To Whom This May Concern,

The success of a small business in the wedding industry has clearly become tied to the success of the platforms on which they advertise. These days you’d be hard pressed to google anything about weddings and not see the knot pro as the first result. It’s a nice relationship, whereby the vendor community and private equity share financial reward.

In such times as these though, we must all band together to ensure continuity in our businesses. Many weddings will cancel and many will postpone. We are unsure of how long this will last. Many businesses will have to close permanently after this. When that happens, The Knot suffers. One thing is true for all wedding vendors listed on The Knot though, they are hurting.

The Knot Worldwide however, a big business that has in the hundreds of millions in revenue and owned by Private Equity groups, has contracts in place that their vendors must pay on to continue their listing. A listing they rely on for the marketing that fuels their businesses. Word of mouth only gets you so far, after that, there’s The Knot Pro.

We as a vendor community need The Knot Worldwide to step up and make a drastic change in their pricing during this troubling time. A minimum of 50% reduction in monthly Billings for the next 90 days must be implemented immediately to save our community from irreparable harm.

After that, reevaluate, and make further changes if necessary. When this curve flattens, business will rebound and the community as a whole will come out stronger and more closely tied together.

We realize this will inevitably end up in layoffs internally at The Knot and WeddingWire and people’s livelihoods will be in jeopardy. That truth exists across the board though. If we don’t face that truth and accept that we must all pitch in and reduce now, the loss will be insurmountable and we will not come back from this. Reduce now, retain later. It must be central to all of our business models. Hopefully you agree.

Thank you for taking the time to evaluate this pressing matter.

Regards,

your vendor community