Planning a wedding? This online startup may just be the help you need

The Wedding Brigade has a team of 45 people based across five cities - Mumbai, Delhi, Panaji, Jaipur and Udaipur

The biggest problem Indians face when planning a wedding is that they have 100 things to do, in a limited time, with a limited budget.  This unorganised segment has created a vast opportunity for wedding planning in the country.

Sanna Vohra, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley in New York, saw first-hand how disorganised the wedding-planning process was while helping a friend plan her sister’s wedding. 
 

The idea of starting an online wedding planning platform struck her and she moved back to India in 2014 to explore the space. Vohra officially founded The Wedding Brigade (TWB), a content-to-commerce wedding portal in 2016 to address the woes of planning a weddings.
 

The Mumbai-based company has recently raised over $1 million in a pre-series A extension round of funding led by Japan-based AET fund and Blume Ventures. The other participating investors include Allana Group and angel investors.
 

“The wedding industry in India is extremely dynamic and fragmented, and we believe it has immense potential. To see a young company disrupting this age-old industry with an array of online and offline innovations is incredible. We’re really excited to partner Sanna and her team to bring some exciting industry-first disruptions to the wedding space,” said Yuki Kawamura, principal, head of india investments, AET Funds.
 

The company aims at creating India’s most-trusted wedding brand through curated and easy-to-access wedding content, products and services. Brides and guests can find inspiration, order clothing and jewellery through its  e-commerce portal, and book venues and services through its services platform.  “The Wedding Brigade is the only Indian wedding portal with a strong content platform, e-commerce arm, and robust services and venues business that can address all of a bride’s needs. Our competitors tend to focus on just one vertical, which is not as helpful to the bride and her family,” says Vohra.
 

The firm has a team of 45 people based across five cities in India. The cities are Mumbai, Delhi, Panaji, Jaipur and Udaipur.  

“Since inception, we have had over 11 million visits to our platform, with millions of brides finding inspiration and ideas on our blog, and tens of thousands of brides purchasing wedding outfits, jewelry and accessories on our e-commerce platform. Also, thousands of brides are booking their wedding venues and additional services like photography and make-up through our platform ,” she says.
 

In the next seven years, the start-up targets to have a presence in at least 30 cities.
 

The Wedding Brigade wants to capture $1.5 billion to $2 billion of the overall spend of about $40-$50 billion in the next seven years. “Our revenue model is commission-based,” said Vohra, who is also the chief executive officer of her company.  “We have achieved break even on a transaction level in e-commerce and services... We have not reached break even as an entire business yet, but anticipate that it will happen within the next 1-2 years.”
 

The fresh funds will be used to scale up the company’s latest business-creating and operating high-quality wedding banquet spaces.