ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID
Women are paying $2,000 to hire this professional maid of honor for their wedding days
Former copywriter Jen Glantz is a professional bridesmaid. She’s helped 65 brides, including Anne Griffin (inset), down the aisle.
ONa Friday afternoon in the summer of 2014, Jen Glantz was asked to be a bridesmaid. A few hours later, she was asked again — by someone else.
The requests brought the number of times the Florida native-turned-New Yorker had been asked to don taffeta to six, prompting Glantz’s then-roommate to say, “You’re like a professional bridesmaid or something.” It was enough to inspire Glantz, then a copywriter, to think about a new career doing exactly that.
That same night she put an ad on Craigslist offering her expertise in getting people down the aisle. The next morning, Glantz tells The Post, she woke up to more than 250 e-mails in her inbox. Glantz soon launched Bridesmaid for Hire, abandoned copywriting after a layoff and amassed a client list of some 65 brides. And now she has documented her experiences in a new memoir, “Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire): Stories on Growing Up, Looking for Love, and Walking Down the Aisle for Complete Strangers” (Atria, out now).
Glantz says she had stumbled on a void in the multibillion-dollar wedding industry. Brides — and even some grooms — sometimes need an all-purpose facilitator and friend, someone there to jump in should an extra bridesmaid be needed to even up the number with the amount of groomsmen, or to pick up the slack for a flaky maid of honor, or to help the bride-to-be whose friends live in another country.
“I say that I do four things — I’m the on-call therapist,
personal assistant, social director and peacekeeper,” Glantz, 28, tells The Post. “A usual bridesmaid . . . may not have the time to spend four hours on the phone for you or have the time to plan your bachelorette party.”
Glantz offers various packages. The most expensive, the Behind-the-Scenes ($1,500), includes pre-wedding consultations, coordinating with vendors, and full-on assistance the day of the event, from helping with bridal meltdowns to fetching lost items. (For an additional $500, Glantz will actually be a bridesmaid, although the bride has to pick up the tab for the dress. She has done this for about 20 women.) For those not looking for such an investment, she offers counseling and planning assistance to maids of honor for $150, or a series of “bridesmaid crash course” videos for $35.
Anne Griffin, a 30-year-old project manager from Harlem, got the Behind-the-Scenes package for her October wedding in Philadelphia.
“I had a wedding planner, but I wanted someone who could handle the stuff that normally falls on the bridesmaids,” says Griffin.
“I wanted [my] friends to enjoy being in the wedding party. It was a thank you for taking time off, and it’s expensive to be in a wedding party,” she adds, saying that having Glantz meant her bridesmaids weren’t “auto-enrolled into being a servant for the day.”
When a member of the bridal party forgot something at the hotel, Glantz even went back and got it, and she ensured that Griffin got enough food and water throughout the day.
“All of my bridesmaids said it was the best wedding they’d ever been in, because they weren’t stressed out,” says Griffin.
Glantz feels the difference between her work and that of a wedding planner is that she focuses on the bride’s emotional needs. Although it may seem silly to hire a stranger to guide you through such an important day, instead of relying on family or close buddies, having an outside source to lean on can be a big help for stressed-out brides, Glantz says.
“Brides often tell me [when they have cold feet], because they’re nervous to tell their friends,” she says.
At a recent wedding, the bride pulled aside Glantz before the ceremony and revealed she couldn’t stand the groom, but she still walked down the aisle.
As far as she knows, none of the couples she’s worked with have split. And watching people tie the knot has informed her own love life.
“[Being a professional bridesmaid] has taught me that it’s important to settle down with someone who doesn’t necessarily make you laugh or give you butterflies — it’s someone who understands you and sticks with you when things get tough,” says Glantz, who has been in a relationship for nearly a year with her beau Adam Kossoff, 28.
And, while she sees marriage in her future, a traditional bank-busting wedding is out of the question. So are bridesmaids, Glantz says, except under one condition.
“I’ve always thought it would be fun to ask the people who hired me to come back as my bridesmaids.”