Jared and Breana Rickman at their backyard wedding. Photo by Oh Lovely Photography.

The wedding industry saw a drastic decrease in activity last year, with many postponements to 2021. Now some vendors are wondering how they’ll make revenue stretch after holding 2020 deposits.

Cassandra Turner, owner of Weddings by Cassandra in Fresno, has been in the business for 22 years. But the last year and a half has been the most challenging yet.

“I haven’t done an indoor wedding since January of 2020. Everything has been outside. Everything,” she said.

The wave of wedding postponements happened nearly overnight.

“It was like on a Friday it happened and then by Monday I had six weddings I had to postpone,” Turner said.

Turner had to rearrange 20 weddings in all, either changing the location or date. One client moved her wedding three times. Some clients got married anyway and others opted to wait out the pandemic.

Typically, coordinating weddings with an average of 300 guests, smaller weddings were a change of scenery. Some clients had a small official ceremony and saved the big reception for 2021.

“Even though things are slowly starting to open up, people are not necessarily doing weddings with 300 people yet, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen,” Turner said.

No one knew what to do at the onset of the pandemic, she said. Turner found herself mediating disappointed brides and worried vendors.

“If a bride postpones her wedding, and you as a vendor cannot do it, you are put in a very difficult spot,” she said.

When a bride moves her wedding with already-booked vendors, Turner has to coordinate new dates with up to 15 vendors.

“If you pick this date, you get all of your vendors. If you pick this date, you lose this vendor,” she told her rescheduling brides. “It was like playing Tetris.”

Turner found herself struggling to keep brides happy, while making sure her vendors still made the bottom line. Many in the event industry are self-employed, so they see each other at weddings and big events. Turner considers the vendors her coworkers and friends.

“I also need to make sure that my vendors don’t go out of business because I need them down the road for other events,” she said.

Events are picking up this year, but many vendors are already booked because of rescheduling from last year. And for some vendors, deposits had already been accounted for, so revenue is still slim.

Turner is coordinating an event, but will not see any new dollars.

“Last year is the first year we didn’t grow,” said Beverly Gable, owner of Frosted Cakery in Fresno’s Tower District. During the Great Recession, Gable saw that in stressful times, people depend on a sugar fix.

Gable made many small, 10-serving cakes. But eventually, she said, “The industry ran out of all small cake boxes and cake boards.”

While people weren’t ordering 100 or 200-serving cakes as in past years, clients were splurging on small cakes because it was one of the main features of small family weddings. Now there’s a shift in the business as clients look to go forward with bigger weddings again.

“This year will be very interesting because already it was filled because of the postponements,” Gable said.

Gable said the challenge with wedding postponements as a vendor is the planning element. Despite not physically working on the product yet, the business has reserved spots for clients, paid its employees and spent time designing the product.

Now 2021 has offered new hope of lifted restrictions and herd immunity as more people get vaccinated, and Frosted Cakery is seeing growing demand.

In some cases, clients want to place deposits just to reserve a date without even having a consultation.

To keep sales booming, Frosted Cakery has started selling its cupcakes in Clovis at Chocolate Wishes at the Sierra Vista Mall. The business has amplified curbside pickup and DoorDash.

But vendors are hiring right now, and Turner says that if people are looking for jobs, they need to look into the wedding industry.

Pardini’s Catering & Banquets is one vendor looking for more employees, even after a successful year of reallocating some core staff to its new food truck, The Big Wagon.

Jeff Pardini, co-owner of Pardini’s Inc., is hopeful after a bumpy year.

“We’re excited obviously that there’s positive momentum in the event industry,” Pardini said.

Pardini said there’s a “sense of confidence that people are at least confident to book events in the future. But now after the governor’s recent announcement, people are chomping at the bit.”

As of June 15, if all goes according to plan, California will do away with the Blueprint for a Safer Economy, which will eliminate capacity and business restrictions.

“People should start making their plans sooner than later because the demand is going to be very high for the upcoming year,” Pardini said.

Pardini’s has almost two years’ worth of weddings that it’s trying to fit into one year.

The catering company ate the temporary cost of postponements last year by refunding their customers.

“I never would’ve imagined in a million years that something would tell us basically, ‘You can’t operate your business,’” he said.

Pardini feels that since there’s hope moving into spring and summer, people are ready to hold events, and the industry will see an uptick. But the industry lags behind a few months because events take planning ahead.

“We’ve been through the recession in 2008, but that did not affect us as much as it did other industries, because people still got married,” Pardini said. “Personally I always thought that our industry was kind of recession-proof,” Pardini said, “but I’ve discovered our industry is not pandemic-proof.”