You might see this at nearly each Indian family wedding ceremony – visitors hogging the cameramen, binging on cuisine and having their share of amusing and dance. It’s a massive party unless you are the family busy arranging the food, decorations, celebrations, and logistics. Sometimes, the bride and groom are also compelled to manage final-minute necessities of guests and can’t even revel in their large day. No surprise, the host households and the couple are maxima relieved while the marriage features finish.
Despite this disappointing evaluation, weddings are big business in India. The Indian wedding ceremony enterprise is the second largest inside the world, at the back of the United States. The predicted marketplace price of the Indian industry is $50 Bn and greater than 10 Mn weddings take area in India every 12 months. And as we’re in the age of disruption thru tech, weddings have additionally turn out to be a goal of an era upgrade.
India’s first flavor of technology and weddings changed into via matchmaking systems along with BharatMatrimony and Shaadi.Com, but that becomes just an extension of the age-old classifieds method. The real disruption has come from tech platforms including Wedding Wishlist. While grand weddings which include those for Isha Ambani and Shloka Mehta (daughter and daughter-in-regulation of Mukesh Ambani respectively) have left the world in awe, the real paintings and planning behind those beautiful weddings become accomplished by using complete-stack wedding ceremony control systems, such as Wedding Wishlist.
Chennai-based totally Wedding Wishlist turned into founded in 2016 and started lifestyles as a wedding present registry. Kanika Subbiah, Tanvi Saraf and Sathish Subramanian, the founders, prolonged Wedding Wishlist’s version to come to be an app-primarily based platform with a multitude of offerings which include guest management, logistics, private social media enjoy and more.
The company has raised over $290K (INR 2 Cr) in seed investment from angel traders inclusive of ex-Facebook India coping with director Kirthiga Reddy, Multiples Equity founder Renuka Ramanath as well as friends and family.
Creating A Wedding Wishlist For Urban Millennials
Talking to Inc42, Subbiah stated Wedding Wishlist started out as a gift registry for couples approximately to tie the knot, but after seeing a chum conflict with managing the undesirable and useless items, the notion of doing greater with tech. Their number one audience is the city millennial population, and this segment is continually willing to include tech even for classic occasions.
The couples that sign up on Wedding Wishlist’s platform for the present registry can add items from any website (in India) to their listing and can also do coins items, holidays and charities.
However, with the evolution of Indian weddings, there has been a clear need to construct at the gift registry model. While gift registries unfolded avenues within the Indian marketplace for a marriage manager and virtual, computerized answers for many of the wedding ceremony-related tasks. Today, Wedding Wishlist offers services and products beyond the present registry. This consists of creating a wedding internet site, digital invitations, checklists, finances planner, and network-centric apps for visitors, to control logistics, customized motifs and greater.
In the past year, the crew has serviced a hundred thirty wedding registry clients. It additionally claims to have 250 sign-united states on common with the aid of potential couples in line with day. The group has bought over 3,900 digital invitations and created 1075 wedding web sites.
Subbiah instructed us that it’s seeing maximum traction in metros — Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. However, that said, currently couples from Tier 2 cities along with Chandigarh, Lucknow, Ahmedabad also are signing up.
The wedding internet site, in simple terms, is a blog for the couple, in which they can percentage their story, plans and details about the marriage. The startup offers a Vowed app, in which it we could couple add guests who can then proportion images and much greater from the wedding in real-time, making it less complicated for each person to have got right of entry to to a personalized image album. No more ready to get all of the photos on WhatsApp.
The Challenge Of Organising Gifting In India
The founders advised us that gifting at Indian weddings is an exceptionally sensitive subject and each attendee has a distinctive concept of what they want to provide. Many just motels to straightforward vintage cash, permitting the couple to select their presents. So instructing and making couples aware about one of these gifting alternative wished a mindset change, and that couldn’t manifest in a single day.
“Our greatest project initially changed into to unfold cognizance approximately this service, in addition, to help couples and guests flow beyond any social apprehensions they had. The different venture for us has been that to date there are not any distinguished players working in this space, and with lack of competition comes a lack of other manufacturers educating and developing the market,” Subbiah told Inc42.
