How Ozempic is Shaping Weddings

Michelle Nedwick doesn’t mind if the 100 guests she’s inviting to her Oct. 3 wedding know she used a weight-loss medication to help her slim down.

Ms. Nedwick, a 56-year-old prosecutor from Elyria, Ohio, began taking the compounded form of Zepbound, a type of glucagon-like peptide-1 drug, or GLP-1, in August. So far she’s dropped 20 pounds. She hopes to shed 20 more in the next few months. (The FDA recently halted production of many of the most compounded weight-loss drugs. Ms. Nedwick said she has stored up enough to get her through her wedding, and will then figure out what she does next.)

“I don’t think there should be a stigma around it,” she said of weight-loss drugs like Zepbound and diabetes drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro that are often used for weight loss. She has shared her story on social media, and subscribers to her YouTube channel following her “GLP-1 journey,” as she calls it, even offered advice on which wedding dress she should choose for her slimmer figure. She ordered three.

Medications like the one Ms. Nedwick is taking have changed the conversation around “shedding for the wedding,” as the expression goes, though not just among brides and grooms, but the dressmakers and tailors too.

In March, the Wedding Report, a market research company, polled 73 vendors across the wedding industry about the effects GLP-1 drugs were having on their businesses. Of the 7 percent who reported seeing “major changes in client requests and change” or 11 percent seeing “small shifts in spending or preference,” 80 percent work in attire and accessories.

Naama Navipur, a couture wedding dress designer with shops in Philadelphia and Austin, Texas, said she helps brides and mothers of brides desperate for adjustments “all the time.” Two years ago, such last-minute changes were uncommon, she added.