Steven Greitzer became a “wedding person” by accident.
In 2016, two friends asked him to officiate their wedding, and the experience proved to be a lightbulb moment. Greitzer ultimately spent a year stressing out about what it meant to build out a wedding service that was personal, and mostly found “Mad Libs templates” online.
“If there’s one thing this ceremony shouldn’t be, it’s generic,” said Greitzer. “So, I devised my own process about how to crush their ceremony…As I was asked by more and more friends, and friends of friends, it became apparent this wasn’t just affecting me and my circle, but that it’s affecting millions of Americans each year. Can we solve this problem at scale and do it well?”
Since then, Greitzer has been embedded in the wedding industry and is uniquely equipped to talk about its joys and foibles. In 2021, he founded the platform Provenance, which helps couples, families, and bridal parties personalize their vows, toasts, and entire wedding ceremonies. Provenance’s seed round was led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from WndrCo, Maveron, and A*, and the company has “supported hundreds of thousands” of weddings to date, Greitzer exclusively tells Fortune.
Greitzer says that the wedding business is a space that has all the love (and giddy spending) you expect—and it’s a very big market.
“The wedding industry is huge in the U.S., with 2.2 million weddings a year,” he said. “The average spend per wedding is like $36,000, which is as much as the average spend on a car. That’s an average across everything from backyard elopements and luxury celebrity weddings, and everything in between.”
But it’s also a fragmented industry, one that companies have struggled to get their arms around, especially since there are very few repeat customers (with any luck).
“It really is such a special industry to get to play in, but nonetheless the wedding industry is certainly challenging,” said Greitzer. “We respect that, given the nature of it that hopefully your clients are using you once…So, it does require a different perspective on how you play your game to try to create a viable business in the space. For us specifically, our aspirations go beyond the wedding industry, as well.”
There have been some big-name startups that have made waves exclusively in weddings, but not that many. Zola, for one, has raised about $240 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, TCG, BAM Elevate, and Canvas Ventures, according to Crunchbase. Another, Joy, has raised more than $100 million from investors like General Catalyst, Sound Ventures, and Y Combinator (also per Crunchbase). The wedding tech industry has seen some notable M&A, as was the case for the 2019 merger of The Knot and WeddingWire.
But it’s hardly a space that VCs are investing in en masse, I suspect in part because of its spectacular fragmentation and odd customer dynamics. According to PitchBook data, in 2022, there were 30 U.S. VC-backed deals in the wedding industry, valued at nearly $119 million. Those numbers dropped precipitously in 2023, to 13 deals that shook out to almost $19.5 million. This year so far, there have been four venture deals in the wedding industry.
Ultimately, the wedding sector isn’t one that anyone has grabbed completely yet, says Greitzer. How will we know when someone has?
“I would say you start having brands that engender real brand love and are able to earn their referral value,” Greitzer told me. “I think that’s a facet of it, but it’s also just a massive space that is made for a company to grow to real value in.”
There was a reason I decided to look at Provenance and the wedding industry now: By the time you’re reading this, I’ll have headed out of the office to my own wedding. (And yes, I know you may be wondering: The wedding’s in Malibu, there will be a carousel, and my dad and I are dancing to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which was absolutely his idea.)
So, I’ll see you soon (but not on Monday),
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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