Wedding bills: Marriage is a $250 million industry in Utah

This fall, Saville renamed his site and show BrideAccess.com, after the show began airing in San Diego and Las Vegas. Locally, the show can be watched on KSL Channel 5 on Sundays at 10 a.m.

"Now we've got interest in several states, including Oregon and Arizona," Saville said.

Wedding professionals are busiest during the first three quarters of the year. "I think engagements are more popular at Valentine's Day than weddings," Saville said. "Most people are hoping for warmer weather."

For their first step in planning a wedding, brides visit businesses and book services. Brides and vendors also meet at bridal shows. Wedding season is typically April through September.

Maria Marcotte — sales and event coordinator for Rose Sachs Gardens, a wedding and reception venue outside Parleys Canyon — remembers that 10 years ago, there were only three bridal shows along the Wasatch Front. These days, there are about 15.

"I used to do them all, and now I've gotten selective," she said. "In any week in January, you've got a show up in Ogden, a show in Salt Lake and a show maybe in Thanksgiving Point."

Wedding shows themselves are big business. Rent for a 10-by-10 foot space can cost $1,000. A full-page color ad in one a local bridal magazine can cost $3,500.

Why pay for a ticket to a bridal show?

"Everything's in one place," said Brooke Tolman, sales manager at Greenband, a show promoter that puts on the Utah Bridal Showcase at the Salt Palace each year.

Wedding professionals said the bridal shows provide them with direct business, as well as name recognition, which can lead to more sales in the future.

About 3,000 brides, their soon-to-be husbands and mothers attended this year's Utah Bridal Showcase and learned that this season, French gathering is in style for wedding dresses and fresh flowers and ribbon can be fashionably draped on wedding cakes. Amid the trendiness, a string quartet advertising its services kept it classical, however, playing Schubert.

Competition in the Utah wedding industry can be cutthroat.

About 12 years ago, Carrie Biggers — a cake baker and decorator who had turned a hobby into a business from her Sandy kitchen — was selling cakes with friends at a bridal show and someone called the health department.

The following Monday, health-department employees showed up at Biggers' house and notified her she couldn't run a bakery out of her kitchen. She needed to have a business license from Salt Lake County. She also needed a commercial kitchen with regular inspections from the Salt Lake Valley Health Department if she wanted to continue working from home, complete with a separate entrance and refrigerator.