Wedding Planning is in!

If matches are made in heaven, then it is a marriage that binds these hearts together on earth. And considering that India is a land of diverse culture and tradition, weddings hold a special meaning for everyone here. But the nitty-gritty of a typical Indian marriage becomes too taxing at times and it takes a heavy toll on the family organising the marriage.

Here comes the role of wedding planners to ease up things and take the entire task of organising the event in their hands.

What is wedding planning?

Planning and managing a wedding ensures that a wedding ceremony takes place in the most organised manner possible and family members get to relax back and enjoy the ceremony just like any other guests. The work involves almost every kind of activities that goes into  right from designing invitation cards, deciding venues and decor to designing the stage for the couple, hiring dancers, bands, singers, catering, to name a few.

Zuzer Lucknowala and Rachana Lucknowala who started their venture, The Wedding Cafe And Lounge some 12 years back are of the opinion that customers nowadays not only look for a one stop solution for wedding planning but also encourage and want creativity in it.

Wedding planning as a profession

Wedding planning as a profession has just started taking off in India and it is not late before it  becomes a full-fledged profession.  According to Amit Rathore, Director Genie Events, wedding planning is fast becoming a big industry in India. Industry estimates puts it that the wedding industry could well be a whopping 2, 00,000 crore industry. “People have money to spend now and they don’t want to compromise on wedding arrangements, the biggest day for their own, or their near and dear ones. The wedding planning industry has really picked up in the last decade and a lot of finesse and expertise now goes into a grand and successful wedding,” he explains.

Anyone aspiring to become a wedding planner has to have the knack for organising an event of such grandeur. He has to plan the ceremonies, organise them as planned, decorate the venue, co-ordinate the event and take good care of the guests. It is he who helps the client in selecting the venue, arranging accommodation and providing transportation to and from the wedding site for the guests, arranging for photographers and videographers and sometimes even the priest. More often than not, if the client wishes to throw up a theme based wedding, the wedding planner has to plan out a particular ambience or theme for the venue and accordingly syncronise all the ceremonies based on that. Most importantly, the wedding planner has to give in to the client’s whims and fancies when it comes to planning, executing and managing a wedding.

A wedding planner should also have a creative bent of mind and try out new innovative ideas, instead of just going for the tried and tested ones. 3D is one aspect that is increasingly being used by planners nowadays and it is helping them to put across their ideas to their clients. With 3D presentations and designs, it apparently becomes very easy to figure out how a venue would look like. What used to be communicated verbally to a client is now being presented to them in a 3D format. So there is more clarity of idea and also the scope to execute new ideas.

Unlike any other business, investment should not be a problem for a wedding planning start-up. “The initial investment for starting a wedding planning business can be bare minimum but however satisfactory returns can be obtained once you build enough infrastructure like in all other businesses,” explains Zuzer Lucknowala, Director, The Wedding Cafe And Lounge. Amit of genie Events opines that 10 lacs is the reasonable investment one needs to make and this would include Office space, a minimum of 10 people staff to manage the event, Inventory for designing and little designer furniture.

Finally…

Wedding planning is coming up in the country, if not at an encouraging pace but gradually. Weddings are a cherished and important institution in India and every family, irrespective of their class today celebrates it largely in their own way. Not only upper middle class or the elite class but the middle class equally make avail of wedding planning services today. Genie Events has done projects from 6 lakhs to 6 crores and this is an evident to this very fact. This unleashes a whole lot of opportunities for wedding planners who wish to make a mark in this line of profession.