China has more than 1.4 billion inhabitants, and marriage is still one of the most expensive events in a Chinese life. Families put pressure on their only child to settle down early. It is read as proof of stability, and therefore of social success. Parents wait for the grandchild. Couples wait longer before saying yes. All of that is still true. What has changed is the number of weddings, and almost nobody selling into this market has adjusted for it.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been based in Shanghai since 2012. Over the past years my teams have taken foreign bridal gown makers, jewellers, photographers and honeymoon destinations into China, and I have watched this market shrink in volume while the average ticket kept climbing.
Fewer weddings, and that is the real story
Old articles about this market, including the first version of this one, quoted a forecast of a 400 billion dollar wedding market by 2020. That forecast was built on a volume of couples that no longer exists. Here is what actually happened.
China peaked at 13.47 million marriage registrations in 2013. It fell below 10 million in 2019, below 8 million in 2021, and hit 6.11 million in 2024, the lowest count since 1980 and a drop of about 20% in a single year. 2025 rebounded to 6.76 million couples, up 10.76%, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs figures released in February 2026 and relayed by CCTV. Read that rebound carefully. It is a recovery from a very low base, not a return to trend. The country still marries half as many couples as it did twelve years ago.
| Year | Marriage registrations | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 (peak) | 13.47 million couples | record high |
| 2019 | 9.27 million couples | below 10 million |
| 2022 | 6.84 million couples | Covid year |
| 2023 | 7.68 million couples | post-Covid catch-up |
| 2024 | 6.11 million couples | -20.5%, lowest since 1980 |
| 2025 | 6.76 million couples | +10.76% |
Two things explain the 2025 bounce, and neither is a baby boom. First, 2024 was a lunar year without a spring start, considered unlucky for weddings, so a lot of couples pushed their date into 2025. Second, the registration rules changed.
The registration reform of May 2025
Since 10 May 2025, the revised Marriage Registration Regulation lets any couple register anywhere in China. No more hukou requirement, no more household registration booklet, just the ID cards and a signed declaration. Xinhua covered the change the day it took effect. It also applies when one spouse is a foreigner, a Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan resident, or an overseas Chinese.
The commercial consequence is bigger than it looks. Migrant workers no longer have to travel back to their hometown to marry. The cities where they actually live captured the growth: Shanghai registered 125,102 couples in 2025, up 38.7%. Shenzhen was up 28.54%. Guangdong province was up 19.92%. If you sell a wedding service, your buyer is now registering, and celebrating, in the tier 1 city where they work, not in the county where they were born. Your media budget should follow that.
Fewer couples, fatter budgets
The services market has contracted, but less than the volume of couples. iiMedia Research puts the narrow wedding services market at 2.84 trillion RMB in 2024, down from 3.30 trillion RMB in 2023. The broad definition, which includes housing, cars and home appliances bought around the wedding, went from 16.67 trillion to 14.32 trillion RMB over the same period. Around 430 million Chinese are in the 20 to 39 age bracket, so the pool is still enormous.
The per-couple numbers from the same iiMedia wedding industry survey tell you where the money goes:
- 34.2% of couples budget between 100,000 and 200,000 RMB for the wedding itself, the largest single bracket.
- 94% spend or plan to spend more than 10,000 RMB on wedding jewellery. Rings are bought by 78.0% of them, necklaces by 73.9%.
- The most common budget for wedding outfits sits at 3,000 to 5,000 RMB (36.9% of respondents). Only 2.8% go above 20,000 RMB.
- Buyers aged 26 to 35 make up 72.5% of the market. Tier 1 and tier 2 cities account for 52.6%.
- More than 40% want a full-service wedding planner. Another 32.6% want a mixed setup, planner for some parts, self-organised for the rest.
Read those two last lines together with a shrinking number of weddings and you get the shape of the opportunity. There are fewer clients, they are older, richer, concentrated in big cities, and they buy in modules rather than in one package. A foreign supplier does not need to sell the whole wedding. It needs to own one module.
Wedding planners still run the room
More than half of Chinese couples hire a wedding planner, and they spend lavishly through that planner. The event is prepared far in advance because it has to be perfect in front of the guests. Couples will cross China, and the world, for good wedding pictures. Paris held that position for a long time. Around 41% of couples find their planner online, and roughly 38% pick one on a friend’s recommendation.
For a foreign supplier this is the shortcut. The planner already has the couple’s trust and their budget. Selling ten planners is faster and cheaper than convincing ten thousand brides, and it is the model we use with almost every client in this category.
Where a foreign brand actually fits
Wedding photography and destination shoots
This is the single best entry point for a foreign supplier, and it always has been. Chinese couples will cross the country, and the world, for their photos. The Chinese travel photography industry, 旅拍, was worth about 39.5 billion RMB in 2023 according to Huajing Industry Research, and wedding and honeymoon shoots made up 55.16% of it. Paris kept its status for years. Provence, the Italian lakes, Iceland, Kyoto and Bali all take a slice now.
The shoot happens months before the ceremony and is often booked before the venue. Whoever wins the photo brief influences the dress, the location and the honeymoon. If you run a hotel, a château, a vineyard or a photo studio abroad, this is your door in. See how Provence built itself into a romantic destination for Chinese travellers for a working example.
The honeymoon
The honeymoon has become a separate purchase with its own budget, no longer a line item inside the wedding. Since outbound travel reopened, Japan, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia lead by volume, but short-haul island trips absorb the mid-range honeymoon demand and long-haul takes the high end. Chinese outbound spending has shifted toward experiences rather than shopping, which is good news if you sell an activity, a private dinner or a boutique property, and bad news if your whole pitch is a duty-free counter. Our article on where Chinese travellers go during Chinese New Year shows the same seasonality logic that governs honeymoon bookings.
Jewellery, and the gold problem
The 三金, the three gold pieces the groom’s family traditionally offers, are under real pressure. Domestic gold jewellery retail prices reached roughly 1,500 RMB per gram in early 2026, with premium brands above 2,000 RMB, while international spot gold traded around 5,000 dollars an ounce after a peak near 5,600. One Chow Tai Fook bracelet went from 53,800 to 71,800 RMB, a 33% jump.
Couples adapted. Some melt down family gold. Some buy bars and have them worked. Fixed-price gold pieces sold 40% to 50% better over the Spring Festival period while by-the-gram purchases fell 30% to 50%. That money did not disappear. It moved to the honeymoon, to the home, and to design-led jewellery where the story matters more than the metal weight. If you are a foreign jeweller, that is your opening, and our guide to selling jewellery in China covers the entry mechanics.
The dress
Most couples now buy or rent more than one outfit. A white gown for the ceremony and the photos, plus a Chinese outfit, 秀禾服 or 龙凤褂, for the tea ceremony and the banquet. The “new Chinese style” wedding is genuinely back, driven by younger couples and approved by the parents. So do not build your pitch on the idea that Chinese brides want to look Western. They want both, in the same day, and they will judge a foreign atelier on cut and fabric rather than on being foreign. Rental is normal and not a downgrade. Read our guide to launching a designer brand in China before you decide between selling and renting.
Why this market rewards foreign suppliers
The money is concentrated
Economic growth produced a large middle class and a substantial upper class, concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Chengdu. Those cities are where the high-budget weddings happen, and now, since the registration reform, where a growing share of migrant couples register too. You do not need national coverage. Five cities give you most of the addressable spend.
One child, six wallets
The one-child policy is long gone, but its effect on wedding budgets is not. A couple born in the 1990s often has four grandparents and two sets of parents contributing to one event. Savings were never split between siblings. That is why a family on a modest income can still put 200,000 RMB into a single day. The buyer in front of you is one person. The payer is a committee of six.
Word of mouth decides everything
This clientele is young, affluent, and surrounded by people who look like them and are at the same life stage. Most of a client’s network is a list of future clients. One bad experience gets posted, screenshotted and reposted. Nearly four couples in ten pick their planner because a friend told them to, which means a single unhappy bride does not cost you one wedding, she costs you her whole circle. In a market with fewer weddings each year, a broken referral chain hurts far more than a lost sale.
How to enter this market in 2026
Xiaohongshu is the wedding search engine
Ten years ago the answer was Baidu, WeChat and Weibo. Weibo has mostly dropped out of this category. Xiaohongshu took it. Around 300 million monthly users, roughly 70% of them use search, a 7 to 3 female skew, half in tier 1 and tier 2 cities. Xiaohongshu’s own wedding vertical data shows audience growth of 26% for wedding planning, 33% for portrait photography and 14% for bridal photography.
The mechanism matters more than the platform name. A bride does not browse a feed. She types “巴黎婚纱照 避雷” or “海外婚礼 预算” into the Xiaohongshu search bar and reads twenty notes before contacting anyone. So your job is not to post pretty pictures. Your job is to make sure that for the fifty specific queries your buyer types, there are recent notes that mention you by name, with prices, with the problems you solved, written by real users. That is search optimisation, done inside an app.
Baidu SEO still matters for the parents, for B2B partners and for anyone checking whether your company is real. Keep it. Just stop expecting it to generate bridal leads on its own.
Generative search is the new first impression
A growing share of couples now ask DeepSeek or Doubao a question before they search anything: “best places abroad for wedding photos”, “is renting a wedding dress worth it”. These models answer from indexed Chinese text. If your brand only exists in English on a .com, you are invisible at that step. The fix is unglamorous: publish substantial Chinese content on Chinese-hosted properties, get named in Chinese media and industry articles, and make sure your facts, prices and locations are stated plainly enough for a model to quote you.
WeChat is where the deal closes
Xiaohongshu creates the interest. WeChat closes it. A wedding sale takes three to nine months and involves the bride, the groom and at least one mother. That conversation happens in a WeChat chat with a real salesperson, in Chinese, with photos and voice messages, at eleven at night. Brands that run a proper private domain, meaning a personal WeChat account per consultant plus a small group for each booked couple, close far more than brands that answer through a form on a website. Budget for the headcount, not just the media.
KOC beats KOL
Giving a free service to a celebrity couple used to be the standard play and it still creates visibility. But a single celebrity wedding is one post that ages in a week. Fifty real brides posting their own honest review, each with two to twenty thousand followers, keep feeding the search results for two years. That is what KOC and affiliate programmes do in this category. Pay for the review, not for the fame. Our take on whether KOL marketing actually works in China goes into the economics.
Case study: Roksana, a Polish bridal atelier
Roksana runs a bridal gown atelier near Warsaw. Poland produces a large share of Europe’s wedding dresses, and her workshop already supplied boutiques in Germany, Italy and the UK. She came to us because a Chinese wholesaler had ordered twice, then stopped, and she had no idea why.
Her first attempt in China had been a Tmall Global cross-border shop with sixty gowns listed at 8,000 to 14,000 RMB. Eleven months, roughly 240,000 RMB in platform and traffic costs, nine dresses sold. Two came back. The maths did not work. The reason was not the product. A Chinese bride does not buy a gown from a photo. She wants a fitting, and if the dress is only for the photo shoot she would rather rent it than own it.
We changed the model. Instead of selling gowns online to individuals, we positioned her atelier as a supplier and a co-branded name for high-end bridal studios in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, with a rental-first structure. Then we built the demand side on Xiaohongshu: a Chinese-language account for the atelier, one hundred and twenty notes over eight months answering the exact queries brides type about European gowns, fabric, alterations and shipping delays, plus around seventy paid KOC reviews from brides who actually wore the dresses. Every enquiry went straight into a WeChat conversation handled by one Chinese-speaking consultant we hired for her.
Why it worked: the studios carried the fitting cost and the inventory risk, so Roksana sold to eleven professional buyers instead of chasing thousands of individuals, and the Xiaohongshu content made brides walk into those studios asking for her label by name. After fourteen months she had signed nine partner studios, shipped 380 gowns, and the Chinese business represented about 22% of her workshop’s revenue at a gross margin above her European wholesale. It took fourteen months and one salary, not a miracle.
What to do first
- Pick one module: photography, honeymoon, jewellery or dress. Do not try to sell “the wedding”.
- Register the Chinese brand name and the trademark before you publish anything. Wedding names get squatted fast.
- Open a Xiaohongshu account in Chinese and write for search queries, not for a feed.
- Hire or contract one Chinese-speaking consultant who lives in WeChat. Without that, the leads die.
- Recruit ten local partners, studios, planners or agencies, before you spend on media. They carry the fitting and the trust.
FAQ
Is the Chinese wedding market still worth entering if marriages keep falling?
Yes, but not as a volume play. China still registered 6.76 million marriages in 2025, more than the United States, Japan and Germany combined. The number of couples is down, the spend per couple is not. A third of them budget over 100,000 RMB for the day. If your model needs a million customers you will struggle. If your model works with a few thousand high-budget couples a year, the market is comfortable.
Which segment is easiest for a foreign company with no China presence?
Wedding photography and honeymoon services abroad. You sell from your own country, you do not need a Chinese entity, an import licence or local inventory, and the customer travels to you. Jewellery and dresses need fittings, after-sales and often a local partner, so they take longer. Start with the destination product, build the name and the reviews, then bring the physical product in once brides already know you.
What did the May 2025 registration reform change for brands?
Couples can now register anywhere in China, without their household registration booklet. Migrant workers stopped travelling home to marry, so registrations shifted to the big cities where they work. Shanghai grew 38.7% in 2025, Shenzhen 28.54%. For a brand it means the buyer is reachable in tier 1 cities, with tier 1 income and tier 1 media habits, and that regional targeting built on hometown data is now wrong.
How long before a foreign wedding brand sees revenue in China?
Plan for nine to eighteen months. The wedding purchase cycle alone is three to nine months, and you need a base of Chinese content and reviews before couples will contact you at all. Anyone promising sales in a quarter is selling you ads. The costs that actually matter in year one are content production in Chinese, KOC reviews and one bilingual salesperson, not platform fees.
Need a partner in China?
GMA is a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai. We work with bridal ateliers, jewellers, photographers, hotels and destinations that want Chinese couples, and we build the Chinese-language search presence and the WeChat sales process that turn interest into signed bookings. If you sell one piece of the Chinese wedding, tell us which one and we will tell you honestly whether the numbers work. Get in touch here.
Related reading: the Chinese marriage market and what brands can do about declining rates, and the Chinese wedding candy market.
