Too much of a good thing isn't necessarily what you want. Back in the summer of 2018, we went from having 20+ weddings remaining for the year to 35+ in a few short weeks. The sudden and very late surge of bookings happened because a large DJ service closed their doors part way through the wedding season. This created incredible demand and a large panic, as brides scrambled to find a DJ on short notice. We did our best to help couples, and in the process, we learned exactly why we don't want to be the company that does 100+ or even 75 weddings a year.
We've always been a boutique DJ company offering a more personalized service for our clients. Volume was never our business; instead, we focused on giving couples a very unique experience that reflects their style. We don’t rely on the latest list of the top 200 most popular wedding songs, instead, we curate music by working closely with each couple. The difference between 20 and 35 weddings doesn't seem like much, but given what remained in the wedding season, it had a doubling effect.
A standard wedding season runs from May through October in Ontario. Having an influx of bookings in July was unusual, and meant the rest of July, August, September, and October were now booked at or very near capacity. Fridays, Saturdays, and even some Sundays were booked. Since we’ve never taken a one size fits all approach to weddings, the 20-25 hours we spend preparing for each wedding, plus another 10-12 hours at the wedding, ended up as a huge undertaking for us. In 2018, we were averaging between 60-111 hours per week, and this left us with little to no time for anything else.
High volume is taxing on a DJ, even if they’re only spending minimal time preparing for each wedding. After experiencing how high volume DJs operate, I began to understand why, at some point during the wedding season, they start to disappear. In 2023 these occurrences were particularly noticeable. In the month of September, we saw 33 last-minute inquiries just in Kitchener-Waterloo and surrounding areas. Part of this, I would attribute to DJs taking on too much work, being overbooked, double booked, exhausted, stressed, and sometimes undervalued. This contributes to some people deciding DJing just isn’t for them, and walking away. We’ve seen this every year, and it has progressively gotten worse.
It’s just not that easy for a DJ to work events, or weddings, Friday, Saturday and possibly Sunday. Even in those cases where a company advertises itself as a full-time DJ service, this is typically in reference to the owner, or on occasion sales staff, being full-time. The majority of DJs are contracted, as needed, to fulfil any contractual obligations made by the owner and/or sales team. This isn’t unusual, it’s fairly the standard for a wedding DJ to be a freelance worker. Unless you’re booking the owner as your DJ, chances are the DJ for your wedding day has another job, so their time is limited. After 2018, we concluded that we should only schedule one wedding per week, because the time required for our level of specialization simply cannot coexist with the high volume business model. We provide a personalized boutique experience that’s not present when you’re doing high volume, but this level of effort requires a bigger investment of our time. However, we know our clients appreciate it, and their big day is absolutely worth it.