Fewer marriages, fussier couples: The wedding business in Singapore is getting tougher

SINGAPORE – The busy thoroughfare of Tanjong Pagar Road has always been known as a bridal studio hub.

But an update is in order. In the shophouse-lined main street, purveyors of ivory gowns and romantic photo shoots are few, stragglers in a sea of Korean eateries.

It was not always like this. Derrick Goh, manager of holdout boutique Z Wedding, remembers that there were more than 20 studios in the area when he first took up his post in the late 2000s.

Now, he counts just four. Since the Covid-19 pandemic years, more than 10 of his former neighbours have disappeared, either shutting down or migrating to cheaper pastures, he says.

The exodus plays into fears of an industry in ill health. By now, the beats of the narrative are familiar: Studios go broke, flake on customers and leave a trail of unfulfilled orders and panicked brides in their wake.

This year has been especially grim. In August, the shock closure of major player Korea Artiz Studio triggered more than 60 complaints to the Consumers Association of Singapore for $271,000 in pre-payment losses.

Still, even that bumper crop is only about a third of the 195 complaints filed in the first eight months of 2026.

By contrast, the association received two complaints in 2025 and 103 in 2024, most of which came from the folding of another big fish, Love Nest, and its related entities.

The high-profile horror stories point to an ailing industry, yet tell only half the tale of an evolving sector that has split into two camps.

Death of convenience

Bridal studios here say the failed businesses are mostly one-stop shops – full-service operations that provide everything from gown rentals and pre-wedding photo shoots to hair, make-up and wedding-day photography in a single package.

It is this old-school model that is dying out as savvier consumers seek specialist outfits that run just one aspect of the show.

Kin Bridal, a gowns-only brand that launched with a shop in Ubi two years ago, is even growing. It has never been in the red, says 30-year-old founder Lynn Tan.

She adds: “We started because of passion and interest. Of course, when we were looking at financial modelling, it was also something that made sense and so far, there is proof of concept.”

Scott Ng, co-founder of popular gown specialist Bridefully Yours, says: “In the last 10 years, a lot of providers started moving towards the specialist route. Instead of doing it all, they do one thing. The appeal of the one-stop shop is convenience, but we see that couples now prefer to pick and choose the best providers in each area.

“They want the best of everything now.”

Concentrating on gowns means Bridefully Yours can “go deep into the craft”, which makes for better products, says Ng’s wife and business partner, Eve Law. Though the millennial pair own a wedding group that covers other aspects of nuptials, they market services for pre-wedding shoots, photography and gowns as individual brands.

It is a way of distancing their brands from the old-fashioned, and increasingly untenable, under-one-roof model.

The shift is palpable at the new bridal enclave in Ubi.

Whereas Tanjong Pagar was associated with full-scale studios, Ubi houses a mix of bridal businesses, including young specialist boutiques that shy away from aggressive marketing of packages.

The turn is in line with a more educated market.

Millennial and Gen Z couples tying the knot browse an endless catalogue of vendors on social media before they ever make an appointment and their approach is curatorial, says Law.

“They might get only one dress from us and others from competitors. Weddings are becoming an expression of their taste,” she adds.

Like most of the younger salons, the seven-year-old brand gets up to 90 per cent of its customers from social media.

With searches for bridal services increasingly beginning online, one-stop shops that rely on wedding fairs for exposure are on the back foot.

Z Wedding traditionally depends on expos for 80 per cent of its clientele, says Goh. As fewer couples resort to fairs, the full-suite salon, which is more than 30 years old, has expanded into pet and non-wedding photography in recent years to shore up its business. Non-wedding jobs now account for one-fifth of its takings.

Universal pressures

Specialist salons may be ahead of the full-service pack, but even they concede that the wedding business is getting tougher.

The key issue, they say, is structural: fewer marriages. There were some 25,000 marriages in 2025, a figure that all studio owners seem to have memorised. The unhappy number is the lowest in nearly a decade, excluding the pandemic-racked 2020, and marks a decline in marriages for the third year running since the post-pandemic spike in 2022.

The dip alone is not fatal to business, but it is a gloomy backdrop to the factors straining margins: shrinking wedding sizes, cautious spending and stiff overseas competition.

Newly-wed Tay Rui Lin held her bash in January at an open-air bar in the Dempsey enclave with just 130 guests. “We wanted it to be more of a casual party thing with our friends and family,” says the 31-year-old legal counsel. “We also wanted to save money for our honeymoon.”

She required only one dress for the event. It was made by a family friend on short notice, but if that had fallen through, she had a backup saved on Chinese e-commerce site Taobao – no studio necessary.

The old dogma of a hotel ballroom do with 50 to 100 tables has given way to an average of 20 to 30 tables, sometimes in “exotic venues”, says Bridefully Yours’ Ng.

“Weddings have become more couple-centric. Twenty years ago, it was very family-oriented, about ‘face’, and all the relatives had to be there. The younger generation are keeping it simpler,” he adds.

Accordingly, studios across the board are seeing drops in the average number of gowns rented by brides who are forgoing elaborate programmes that call for multiple dresses.

Says Kin Bridal’s Tan: “There’s not much we can do to change the minds of consumers. What we can do is be sensitive to upcoming trends. We know they are downsizing weddings and going simple, so that is reflected in the style of our gowns. We have a good range of simple gowns for them.”

Annabel Law, founder of bundle package firm Wedding Venue SG, says prudent Gen Z wedding spending is behind the trend. The idea is not to throttle finances with a $100,000 blowout at the start of marriage.

“They have to pay for their house and renovation, and that is going up as well,” says Law.

Cheaper abroad

The parsimony has amped up the threat of overseas competitors.

Popular pre-wedding shoots in China and Vietnam have eaten into sales of package deals, says a sales attendant at a Tanjong Pagar one-stop shop who spoke on condition of anonymity. She estimates a 40 per cent drop in customers since 2024.

A strong Singapore dollar and cheaper creative services abroad mean that doing an overseas shoot with local studios can cost less than a Singapore shoot – or the same, with more thrown in. And couples get a holiday to boot.

Gown rental specialists are rattled by brides who buy their dresses online or abroad.

Kin Bridal prices most of its rentals at below $1,000 a dress, “so people are not driven to fly to Vietnam or China”, says Tan.

Cheryl Ng, founder of gown rental boutique WeddingCrafters, was so worried about brides buying gowns online or overseas that in 2025, she launched an online store selling dresses for below $700 – though it has so far attracted mostly American buyers.

In the first eight months of 2026, she has also seen a quintuple jump in alteration requests for gowns purchased elsewhere.

She says: “It’s a bit of a concern that even the many studios here are still not enough to cater to (these brides). That, plus a shrinking market, is a bit scary, especially if you look at the next five to 10 years as people just get more comfortable doing everything online.

“They do the whole try-on process here and then make the purchase online.”

Even high-end studios, which serve a more open-handed crowd, have discovered their luxury gowns are not so price-inelastic.

Bride-to-be Jane Tan is hardly operating on a shoestring. The 27-year-old is expecting 450 guests, customising an evening dress and renting a designer gown. However, she will get the gown from Kuala Lumpur instead of a Singapore studio.

There will be no boutique care, tailoring or rental of accessories, and there is a risk of chaotic transportation of the gown. But the bargain was a no-brainer, she says, as the same dress costs over 30 per cent more in Singapore.

Popular multi-label designer gown outfit Truly Enamoured is an outlier in that its growth has been positive, though modest, despite the drop-off in marriages. The studio carries gowns by brand-name designers such as Vera Wang and Viktor&Rolf.

Yet, its premium catalogue, from $2,000 to $10,000 a dress, wrestles with pressure from Vietnamese dressmakers, says commercial director Zeng Jing Yi.

It is combating fiercer competition by doubling down on the customer experience. Post-pandemic, it created a team just to reply to text messages from brides within five minutes, and went from providing one stylist for each bride to deploying a full team of experts – one to choose the dress, another to tailor, and technical stylists who work with the seamstress.

All this has driven up costs, says Zeng. But prices have not budged since before the pandemic. “Our competitors haven’t raised prices, so we can’t either,” she says.

A new enclave

The pursuit of lower costs has made light industrial area Ubi an attractive proposition for some.

Tucked behind nondescript doors in dozens of buildings is a scattered network of bridal salons. Most were set up in the last three to four years.

The rent at an industrial unit in Ubi is about half the price of an average commercial unit, says Giorgia Couture founder Vienna Mei. She moved to Ubi from financial district development Marina One in 2024, driven by poor business in 2023. It is a smarter business strategy, she says – less money for more space.

Lili Lim, founder of studio Love To Love, cites the area’s location near young couples in Sengkang and Tampines as her reason for settling down in Ubi.

Rates go even lower in industrial estates in the west, but Ubi offers enough relief to make a difference, she says, adding: “We don’t have to hard-sell to keep up with costs. This lets us focus on good service instead of trying to hit a high sales target. We don’t need to be so pushy, so we have an advantage, in this sense.”

Ubi’s relative remoteness is also no drawback in an age where traffic comes from social media and word-of-mouth recommendations, says Lim.

Most studios are by-appointment-only places so there is no need for a central location to entice walk-ins.

Kin Bridal’s Tan says proximity to other studios is also a boon as couples who tend to pack multiple fittings into a day find it easy to swing by her place.

Favourable rent has helped her price more competitively. “We spend less on rental, so we don’t need to transfer that to consumers,” she says.

The flourishing hub has frustrated others in the sector who maintain commercial units – one more thorn in the side of an industry vulnerable to price battles.

But for all their travails, studios do not want out.

Says Bridefully Yours’ Law: “People are still spending on weddings. It’s still a significant milestone, but the things they are spending on are shifting.

“It’s not a sunset industry.”