On March 15, flowers worth P300,000 arrived from Holland at Michael “Badang” Rueda’s place, for a wedding he was styling the following day. Because of the Luzon lockdown, the wedding had to be canceled.

The flowers had been paid for, says Rueda, an in-demand event stylist who designed the wedding venues of show-biz celebrities Heart Evangelista and Regine Velasquez. He shares this anecdote with Lifestyle to illustrate how much Filipinos spend on weddings—and how much the wedding industry is losing during the pandemic.

Teddy Manuel, another popular event stylist (his clients include Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes, Iza Calzado and Ben Wintle, and socialite Linda Ley), believes that the wedding industry is losing an estimated P13 billion a month, if one goes by 2018 figures, where 449,000 couples wed at an average cost of P350,000.

That is a conservative estimate, given the scale of the weddings and events of celebrities and rich Filipinos done by the likes of Rueda and Manuel.

“You have to consider that Chinese-Filipino weddings have an average of 800-1,000 guests. That’s normal,” says Marbee Shing Go, erstwhile editor of Wedding Essentials magazine and Mega Weddings book, and curator of wedding fairs. “The venues now are not just hotel ballrooms. There are places that can hold up to five big weddings at the same time.”

A wedding with only 100-200 guests isn’t necessarily cheaper if they do it at, say, Antonio’s in Tagaytay, or fly everyone to Shangri-La Boracay, Go adds. “Filipinos love weddings. It’s a happy celebration and they will go all out.”

“The pandemic occurred in summer, which would have been the peak for destination weddings,” says Manuel. “Our weekends would have been full. On an average, we would have a minimum of 12 events per month. All either had to reschedule or wanted a refund. Our Boracay branch was greatly affected.”

Rueda had close to 30 scheduled weddings for the rest of 2020, half of them Chinese-Filipino, and all had postponed indefinitely. His only consolation: Those were all partially paid for, and no one has canceled or asked for a refund.

Scaled down

Nikki Chatto, a popular event stylist in the Chinese-Filipino community, says one client pushed through with the wedding, though it was immensely scaled down. It was done in the client’s house with a very small guest list.

“Usually we have a full staff for the setup, but for this, all the arrangements were done the night before, with my staff wearing masks and following proper social distancing and hygiene protocols,” says Chatto. “The setup itself was touch-and-go. Only three people went to the house: myself, my daughter and one florist. We had to make it as quick as possible to minimize interactions . . . I made a few styling tweaks, and we left.”

She adds, “The challenge is that it takes a lot more planning and visualizing beforehand, unlike before where you could spend hours in the event space for iterations. You don’t have that luxury of lingering now, and you have to balance creative execution with ensuring your safety, and the safety of your team and your client.”

Go, who was set to curate Conrad Manila’s bridal fair for the third straight year, was disheartened by the turn of events. “Our advocacy for these fairs is to promote young suppliers, so we can also build their business. We have a mentoring system by big-name stylists. Now everything’s on hold.”

“I had a wedding during Tropical Storm ‘Ondoy’ in 2009 and it was heartbreaking to see just the couple and the parents with no guests. But this is something else,” Rueda says.

Opportunity

Manuel, however, saw the downtime as an opportunity to explore other ways of doing business. He took his trade online, teaching master classes in flower arrangement and event styling. He also launched TM Party in a Box, where he sends decorating kits to clients for intimate celebrations, with online instructions on how to execute the décor.

Prepandemic, Manuel says they used the internet only as marketing tool. “Now, I realize that it’s also another way to do business.” He learned to not

be complacent, he says. “Big and small business are all affected, but the sooner we adapt and pivot, the better our chances to survive. Creativity is reflected not only in our output, but also in the way we cope with challenges.”

Chatto spent the quarantine growing her daughter’s online floral arrangement and delivery business, The Flower Girl PH, to give her staff something to do.

“I am taking the time to rest, something I haven’t done in years, which has sometimes taken a toll on my health,” says Chatto. “My daughter and I are learning the regenerative powers of communing with nature by taking care of plants in our house . . . I’m now able to value the luxury of time and use it to reflect and meditate for spiritual enrichment.”

Rueda, who planned to celebrate his 20th year in the business in a big way, says he took the time to finally get some rest and spend time with family, after years of nonstop work.

For income, he rents out his canter van to food deliverers. He’s paying his staff in advance for the postponed events.

“I’m ready, but I’m also scared,” Rueda says. “I could do things remotely on Viber or Messenger, but what about my staff who have to be out there? I have to take care of their welfare.” He’s keeping busy putting together mood boards for postponed events. In these boards, he suggests taking out the long, rectangular table, which sits guests so close together. Round banquet tables for 10, Rueda says, may now sit only four, and Chinese lauriat and buffet setups will have to go.

Intimate affairs

“We definitely won’t be seeing events with guest lists reaching the hundreds in the near future, so spaces won’t be as packed as before,” says Chatto. “It would be interesting to explore how event styling can creatively adapt to social distancing. Production-style setups won’t be feasible either, so we might see more minimal motifs with a focus on locally sourced elements.”

Go is working on a project with the Discovery Group and the international online wedding platform Hitchbird, to promote Philippine destination weddings to the foreign market, which prefers intimate affairs and better fits the requirement of physical distancing.

“Many who work in the wedding industry are either freelancers or get paid per day,” Go says. “It has been heartwarming to see insiders doing fundraisers for those who have lost their income during the crisis. They’ve been auctioning their services or slashing their fees, with proceeds going to those who were most affected.”

She adds, “In a way, it’s good because we’re doing a complete reset of everything.”