ShaadiWish - A Promotion and Marketing Platform that Caters to Service Providers from Indian Wedding Industry
The Indian wedding planning industry is estimated to be at a staggering Rs 1.6 trillion by 2020.
“We are confident that this unorganized market in the next five years will not only become surprisingly organized in light of so many players but also has an extraordinary potential to captivate the novel cash rich segments for India such as wedding registry and rise in destination weddings,” says Divyata Shergill, Founder, ShaadiWish.
ShaadiWish is an online wedding planning portal that assists prospective couples & their families to plan the wedding and strategically helps the wedding category experts to market their work. It does so through its curation of the best wedding vendors, wedding focussed blog and content.
In an interaction with BW Disrupt, Divyata Shergill, Founder, ShaadiWish shared details about her venture.
Genesis
Until a few years ago, when most couples planned their weddings they relied heavily on the recommendations of their relatives and friends while selecting vendors. However, with the advent of social media and directories, engaged couples found themselves browsing through a list of thousands of vendors with pretty pictures, still grappling with the issue of credibility and finding the perfect wedding vendors. These issues were first hand were experienced by one of the founders while planning her own wedding back in 2011.
Furthermore, before launching ShaadiWish both founders were working full time jobs, they saw their colleagues struggling to plan their weddings, with hectic jobs and no time off. Thus, the germ of the idea was sown many years before ShaadiWish was actually born.
This made us immediately realise the huge gap in the Indian wedding market and we thus began the process of curating the market. We believe that there is a massive opportunity to disrupt the market and aggregate the highly fragmented wedding industry. Our website curates & our team of editors filters the wedding vendors through a step by step process and focuses on providing them a marketing and promotions platform. In respect of our users since the wedding vendors promoted on our website form a part of the curated list, they do not have to browse through thousands of vendors in a category.
Key Features
ShaadiWish is an exhaustive online resource for all wedding’s things. With our motto is “Your Big Day is our Biggest”, assists prospective couples plan their big day through our concierge services and personalised signature events. ShaadiWish, on its website and mobile applications also provides a lot of wedding planning advice and inspiration, through featuring curated real weddings, blogs on latest trends and expert advice from our wedding vendors. Users are able to find vendors online, connect to them directly and even use the app to send their wedding invites.
However, the most unique aspect is that we provide personalised marketing solutions to our vendors by creating unique collaboration concepts, online campaigns and creating and producing brand AVs for vendors. This works brilliantly as we create a lot of unique content for our wedding vendors, promote and market them and also generate leads for them.
Differentiation
ShaadiWish greatly differs from its existing competition. In country like India with more than a billion people, even today people are starting food, fashion and construction companies. The main focus has to be on each company’s own product, business and audience. Accordingly, the most important differentiator being that ShaadiWish is not a yellow pages of wedding vendors. We are a curated platform that creates original content for our curated vendors and markets them to our target audience. This also implies that we have a plethora of aggregated information, content and inspiration to offer our users, which is highly unique. We have achieved this through personalised online campaigns for our vendors to engage the right target audience.
Funding Status and Monetization
Presently, the business is mostly funded by the founders, Tanveer Shergill and Divyata Shergill. We make money through charging our vendors a promotions and marketing fee. The vendors on the platform pay a fixed fee to be promoted on the ShaadiWish website and social media handles. Having said, we also customise solutions for our vendors and also charge a commission when a lead through us is successfully converted.
Traction Details
With 14 million impressions & an average month on month viewership growth rate of 158%, our growth trajectory in just 8 months from launch looks promising. In a cluttered online wedding assist category with more than dozen players to run very targeted ads, build a meaningful community and get visited by more than 60,000 people every month for our original content and tips shows an upward spike.
Expansion Plans
We are planning to become a holistic touch point in the majorly unorganized Indian wedding category by innovatively marketing the B2B partners and simultaneously servicing the customized needs of the B2C segments. The obsolete listing model becoming a given, we aim at growing ferociously both in reach and in turnover with our OMFG Model:
Original Content Curation for National and International Partners
Marketplace
Focused Vendors+ Audience
Gifting & Merchandise
