May 26, 2026
Weddings have long operated under an unspoken rule: all eyes on the bride. The industry built billion-dollar fantasies around lace gowns, champagne-filled bridal suites and the idea of a grown-up little girl’s dream fairytale day.
With the average U.S. wedding now costing $34,000 according to The Knot, that dynamic may be starting to shift. A growing number of grooms are taking a larger role in wedding planning — and spending more in the process.
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Former NFL player Duke Ihenacho spent $2,000 on a groom concierge, hiring event producer Adler Marchand to help with everything from finding ivory shoes to easing wedding-day nerves through prayer.
“Every groom needs a groom’s assistant,” Ihenacho told the Wall Street Journal.
“I don’t even understand why it’s not a common thing.”
Grooms are stepping into the spotlight
It’s not just groom assistants helping fuel the rise of the “groom economy.” For many men, weddings are becoming more personal and more expensive.
According to The Knot, the average wedding dress costs about $2,100, compared with roughly $330 for groom attire. But some couples say that gap may be starting to narrow.
Rachel Hodin saw that firsthand. In a personal essay for Vogue, she wrote that after getting engaged, her fiancé David Betesh initially wanted little to do with planning. But that quickly changed. Soon, he was joining catering calls and dreaming up over-the-top details for the wedding.
“One second he was willfully, blissfully ignorant, the next he’s texting me at two in the morning on a Tuesday “just some high-level vibe setters to think about: retro NYC, tableside flambé, cherries jubilee, New Year’s Eve, Slim Aarons, maybe a Tiki element (less Margaritaville, more Trader Vic’s at The Plaza circa 1965?)”, she wrote.
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People working in the wedding industry say they’re noticing the same shift. Jason Saracoglu, a cinematographer and co-founder of Momentous Films, told Moneywise he has seen more grooms taking a hands-on role since he started filming weddings four years ago. Last year, while filming a wedding at Cluny Castle in Scotland, he said one groom was so focused on details that he asked him to hide his microphone so it wouldn’t show up in photos or video. And the requests keep coming.
“At a wedding I filmed last weekend, the groom wanted me to film him with the groomsmen with an Aston Martin,” Saracoglu said.
He’s also seen the trend play out in who’s watching his content. In 2022, according to his internal social media metrics, women made up 89% of his audience while men accounted for just 11%. On one of his latest wedding reels, that shifted to 69% women and 31% men.
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More than a tux and a toast
As more grooms take on a greater role in planning, businesses are seeing a new opportunity: catering directly to men.
“The wedding industry is a sea of white dresses,” Fletcher Kasell, cofounder of fashion label Tanner Fletcher, told the Wall Street Journal, arguing that grooms have long been overlooked.
But some men are beginning to spend more to create their own wedding moments.
At his wedding in Ireland last year, Sean Fernando, a 43-year-old New Yorker who works in tech, spent roughly $15,000 on his wedding wardrobe alone. Instead of buying a single suit, he built multiple looks for different events throughout the celebration, including a bottle green jacket for the rehearsal dinner, a black tux for the ceremony and a pink tux jacket for an after-party.
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“I’m not going to prom,” he said.
Nobody remembers the napkin rings
The rise of the “groom economy” may be changing weddings, but it can also change the budget. A $2,000 groom concierge or a $15,000 wardrobe might not be in every couple’s plans, but new traditions can turn into new expenses.
Naïm Terrache, wedding officiant and founder of The Parisian Celebrant, told Moneywise that before couples book a single thing, they should sit down and ask one question: What do we want to remember about this day in 20 years?
He said the biggest budgeting mistakes often happen when couples avoid talking about money until costs begin piling up.
“The couples who wreck their budget are almost always the ones who avoided talking about money until it was too late,” he said. “They didn’t sit down in January and say, ‘Here’s what we’ve got; here’s what matters.’”
His advice: decide early what matters most and build the budget around that.
“I promise you nobody remembers the napkin rings. Nobody. I’ve done over 200 weddings. Not one couple has ever come back to me and said “Naïm, the napkin rings were incredible,” he told Moneywise.
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Victoria Vesovski is a Toronto-based staff reporter at Moneywise covering personal finance, lifestyle and trending news. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto and New York University, and her work has appeared on platforms including Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Apple News.
