Taiwan's one-stop shops for brides and grooms.
This photographer could easily be mistaken for a film director. He barks orders, gestures emphatically, and runs to and fro smoothing out creases and fluffing up ruffles. "Gaze into each other's eyes lovingly! Move your faces closer! That's right! Such a loving couple!" snaps the photographer as he hovers around the couple shooting off photos. Next door in a cosy room, love songs gently loll brides-to-be as make-up artists and hairdressers flutter about them. "The whole process just makes me happy," says Chen Juei-fen.
She and her fiancé have been posing for photos since early morning, changing clothes, make-up, hairstyles and back drops over and over so their photos are interesting and varied. This is the routine in a popular Taiwanese pre-wedding ritual. Although some grooms may not like it, most brides consider a session at the wedding boutique an indispensable part of marriage. "Photos are significant because they give you something to remember. They complete the ceremony," Chen says. "It's fantastic to be treated like and look like a superstar."
Over the last two decades, wedding boutiques in Taiwan have had a steady flow of business. Their picture windows feature fancy wedding gowns and display photographs of adorable couples. Such salons first began to appear in the mid -1980s and have since mushroomed across the island. In Taipei, they are clustered along Jhongshan North Road and Aiguo East Road in virtual colonies.
Mai Tsan-wen attributes their sudden emergence and popularity to their inherent practicality. President of Julia Wedding News, Mai is also the chairman of the Taipei Wedding Photography Association. He started out with a photo studio in 1980, primarily serving celebrities, entertainers and models, and transformed it into a wedding salon in 1986. "Before these salons came about, couples had to go to the beauty parlor, the dress shop and the photo studio in sequence. It took a lot of time and energy," Mai says. "Taiwan put all these together into one-stop shops for the first time."
Lee Yu-ying, associate professor of the Institute of History and Historical Relics at Feng Chia University, says the bridal business is typical of Taiwanese culture and customs. She thinks the photographic ritual, particularly for brides, is a symbol of the Cinderella dream-come-true in that the prince and princess finally tie the knot and live happily ever after; the couple's love story becomes a visible romance.
"The bride-to-be is coddled every step of the way; she is carefully attended by a hair stylist and make-up artist and dressed beautifully," Lee says. "Such treatment is extraordinary, making her feel like a leading lady. That's what keeps this niche business thriving."
Lee also thinks that the photo service, the wedding ceremony and banquet are displays of the families' financial standing and are therefore deeply connected to ideas of face. "Here in Taiwan, marriage is not only the linking of the bride and groom, but of their two families," she says. "Considerable emphasis is placed on wedding rites. As long as the marital system exists, the bridal business will always boom."
Taiwan's wedding salons not only attract locals, but are also gaining popularity around East Asia. Mai has noticed a marked increase in the number of clients from Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea in recent years. "Our boutiques' biggest advantage is their provision of comprehensive and efficient services at competitive prices," he says. "With photos for example, the photographer works as director and photographer simultaneously and gets the job done in and outside the studio in just one day." Basic packages are priced at about NT$50,000 (US$1,587) in Taiwan, compared with NT$100,000 or more in Singapore and Japan.
Tsai Ching-hua, chairwoman of Ching Hua International Co., estimates that her shop lures approximately 500 couples a year from abroad. She says the opening of Taiwanese society in recent years has, to some extent, contributed to the development of the bridal industry by making it more creative, diversified and dynamic.
Tsai thinks that bridal photos are still taken in a rigid and uniform way in many countries, with the bride and groom standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing directly toward the camera, whereas they are done in Taiwan with more variety. Here, the couples change outfits several times and pose in different places of their choice. This has set Taiwan apart from and given it an advantage over its foreign counterparts.
The bridal market in Taiwan, however, now faces saturation. Rising competition compels proprietors to offer better products and services in order to survive.
Six years ago, Tsai spent NT$10 million (US$317,500) on digital photography equipment and fostered a strategic alliance with Epson for technological development.
Her husband, Tsai Jung-feng, a senior photographer, also went to New York to learn new techniques for half a year. "Image digitization has improved photograph quality and has made boutiques more sophisticated," she says. "The application of such technology is also a competitive advantage." Wedding photos are now provided on a disc with background music as well as the traditional hard copies.
Mai says that bridal gowns, styling and photography were once sold as a package, and that was enough to make customers happy, but now customers scrutinize every part of the business, forcing the salons to be perfectionists.
He established a brand name, Julia, for bridal gowns produced by in-house designers. "Having our own designers, we hope to make dresses for our customers that not only fit their figures but also tie in with fashion," he says. "Tailor-made services are a trend as well as a competitive edge for our operation."
Likewise, David Huang, marketing manager of LinLi Studio, says the bridal shops in Taiwan have paid increasing attention to gowns by offering custom-made services. "Due to increasing competition, domestic boutiques strive to offer differentiated products and services at higher quality," he says. "Hand- or tailor-made wedding dresses, for instance, are gaining popularity over mass-produced ones, despite the considerable price difference."
Huang thinks that Taiwan has become one of the world's major design and manufacturing centers for wedding gowns, due to its experience in contract manufacturing for several leading foreign brands. As a result, the wedding gowns made in Taiwan are at least in line with, if not ahead of, international fashions.
Chen Ying-mei, a staff member at Judy Wedding Photo, says most customers are more concerned with service than price. They are particularly attentive to the effect of their photos and whether the clothes fit their personal style. At Judy's, if the customers are not satisfied with their photos, they can request a re-shoot, and if they cannot find any wedding gowns they like, they can ask for custom-made ones at preferential prices.
Shen Chih-hsiang and Chiang Mei-huei plan to get married in October and are shopping around for a bridal photography service. "Getting married in Taiwan involves a great deal of red tape. Thus, our major emphasis is on the completeness of the package that the boutique can offer. We've little knowledge about what to prepare, nor time to handle it as we're both working," Shen says. "We don't mind paying more for better service and product quality. It's a once in a lifetime practice and we want to make it just right."
Along with fierce competition, the wedding business is facing something neither technology nor quality can alter: a declining marriage rate. Latest tallies from the Ministry of the Interior show a drop in marriages from 2003's 170,000 to 130,000 in 2004. There are an estimated 1,000 wedding salons in Taiwan, competing for a piece of the ever-shrinking pie. As a result of stiff competition and a withering customer pool, the average profit margin has dropped from 30 percent a few years ago to the current 15 to 20 percent. Meanwhile, production costs have increased with enhanced service and product quality.
Mai thinks wedding boutiques should build their own brand name and expand their operational scope to deal with the situation. Rather than targeting merely the soon-to-be-married couples, Mai's salon has started to cultivate the market for wedding anniversaries, births and family groups. He also established a planning department to offer catering, car rental, decoration and cards for the complete one-stop wedding shop.
In terms of expanding marketing, he has set up a shop in Singapore. He understands that in recent years many Taiwanese proprietors have set up shops in China, the United States and Canada.
To attract more foreign nationals to Taiwan, the association has teamed up with the Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications as well as travel agencies, airlines and hotels to provide preferential package tours.
"The best development for the [bridal] industry is to create a bigger pie for all to share, rather than resorting to price wars," he says. "Given its decades-long experience, I'm confident in its ability to do well in foreign markets while attracting customers from overseas."
Ching Hua's Tsai has adopted similar new marketing schemes to cope with rising operational challenges. She set up a shop in Hong Kong early this year. Besides serving local customers directly, her Hong Kong branch encourages couples to come to Taiwan for the service. "My ideal is to promote Taiwan's bridal industry to the international arena as well as using my business to market Taiwan by publicizing its natural beauty," she says. "Of the three-day, reasonably-priced packages that we provide in cooperation with domestic airlines and hotels, the couples can have their photos taken in the island's major scenic spots and get a holiday at the same time."
Tsai says she is not afraid of competition. She cares about her company's continued development and is especially attentive to cultivating talent. Her salon closes for one day every month, or what she calls "corporate culture day." On this day the staff has on-the-job training, mainly lectures and films.
"The success of wedding boutiques does not hinge primarily on large investment in advanced hardware facilities or technology," she says. "Rather, it has more to do with service quality. If we can satisfy the needs of customers, we can win their hearts. This is a cultural thing that calls for humanistic training."
Lee Yu-ying thinks Taiwan's bridal industry leads the Asian market. What might be dismissed as a national bias is perhaps more objectively borne out by bridal shops in China that pass themselves off as Taiwanese or put Taipei in their names. Taiwan is clearly perceived as the best in the wedding game.