable weddings more.
We have one big fact to share with you today.
The bigger your wedding, the worse your carbon footprint is likely to be.
It’s a bad fact. It makes us sad.
But it means the secret to a more sustainable wedding is dead simple: reduce your numbers.
Here’s a nice fact, for balance:
Smaller weddings tend to have a lower carbon footprint.
Isn’t that lovely?
If you’ve already considered the environmental impact of your wedding, you’ll be familiar with Green Union. In their words, “a happy accident of COVID-19 is that intimate weddings are by their very nature more sustainable: the fewer the guests, the lower the carbon footprint of travel, the less waste… the list goes on.”
We’ve talked so many times about the beauty and warmth of micro weddings. The trend towards smaller and more intimate celebrations was beginning to emerge before the pandemic, but 2020-21 really saw a huge shift in the size of the average wedding.
It wasn’t by choice, of course – but for many couples it was a revelation to be able to have a cosy and heartfelt small wedding, with a big party later.
And whether knowingly or not, couples who celebrated with their very closest people had a minimal impact on the environment compared with the average ‘big wedding’ of 2019.
We hope micro weddings are here to stay, we really do.
We appreciate that not every wedding guest list can be culled – we really do! Different cultures and different family traditions will often dictate the size of your wedding. Often it’s out of your control who will come: if your parents are footing the bill for example, or in cultures where the wedding is as much about the family coming together as it is about the couple.
And that’s fine. All we’d ask is that you look at reducing single use items, consider transport and reducing or offsetting your carbon footprint as much as you possibly can.
But if your situation is a little more flexible and you’re in the position of being able to really have “your day, your way” – then you have the option to minimise your guest list and have a sustainable wedding.
Here’s how to keep your guest list planet-friendly!
- Start with parents, close grandparents, and siblings
- Invite your very closest friends – the ones you see every week
- Everyone else is optional 😉
- DON’T feel you need to invite people you don’t see often
- You don’t have to invite everyone whose weddings you’ve been to
- There’s no rule that you have to invite colleagues
Remember, lots of couples choose to have micro weddings now, and people will understand if they’re not invited when you say yours is only a small wedding!
The ultimate in planet-friendly weddings: why not elope?
The sweet spot for a micro wedding is 20 – 30 people. An elopement might be just the two of you, or a couple of witnesses. You can always have a party later, and if this party is more relaxed with none of the traditional… well, traditions!… of a wedding*, there’ll be less waste, fewer single-use items, less chance that people will buy a special outfit they’ll only wear once… and another little win for the planet.
*Think: floral arrangements, table settings, seating plans and signage, favours, food waste, vehicle hire, decorations…
If this intrigues you, read more about planet-friendly elopements
With thanks to lovely Gwenda from Green Union for the inspiration – more coming soon!
