Start-ups target the big fat Indian wedding industry

With India all set to become the youngest country by 2020, they see enormous opportunity in this segment

Gone are the days when uncles, aunts and cousins would be the de-facto wedding planners in the good old Indian wedding. Now, the slick, suave and efficient wedding planner has replaced them as a event manager of the big fat Indian wedding that can stretch well over three days and the expenditure could range from about Rs 5 lakh to about any astronomical figure. This 'recession-proof' industry which is estimated to be around $40-50 billion in size can rival the IT business process management space in terms of sheer size. 

Obviously, young professionals see a wealth of opportunity in this segment, and a string of start-ups have come up in this space in the past few years. Enter the Wharton-graduate Dharam Mehta who founded Wedwise in October last year and 25-year old Sanna Vohra whose Wedding Brigade (earlier known as Indear) recently raised Rs 4 crore in pre-series A round of funding led by Blume Ventures. 

So, how are they crunching the numbers? According to various reports, 1.25 billion Indians live in about 250 million families (considering five members per family) and there is one wedding in every family every 20 years, there are around 10-12 million weddings annually. Also, India is set to become the youngest country in the world by 2020, when the median individual age in the country would be 29 years, the wedding industry is sure to reap the benefits of this demographic dividend. 

What's more, Indians are a value conscious people; and that is where platforms like Mehta's Wedwise see opportunity. "Instead of being a glorified classifieds portal, we tend to work with vendors and customers alike to create the best value deal. People tend to spend almost 30 per cent of their life's savings on weddings. With so much of money on the plate, there has to bee a lot of bargaining," he says adding that their target are the middle income customers who comprise nearly 25 per cent of the wedding universe. 

Manas Wadhwa, founder of Weddingplz, which started in August 2014 and is now looking to raise the first round of funds (around $1 million) to fund its geographical expansion, says, "The Indian wedding industry is bigger than that of the US in terms of number of weddings, while the value of the latter (in dollar terms) might be higher." 

Wadhwa further adds that the industry is clocking a 25-30 per cent growth rate, and there are at least 300,000 vendors related to this industry across the country. From florists to caterers to beauticians, the vendors together employ not less than 3 million people during the peak season. 

Seasonality as such is increasingly becoming a rare word in this space with cross cultural weddings on the rise. Anand Shahani, an MBA from XLRI who quit his cushy corporate job at Abbott Laboratories to start WedMeGood says that the seasonality issue is increasingly coming down making it an round the year industry. Shahani and his wife Mahek who is a co-founder in his start-up thought of getting into this space after they had issues planning their own wedding. 

"With more couples getting actively involved in the decision making process, weddings these days are more personalised and customised, thus necessitating a planner. Almost 25 per cent weddings are now what one calls 'destination weddings'," Shahani says. Their firm which saw its revenues grow six-fold in the second year over the first, has already broken even, and aims to be a Rs 100 crore company by 2020. 

WedMeGood, which gets over 30 per cent of its enquiries from NRIs, is planning to set foot on the Dubai,US and Far East markets by 2017. Vohra's Wedding Brigade, which plans to enter Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabd markets after Mumbai and Delhi, gets 10 per cent of its queries from NRIs without even actively marketing it to them. 
 

Says Vohra, "Customisation is a huge theme — couples want everything from the drinks menu to the invitations to the decor to represent their personalities and love stories." 

Planners usually charge around 10 per cent of the entire budget as their fee for making the weddings memorable. Also, many of the websites who do not get into day-to-day event planning but help access the relevant vendor or service, charge a listing fee to the vendors. WedMeGood which has over 8,500 vendors listed on its website and gets around 300,000 unique visitors per month, plans to start a transaction platform on its website too, which will then enable it to charge a transaction fee. Wedding Brigade's Vohra says, "We charge a commission on all products bought on our portal, and all services booked through our portal and concierge service."

The colour, drama (or perhaps melodrama),music, food and chaos has indeed spawned a new industry.