So how do you think about the way that this K-shaped economy is impacting the way that people are thinking about their weddings?

Yeah, it's funny.

When I first started, our data shows that the average wedding in the US is $34,000.

And I get so many reactions to that number from every direction.

Sitting in New York City, people are like, What? That's the cost of my flowers.

Yeah, but then sitting anywhere else, people are like, oh my God, that's so expensive.

So it is truly an average.

I kept hearing

And looking at it from the perspective of a leader, a really important question to ask yourself is: What kind of opportunities am I giving to the people who work for me? Are they stuck in one role? Are they stuck in one silo within the organization, or do they have the ability to move around? Do they only gain exposure to one slice of the way the business is run, or will they gain visibility into how all these different areas within the business are running?

Yeah.

I really believe that there are so many skills that are transferable.

Of course, there are some roles that are incredibly technical and you can't just step into, but there are a lot of different functions, moving from customer support to sales, or sales to marketing, or marketing to product, analytics to marketing.

There's so many transferable skills.

And so I love, throughout my early career, because I've moved around so much, that really set me up later and now to be a CEO because I've led so many of those functions.

But in turn, I've worked over the years then to develop talent, and I have so many stories throughout my career of finding someone, they're in a certain role, but seeing that that skill set that they have can be applied somewhere else.

How can leaders cultivate trust?

Nightmare.

And so we actually launched something called Peace of Mind, where while this is rare and doesn't happen a ton, we wanna just remove, like, we wanna take that off the table.

We wanna remove that stress.

Um, given we're a global marketplace, we wanna stand behind our vendors, and we want couples to just not have to worry, that if something goes wrong, we're gonna have their back.

We're gonna help them rebook, find another vendor.

Um, and so that's something new that we launched this past year, um, because that's just something that kept coming up in research.

But overall, wedding planning is stressful, and it is expensive.

Mm