Keeping up as Gen Z starts to wed

Tim Chi

CEO

The Knot Worldwide

Tim Chi, the CEO of The Knot Worldwide, attended eight weddings in the year leading up to his own 2005 nuptials. After seeing all that stress and emotion firsthand, he started thinking about ways to make wedding planning easier.

“I felt very strongly that the wedding industry needed something user-generated that really helped good vendors stamp their reputation and gave consumers more information to make better buying decisions,” Chi said.

So Chi and three friends created WeddingWire, a marketplace for couples to research photographers, bakers and other vendors. In 2018, WeddingWire merged with its rival, The Knot, to form The Knot Worldwide.

The company now connects more than 4 million couples to 850,000 wedding vendors each year in 16 countries.

Chi spoke with The Associated Press about the wedding industry. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

How have weddings changed since you’ve been in the business?

Weddings are a local celebration at the end of the day, and you all come together and you need food and you need entertainment. There’s just a baseline practicality and pragmatism about it that has not changed for as long as people have been getting married. Where the most change has been is how couples go about making those selections or finding vendors. It wasn’t that long ago when we were all just using binders and clipbooks.

How do you ensure couples will keep coming to The Knot when they have other places to look for inspiration, like TikTok?

I think it’s that Wayne Gretzky quote: “Skate to where the puck is going.” This year-ish Gen Z is starting to get married. We don’t know definitively how they’re going to behave as they get married, but we know a lot about them as a generation. And so we’re trying to play that forward a little bit. We find them more optimistic rather than realistic.

The Knot relies on vendor advertising for its revenue. But the more vendors there are, the more they have to compete with each other for business. How do you balance those needs?

The vendors themselves often are very bespoke and unique and differentiated.

We’re not in the business of, like, you check a couple of boxes and we match you to a couple things and it’s a perfect fit. There’s so much subjectivity and personal stuff that goes into the decision-making. So we do need depth and breadth.

What advice would you give others about going through a merger?

They’re never easy, right? So your best bet is to find a point of view. Make decisions quickly and then just do it all really quickly and not let it drag out for very long. Because uncertainty is the thing that kills all deals and grinds everyone down.