Celebrity weddings make it to the limelight, but a fly-past is the sort of grand gesture that takes the big-ticket Indian wedding into another league. A league that involves buyouts of entire hotel inventories at destinations or even cruise ships, flying down chefs and artists from all over the world, and setting up massive sets that resemble cities. Where costs might start at ₹1 crore to ₹1.5 crore, with no upper limit.
And that’s just on the food side, he says, adding that he had a client who wanted to do a Jaipur wedding, but it wasn’t working out logistically. “They had 1,500 people and the number of available rooms was a problem.” So they brought Jaipur to Mumbai, recreating an entire set of Jaipur at MMRDA Grounds. “It was a three-month-long production for us. There was work going on in my godown for three months. Every pillar, every engraving, everything was freshly made for them to create that set-up because they wanted to get married in Jaipur,” says Sidhwani.
As Gurleen M Puri of Weddings by Gurleen M Puri puts it, there’s no start or end point to a big wedding. “My daughter wants it. End of story.”
“It took about four months of planning for the entire wedding. The venue, the cruise ship, at the time was sailing in Brazil so we actually flew to Brazil in January to do a recce of the ship and cruised for three days on it, to understand our venue,” says Sawhney. There were performances by Badshah, Vishal-Shekhar and Meet Bros on the ship.
Motwane, director, Motwane Entertainment and Weddings (MEW), says that while international artists do get booked, Bollywood often trumps even the likes of Justin Bieber and Elton John.
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Getting into the actWeddings have been family affairs, a time for the entire joint family to get together, where various people are put to work and given specific tasks. But when the logistics involve booking 500 cars and artists such as Jennifer Lopez, it’s no longer a job for an uncle or a nephew. “Fifteen years ago there was nothing like a wedding planner,” says Mahesh Shirodkar, managing director of Tamarind Global. Shirodkar was a tour operator with hospitality, destination and logistics expertise, who happened to fall into the wedding space when a friend asked him to plan his daughter’s wedding. Shirodkar thought it wasn’t going to be different from any other event. The first itself turned out to be a baptism by fire. “We booked 500 rooms at Hotel Trident in Mumbai and 500 cars, the wedding was spread over four days and five venues. There was a reception at the Turf Club with 2,800 people. We got the Imperial Circus of China and fused it with Shiamak Davar at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). It was not a big fat wedding, it was an obese wedding.” Since then he has done big weddings in obscure locations like Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Moscow, Israel and China, among others.
Vandana Mohan, who introduced luxury and lifestyle to corporate events, applied the same formula to weddings when she incorporated the Wedding Design Company 18 years ago. “When I started out I decided to charge a management fee. Now, nobody had ever charged a management fee. Even I had no clue. I only knew what corporate was like. And corporate is charged at 17.65 percent we charged a management fee like advertising used to,” she says, adding that that figure died pretty quickly. “Nobody is paying us 17 percent of whatever it is,” she says. Numbers depend on several factors and could range from five percent to 12 percent, with an average of seven to eight percent.
Sudha Khanna, partner at Weddings by Gurleen M Puri, says they usually charge a flat fee. “We take a fee depending on the scope of work, which will be from A to Z, including 20 to 30 services, right from the basic of your invitation card designing to your wedding cards, to whether you are handling the RSVPs to their couriers as well.”
Though event management company Wizcraft had always been doing weddings as an extension of their events business, five years ago they decided it was big enough to have an entire division focussed just on weddings. “We are the ones who are stitching the whole affair together. It is a lot of hard work with almost no [fixed] working hours. The amount of work that goes into a wedding will never come to what people are willing to pay for.” The profit margins, according to Sawhney, range from 10-15 percent, most of which goes as salaries, which are pretty high for creative spaces like weddings. “It is an industry that really kills you. You have no personal life and you are living in your office or on an aircraft,” says Mohan. Or as in the case of Puri, waking up at 5 am to go check out the venue with the client and having to make 300 sofas just seven days before the big day.
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Policy Hiccups Weddings are recession-proof, more so when the clients are billionaires. But they don’t seem to be policy-proof. While policy changes like demonetisation (in 2016) and Goods and Services Tax (GST, implemented a year later) didn’t have a direct effect on the business, with liquidity becoming a problem, it made people more careful about their spending. Things started to scale down.
Mohan of Wedding Design Company says that the trend of the two-day wedding is a recent thing. “In recent times, we have had bad years and then some really good ones. The key is to adjust and keep rejigging the business to keep up with the times.”
She realised that every project she got was not a four or three-day wedding. “People were saying let us do the wedding small and a big sangeet, and keep the mehendi simple. Keep one thing big. There’s no need to do a three-day thing. So, the two-day concept started in 2017,” says Mohan who does about 10-15 weddings a year.
Sidhwani of Dreamzkraft also believes that the wedding industry was not directly hit by demonetisation, but it was impacted indirectly. “Parents save up for their child’s wedding, either by investing in property or through stocks. These are the industries that have been impacted by demonetisation, GST and Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA). So, it is not that people do not have the money to spend, they do not have the liquidity it was the spending capacity that was hit,” he says. Although it was for a short period of time, demonetisation did hit the profit margins of wedding planners as well
First Published: Feb 02, 2019, 07:12
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