Daniel Samson and his business partner, Liane Mendez, ran their catering business out of leased space for 20 years before taking the plunge and building their own catering kitchen in South Hero.
Construction on the $750,000 kitchen started in November, and was just winding up in late winter when Covid-19 emerged, casting a huge cloud on the summer weddings and corporate events that are the bread and butter of the pair’s business.
The catering company, called Let’s Pretend, had 28 weddings booked for the summer and fall; all but one was canceled or postponed, said Samson. And that one went from serving 275 people to serving 28.
“Literally within a day and a half of construction being done, that’s when the state shut everything down,” said Samson, who is now using the 1,800-square-foot kitchen to make takeout meals.
Although the company pivoted, Samson said there is no way Let’s Pretend can make up with takeout what it lost in weddings.
“Here we have this established business expecting a record-breaking year,” he said. “We had really nice-sized weddings on the books, most over 200 people, which is great for us in Vermont.”
Hospitality-based businesses have taken the largest hit from the pandemic of any sector in the state. Weddings draw thousands of guests from out of state, and are an integral part of the industry. They rely heavily on the summer and fall months and employ thousands of small business owners in areas like hairstyling and makeup, floral design, catering and photography. Many musical acts rely on the summer and fall wedding business; so do photographers and videographers, DJs, stationers, tailors, and companies that rent out chairs, tents, stages, lighting, high-end portable toilets, silverware, and a host of other amenities.
According to the Tucson, Arizona-based researcher Wedding Report Inc., Vermont was the site of 5,600 weddings last year, with an average cost of $29,000, for a total impact of $163 million. The report, which breaks services down into dozens of categories, said Vermont weddings generated spending of $3 million on DJ services; nearly $200,000 on pedicures and manicures; and $1.9 million on live bands. Flower arrangements brought in another $2.9 million, and event food service cost $28 million.
Nearly half of those weddings were destination weddings, with couples and their guests traveling to Vermont for the ceremony, said Talena Companion of Premier Entertainment & Events, the board treasurer for the Vermont Association of Wedding Professionals. Companion said 46% of the couples who get married each year are from out of state.
Summer and fall of 2020 were shaping up to break records for wedding spending, said Companion, partly because the economy was booming and trends were already moving that way. Also, she said, couples tend to like even-numbered dates, and a lot of those fell on Saturdays this year.
“Also, the economy was screaming, so people had disposable cash,” said Lindsay Leichthammer, president of the wedding professionals’ group. Leichthammer has her own wedding planning company, and until March 16 had worked for more than five years for the Farmhouse Group, a Vermont-based restaurant company that puts on dozens of weddings.
But after Gov. Phil Scott signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency on March 13, couples started to cancel.
“I had my first bride call me crying in the beginning of March,” Leichthammer said. Engaged couples tend to book a year or more in advance, according to wedding planners. As soon as the pandemic shutdowns began, they started trying to see if they could get their deposits back.
Canceled contracts
The pandemic cancellations have been a wakeup call for people who were using contracts that didn’t specify whether deposits would be returned, said Joy Karnes Limoge, a Williston attorney who has been doing pro bono work for wedding contractors through the Association of Wedding Professionals.
“We have been encouraging people to be a lot clearer and more articulate about what the deposit is intended for,” said Limoge of contracts that are being crafted now. She estimated she gets one or two calls a week about disputes over deposits.
Many wedding contractors use deposits as working expenses and aren’t in a position to return them, Limoge said. She hasn’t heard of any lawsuits over contracts – although she said she knows at least one has been threatened — but noted that disputes involving $5,000 or under go to small claims court in Vermont.
Nationally, the wedding industry has been advising wedding planners and service providers to try to get engaged couples to postpone their weddings to 2021, not cancel, and most have, said Leichthammer and Companion.
Changing direction
Like Samson, many of the Vermonters who provide wedding-related services have taken up other means of making money.
“I had a florist hire me to clean out their studio and basement,” Leichthammer said. She took the work gladly. “I have two hands and a heartbeat.”
Companion said she knows a photographer who started a composting business on the side. People can’t really change careers when they expect to be working at the postponed weddings next summer, she said.
“People are doing things in the gig category, because they don’t have the ability to sign on to jobs full-time,” she said. “Otherwise, in six to eight months, you have to say ‘Bye, employer.’”
Engaged couples, too, are pivoting; many service providers tell stories of large weddings that were converted to family-only events. Leichthammer knows of a couple who had a photographer become an officiant so she could marry the pair on a mountaintop and take photos as well.
Waiting it out
Samson typically hires as many as 60 people in the summer, but has just seven seasonal employees now to cover some of the new 10-person weddings he has picked up this summer. He said a PPP loan of about $10,000 and a state grant of $38,000 has helped the business stay afloat. In prior years, weddings made up 75% of his business.
For now, there’s not much that the wedding industry can do except survive and wait for the pandemic to subside, said Leichthammer and Companion. Samson said the crisis has brought the many different contractors who rely on weddings together in a way he hasn’t seen before.
“We’ve all been talking back and forth: ‘How are you doing this week?’” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of ups and a lot of downs in 20 years. You have to morph your business to make it.”
Molly Peters, co-owner at Sleepy Hollow B&B in Huntington, had 24 weddings booked this summer, and ended up with one. Wedding parties often book the inn’s eight guest rooms and hold the ceremony in a large round building and outdoor pavilion.
Peters, who co-owns the venue with her parents and brother, said a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan helped the business through the summer. She also works as a cross-country and Nordic skiing coach at St. Michael’s College.
“We will be in trouble if we can’t do some sort of weddings next summer, but we are crossing our fingers that there will be some sort of vaccine,” she said.
