Married in Korea

Our First Korean Wedding Fair: What We Learned

When we first started planning our wedding in Korea, one of the first things we did was visit a Korean wedding fair (웨딩박람회).

If you’ve never planned a wedding in Korea before, a wedding fair can be a surprisingly good place to start. It’s not just an exhibition filled with pretty dresses and wedding photos. It’s more like a one-stop introduction to the entire Korean wedding industry.

And for us, it was the first time our very vague idea of “We’re getting married!” started turning into an actual plan.

So, What Is a Korean Wedding Fair?

A Korean wedding fair brings together many of the businesses you might need while preparing for a wedding.

Depending on the fair, you may find vendors for:

• Wedding studios and photography
• Wedding dresses
• Hair and makeup
• Wedding rings and jewelry
• Groom’s suits
• Hanbok
• Honeymoons
• Wedding venues
• Invitations
• Home appliances and furniture
• Other wedding services

Some of the larger fairs cover almost everything from the wedding itself to setting up your newlywed home.

But one of the most important parts of the experience is meeting a wedding planner.

Meet Your Wedding Planner

Wedding planners are very common in Korea, especially for couples planning a more traditional Korean-style wedding.

We sat down with a planner and started with the most basic information: our approximate wedding date, what kind of wedding we wanted, our preferences, and our budget.

From there, the planner helped us understand what needed to happen — and when.

This was actually one of the most helpful parts of visiting the fair. When you first start wedding planning, everything feels equally urgent. A planner can put those pieces into a timeline and show you what should be booked first and what can wait.

For an international couple, having someone explain the Korean wedding process was also reassuring. There were plenty of things that Olivia was familiar with as a Korean, but even for us, actually planning a wedding was completely new.

And Then We Learned About “Seudeume”

One word you’ll hear constantly when planning a wedding in Korea is:

스드메 — Seudeume

It’s an abbreviation for three of the biggest parts of Korean wedding preparation:

스 — Studio
Wedding photography

드 — Dress
Wedding dresses for your photoshoot and/or wedding day

메 — Makeup
Professional bridal hair and makeup

Instead of finding and booking all three separately, many Korean couples choose a package through their wedding planner or wedding planning company.

At a wedding fair, you can look through portfolios from different studios, dress shops, and makeup salons and start narrowing down the style you like.

This was helpful because suddenly we could see what our options actually looked like rather than trying to understand everything through random searches online.

We eventually decided not to follow the most conventional route for every part of our wedding. For our pre-wedding photos, for example, we wanted an outdoor shoot, so we separately found our own photographer, makeup artist, and hairstylist.

We’ll share that whole process in another post.

Do You Actually Need a Wedding Planner in Korea?

Not necessarily.

Using a wedding planner is still a very common way to prepare for a wedding in Korea, and it can make the process much easier — especially if you have no idea where to begin.

But it isn’t the only way anymore.

There is now an enormous amount of wedding information available online through Korean wedding communities, blogs, social media, and wedding platforms. Weddings themselves have also become much more diverse.

Some couples want a conventional wedding hall. Others choose small weddings, outdoor ceremonies, destination weddings, restaurants, or completely customized celebrations.

Because of this, it has become much easier to research vendors and organize your wedding independently.

So we don’t think there is one “correct” way to do it.

If you want convenience and guidance, a planner can be incredibly useful. If you have a very specific vision and enjoy researching everything yourself, planning independently may give you more freedom.

We actually ended up doing a little bit of both.

Some Wedding Planning Companies in Korea

There are quite a few wedding planning companies and platforms in Korea, and each works a little differently.

For example, Direct Wedding (다이렉트결혼준비) offers wedding planning as well as access to vendors across categories such as wedding halls, studio–dress–makeup packages, honeymoons, jewelry, suits, and hanbok.

Another option is iWedding (아이웨딩), a wedding platform where couples can explore wedding halls, studio–dress–makeup options, honeymoon services, and other wedding products.

There are many other companies and independent planners as well, so it’s worth comparing how each service works before choosing one.

We personally chose Direct Wedding for our wedding planning.

This isn’t a sponsored post — it’s simply the company we used during our own wedding preparation, so you’ll probably see us mention them again throughout this series.

What Our Wedding Fair Day Actually Looked Like

Our visit went something like this:

Wedding planner consultation → Wedding rings → Honeymoon → Groom’s suit

Sounds manageable, right?

It took us almost three hours.

By the end, we were exhausted.

There is a lot of information coming at you in a very short period of time. You’re talking about prices, dates, styles, contracts, destinations, rings, suits, and a wedding that still feels very far away.

It can be exciting — but it can also be overwhelming.

If you’re visiting a wedding fair for the first time, we would definitely recommend not scheduling too much else that day.

Wear comfortable shoes, eat beforehand, and don’t feel like you have to make every decision on the spot.

Was It Worth Going?

For us, yes.

Not because we booked everything that day — we didn’t.

The biggest benefit was that we finally understood the big picture.

Before the wedding fair, wedding planning felt like dozens of unrelated things we somehow needed to figure out.

Afterward, we had a rough timeline.

We understood what Seudeume was. We knew what kinds of vendors we would eventually need. We had a better sense of the costs involved, and we knew which decisions needed to come first.

That alone made the three exhausting hours worthwhile.

What We Learned

If you’re at the very beginning of planning a wedding in Korea, a wedding fair can be a useful starting point — especially if Korean wedding culture is completely new to you.

But think of it as a place to learn and compare, not a place where you have to decide everything immediately.

Ask questions. Take photos or notes. Compare prices. Look at different styles. And give yourself time to think after you leave.

Most importantly, start figuring out what kind of wedding you actually want.

We started with a fairly typical Korean wedding planning process, but as our plans developed, we realized there were quite a few things we wanted to do differently.

And that’s where things started getting much more interesting.

Next: PART 03 — How We Chose Our Wedding Planner in Korea