Swedes can buy their own royal cake at the supermarket. Photo: Delicato

After much hype and anticipation the big day is fast approaching. June 19 sees the marriage of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling in Stockholm. Not surprisingly there is wedding fever across Sweden. If weddings are big business, royal weddings are an unstoppable commercial monster, with everyone wanting to cash in.

Royal wedding range

For the last few months, Swedes doing their everyday grocery shopping cannot have failed to notice the array of Royal wedding products on offer: from coffee and cakes to umbrellas and porcelain vases.

Peter Larsson, managing director of bakery company Delicato, sees the wedding as a great business opportunity. “We realized early on that this would be by far the biggest event of the year, so we were planning on launching some kind of cake in connection with the wedding,” he says.

Delicato’s official involvement came out of this initial desire to get involved. “We contacted the Royal Court asking if we could do something in connection with the wedding,” Larsson says. “It turns out that there were around 200 other companies that had also, quite independently from one another, approached the palace.”

From this interest the idea for the official series was born. In the end only 18 of the many interested companies were given permission to create a product with the specially designed wedding crest on. Delicato developed a blueberry and raspberry mazarin, a twist on a classic Swedish cake filled with almond paste.

Approved by the wedding couple

This and all the other products were developed in close cooperation with the Royal Court. National department store Åhléns has developed a whole range of royal wedding products, including a kitchen towel, an umbrella and a vase. Monica Hultgren Andersson, the store’s head of PR, explains how the product range was developed. “Everything we are selling in the official wedding series has had the direct approval of both Victoria and Daniel.”

 
A royal cup of java, anyone? Photo: Arvid Nordquist

And of course all of this means big business. Grocery company Arvid Nordquist is also on the official supplier list with their fresh ground coffee. Håkan Ljungqvist, the company’s director of coffee, is confident. “Sales in May were extremely positive. We have built most of our summer marketing activities around the wedding and our wedding coffee,” he says. “Apart from being great fun, we feel that it’s also the right decision commercially.”

Love Stockholm

And it’s not just companies cashing in on pre-wedding fever. Stockholm city itself sees the wedding as big business, as Ann-Charlotte Jönsson, press chief at Stockholm Visitors Board, explains. “This is a big limelight opportunity for Stockholm. To maximize the short-term benefits from this event we have organized a 14-day festival called Love Stockholm.”

The festival Love Stockholm runs from June 6 (Sweden’s National Day) culminating on the wedding day itself, June 19, and features a host of events, exhibitions and happenings all loosely based on the theme of Love. “We hope that the festival and the wedding will draw visitors to Stockholm,” says Jönsson. “The media attention and the success of the event might also have a more long-term effect in attracting more visitors to Stockholm even after the wedding is over.”

And just how many people is Jönsson expecting? “It’s difficult to say overall until after, but based on research from other recent Scandinavian Royal weddings, we are expecting a total of two million visitors to Stockholm on the day of the wedding,” she says. And according to Jönsson, the wedding is set to bring in an extra SEK 100 million in retail sales in Stockholm alone.

Get a room

But surprisingly, with all those extra people, Stockholm’s hotels are not fully booked for the big day. “There have been rumors in the press that everything is booked up,” says Jönsson, “but there are still hotel rooms available.”

Stockholm’s legendary Grand Hôtel, however, is not an option for spontaneous visitors, according to Tuomas Liewendahl, the hotel’s commercial director. “We are fully booked June 19.”

And just to seal the wedding deal, the Grand has a whole host of services for sale that can get you in the mood for love: from wedding cocktails in the bar, to romantic spa treatments for two. “The wedding is big business for us and the romance packages are proving particularly popular,” Liewendahl says.

Sorry, no chance of a room with a view at Grand Hôtel on June 19. Photo: Grand Hôtel Stockholm

Rent a home

And it’s not just the big hotels that are cashing in. Many Stockholmers with downtown apartments have seen the wedding as an opportunity to turn their homes into private hotels.

Catarina Elliasson owns a three-room apartment of 110 square meters in central Stockholm. “I am on vacation anyway during the wedding,” she explains, “so I figured, why not rent it out seeing as it will only sit empty otherwise. I thought there would be a market for it.” And she wasn’t wrong. Elliasson has recently rented the apartment to a couple from the United States for way above the going rate. Nice money if you can get it.

If all these money-making schemes are making you think greed is good again, there is a more ethical side to the impending nuptials. A percentage of the profits from the official wedding suppliers will go to the newly launched The Crown Princess Couple's Wedding Foundation, a charity created on behalf of the happy couple to fund help for sick and underprivileged children in Sweden.

A cheering crowd

Something to think about when you watch the two million-strong crowd cheering as Crown Princess Victoria gets her Daniel Westling on June 19. You may well find Peter Larsson from Delicato in the crowd. “I was hoping for an invitation out of our involvement in the wedding,” he says jokingly, “but it never came. I’ll just have to stand out on the street with rest of Stockholm, with my flask of coffee and official mazarin cake.”

Rob Hincks

Rob Hincks is a British journalist and editor based in Stockholm. He always keeps a stiff upper lip and a dry eye at weddings, but has been known to shed a tear or two over a nice piece of cake.

The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.