Why I decided to become a bridesmaid for hire
The two phone calls that changed my life happened on the same night, four years ago, from two different people who had the same thing in mind. On a Friday night, I answered both calls, only an hour apart, eager to see why two distant friends had picked up the phone to give me a ring. Much to my surprise, both of them asked me the very same question.
“Jen,” they began, in a slow and familiar tone. “Will you be my bridesmaid?”
By that point in my life, I was no stranger to that question. By age 26, I had already walked down the aisle wearing a range of different chiffon dresses, giving wedding toasts and dancing to the same soundtrack of wedding songs, over half a dozen times. I knew when to take three steps away from the bride because she needed her space and I knew when to be three steps behind her, with a bag of tissues, Band-Aids and extra-strength Advil. I was reliable. I went with the flow. I didn’t cause any drama and I found ways to break the tension between other bridesmaids with humor, magicianlike distractions and bridesmaid task delegation.
That’s why when two friends I hadn’t spoken to for an average of three years asked me to be their bridesmaid on the very same night, the only logical conclusion I could come to was that I had become really good at being a bridesmaid, and that everybody knew that. After venting to my roommate that night, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Wow. You’ve seriously become a professional bridesmaid.”
I saw firsthand that weddings were becoming bigger and bigger, more expensive and more of a headache for brides. In 2017, the average wedding cost $25,764. That’s more than a year of tuition at most in-state colleges for a year.
That’s when it clicked. I could take on this role, which sometimes felt like a part-time job that lasted six to nine months and ended with a celebration of an open bar and a few minor panic attacks. If friends that I hardly had a relationship with anymore were asking me to do this for them — because they wanted someone who was practically a professional at it — perhaps I could do it for strangers.
Years earlier, I majored in poetry in college, and at the time, I was working as a copywriter for a tech start-up in Times Square. I had no experience starting a business. That’s why I decided to test my idea by bringing it to a website where I’d quickly find out whether people thought it was a good idea or just something that I was better off leaving in the past.
I went on Craigslist.org and wrote an ad offering myself, and my services, as a bridesmaid for hire to strangers around the world. The ad, which mentioned that I’d be there to help the bride with dirty work that her real friends would be too busy, too unfamiliar with, or just too wrapped up in having fun, included helping her pee in the wedding dress, dancing with guests, catching the bouquet, and answering long email chains from other bridesmaids.
I posted the ad late on a Friday night, and two days later, when I checked my inbox, I had hundreds of emails from people all around the world who wanted to hire me.
The emails got personal. I heard stories of brides who had grown distant from their friends and desperately needed someone to help them feel confident and stress-free on their wedding day. I heard from brides who explained that their good friends had become bridesmaid-zillas, making the wedding all about them. Finally, I heard from Ashley, a bride in Minnesota, asking for my help. She was getting married in just a month and had recently “fired” her maid of honor, a close friend who had suffocated her wedding experience with jealousy and cattiness.
I decided to reply to Ashley first, sympathizing with how hard it must have been for her to end a friendship just a month before her wedding with someone who had meant so much to her. After a few emails and a couple more phone calls, Ashley officially became my first client, and my flight was booked to work at her wedding in Maple Grove, Minn.
As for the rest of the emails, those became research. I read through all of them and put together a few core packages based on all the needs that were flowing into my inbox. I started another package that would allow me to be a “phone-a-bridesmaid” for brides all over the world who needed someone to vent to about their wedding and get real-time, honest and unbiased advice. I started another package for brides who just needed behind-the-scenes help on the day, to make sure that last-minute tasks and bouts of stress were taken care of. Simply put, for brides, I became their on-call therapist, their personal assistant, their social director and their peacekeeper.
Some brides even ask that I keep all of this a secret, taking on a different name and a backstory of how we know each other, and playing that part for their family, their friends and their fiancé. When I’m at the wedding, I walk down the aisle, I wear the bridesmaid dress — and often, I give the wedding toast.
I also created a package for maids of honor, offering to write their wedding toast for them and do all the planning for their bachelorette party and bridal shower, without the bride knowing about any of it. My packages range from a few hundred dollars to close to $4,000.
After working with Ashley, I’ve worked with close to a hundred more clients over the past four years. I’ve traveled around the country, walking down aisles in Las Vegas, Seattle, Philadelphia and many more cities. I’ve dealt with a lot of brides with cold feet, including one who backed out just three minutes before the ceremony happened. I’ve been in charge of locating missing grooms, calming down hysterical brides, and dealing with family fights that broke out during the reception. I’ve given maid-of-honor speeches for brides I met just hours before the wedding started and I’ve shaken hands of grooms pretending to be a bride’s friend from yoga class, high-school or summer camp. I’ve had fake names and fake backstories, but oddly enough, I’ve built real relationships with many of the brides I’ve worked with, including Ashley, who is still one of my dearest friends, even four years later.
I’ve had close to 30,000 people apply to work for my company, Bridesmaid for Hire, and have been able to hire about five people over the past few years to work weddings with me (when brides request more than one bridesmaid) and for me (on weekends when we have multiple weddings booked). Recently, I started a training program to teach people all over the world how to start their own professional bridesmaid business, or weird wedding business, in less than 30 days.
As for the bridesmaid dresses, I still have most of them, crumpled up in a few garbage bags that I pull out of my closet every so often, and hold onto the fabric, to the patterns, to the stains, and smile over the stories and the strangers I’ve had the opportunity to work for over the past four years.
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