This Mumbai-based startup develops a platform for an easy and hassle-free wedding planning services

An easy and hassle-free wedding planning is just one click away. You can book all wedding-related services through The Wedding Brigade – Inspiration, planning, and shopping portal for Indian weddings, from Venue to Make-up & Mehendi artists to Photographers. It is one stop shop for all things wedding. They handpick every single vendor on their platform to ensure you are only getting the best. Also, their expert (and free!) wedding concierge will find you EXACTLY what you’re looking for within your budget & help you score the best deals in town! The Wedding Brigade was launched in the year 2016.

Sanna Vohra is the founder of The Wedding Brigade, an online portal where users can discover the best wedding content, buy curated wedding fashion, and book verified vendors and services.

Sanna has been included in the 2018 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list. Prior to The Wedding Brigade, Sanna worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in New York, and at the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi X.

She discovered her passion for building businesses at Brown University when she co-founded the largest student-run business at the time.

The core team consists of people with diverse skill sets that have come from great B2C technology companies, millennial consumer brands, hospitality brands, wedding companies, banks and more.

We are publishing an interview with Ms. Sanna Vohra, CEO, and Founder, The Wedding Brigade.

Q.: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Please share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
Ans: Essentially what we realized is that even though brides, grooms, and their families invest so much time and money into planning a wedding often quitting their jobs taking loans, the actual process of planning the wedding is so stressful and chaotic that the bride, groom, and their family actually don’t enjoy themselves. So we created The Wedding Brigade to take away all the stress from the planning process, by offering them the very best wedding ideas, outfits, jewelry, venues, and vendors on one platform. That way, we can take care of the nitty-gritties and they can enjoy the most important day of their lives. Given the fact that it’s a 50 billion dollar market, but everyone still struggles with wedding planning made it clear that it is a huge opportunity.

Q.: Tell us about the Product / Solution. How did you get your first customer? Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process.
Ans: We started off with content because we wanted to see if people were even interested in looking at wedding content online, and then we started receiving a lot of queries from people asking us where they could buy a certain product, or how they could source it. So it became clear that we have to build transactions on top of it all. That’s when we moved towards a marketplace model where we sell wedding fashion, jewelry and more, as well as help brides and their families book wedding venues and vendors – all in one place.

Q.: What is your USP?
Ans: The Wedding Brigade is the only content, e-commerce and services platform in India, that can help brides and their families with the entire wedding planning process. The idea is to take over the hassle of planning a wedding and let the families and couple enjoy the most special day of their lives.

Q.: What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learning that you have? Who in your mind is your ideal customer? Do you have at least one of them signed up?
Ans: My view of weddings was based on the ones I have attended and what I saw in bollywood movies, which is so niche! India is so culturally and religiously diverse that I had to really educate myself on how weddings actually happen across communities, across other parts of the country and across other budgets- and build our platform accordingly!

Q.: What has been your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what did you learn from it??
Ans: I would have liked to start monetizing a bit earlier.

Q.: How are you pricing the Product? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.
Ans: We make a commission on the marketplace, on all the products that are bought and services booked via our portal.

Q.: Please tell us about the investors (if any)
Ans: We have raised multiple rounds of funding which has mostly been led by Blume Ventures, we also have other investors such as Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund (AET Fund) and family offices and angel investors that have participated too.

Q.: Is there any interesting success story of your startup? If so, please write about it. ?
Ans: What sets us apart is the fact that we do everything at one place, from content to services to e-commerce, making us the only one-stop-shop for weddings. We have touched hundreds and thousands of weddings across the country. Now with the launch of Mogra Banquets (our managed banquet halls) we are also the only wedding portal with the capability of planning and hosting a wedding end to end.

Q.: Since inception, give us a sense of the value of business done by your venture.
Ans: We have had over 16 million visitors since our inception

Q.: What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product/service leading to something bigger? If so, how?
Ans: In the next 3 years we want to deliver dream weddings for 1 million brides. These brides can be anyone who has either booked a venue through us, brought their wedding trousseau from us, booked a service through us, or used our planning tools. Eventually, we want every bride in India to think of us the moment they get engaged, and use us to make their entire wedding planning process easier, and more fun!

Q.: Who do You Perceive as Your Competition? How do you differentiate yourself from them?
Ans: Though there are players who focus on one piece of the puzzle, like only providing services or content, no one really focuses on the entire journey. And that’s where we believe we add value by providing brides with a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all their wedding needs. Because at the end of the day the hardest part of planning a wedding is having to do so many things with very limited time and a limited budget. We are the only platform that actually addresses that problem. More than competition-focused, we are consumer-obsessed. Our driving force is what our consumers want, their relationship and experience with us.

Q.: What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months? Any other information you would like to share?
Ans: We are looking to scale our services business and venue business to more cities. We are looking at expanding our private line and expanding into more categories in e-commerce as well.

Q.: What message do you want to convey to fellow entrepreneurs?
Ans: Don’t get distracted by daily fires – spend some time working towards the bigger picture every week. Consistently iterate and put in the work – eventually the results will show!

———————–
Thanks Sanna. All the best!