WedWise - A Startup Which Takes Care Of All Your Wedding Work
WedWise Started in May 2015, taking the Social Media by storm and revolutionizing the way weddings are planned. India’s favorite Online Wedding Community.
WedWise endeavour to do something unique and helpful for the prospective Brides and Grooms, WedWise aims to provide the most curated information and helpful tips that is required to rock your wedding day.
From the latest trends to the best venues, from real wedding inspiration to the Dos and Don’ts for Wedding Planning, WedWise will share everything that will help ease wedding stress. WedWise surely go an extra mile to give you the best of the contemporary ideas for your wedding day.
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?
Well the truth is that it’s not like I woke up one fine day to decide I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’m a qualified design engineer and quite enjoyed my job in the UK and returned to India only in 2010.
Returning to the corporate scene in India was a slight challenge even though I did my MBA here. The way we do business here is definitely different from other parts of the world. Not necessarily in a bad way, but the readjustment surely takes some time. By May 2015, after a couple of years of toiling away in the corporate setup, I spent a month working with my father in his British bike’s business, which he was very keen I join, but I recognized this opportunity and decided to createWedWise to fill the gap before someone else did.
What were the challenges before you while setting up this startup?
Well apart from the obvious- that I’m young, single woman- there were inherent issues in the wedding sector, which was unorganized and unstructured. So foraying into this space with an idea and a non e-commerce platform was not the expected “start-up” move. To bring all wedding related vendors together to connect with each other and get inspired to grow their businesses to eventually create a community driven ecosystem was the primary challenge. We now bring in all stakeholders in the wedding industry under one roof, which thus far didn’t exist in the wedding fraternity in India.
What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?
Each start-up in based on the passion and vision of the founders. To retain that vision whilst also organically and dynamically growing is perhaps the biggest challenge. Why I say dynamic growth is difficult is because as an entrepreneur you never really know what the next day will bring. Everything is dependent on how much you put in to your business. Bootstrapping is not a sustainable growth model and securing funds is getting increasingly challenging in today’s business environment. Also, putting together the right core team is essential, and possibly one of the fundamental problems faced by start-ups today.
How is your business model different from the existing ones?
WedWise was created to be India’s first community driven wedding start-up. Our vision is to resolve chokepoints in the wedding ecosystem, whether they be due to information sought extending all the way to end-to-end wedding solutions. The community acts as an aggregator and is thus both a B2B as well as a B2C channel.
WedWise is an effort to help prospective Brides & Grooms to get ideas, discover new trends and book authentic & credible wedding vendors through real-time recommendations.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?
As a community with over 25,000 members actively interacting on the platform, we bring together not only couples and families planning a wedding, but also wedding professionals and service providers. This includes the industry’s top designers, venues, make-up artists, photographers, etc. showcasing their work and connecting with their prospective clients instantly.
WedWise has raised seed-funding from STEP(Startup Equity Partners), which has provided a great opportunity to further explore the market. We’ve recently launched India’s first ever Wedding Channel, WedWise TV, on YouTube as an initiative to prepare and lay the foundations for easing the process of planning a wedding in India.
The next stage would be to expand our community reach to the UK and the US and assist Indians settled overseas and looking to connect with wedding vendors in India.
The best and worst memories while setting up..
The best memory has definitely been to share my vision with my investors who believed in me and trusted the idea and came onboard to mentor me in my journey almost since inception. The learning from them has been immense and will hold me in good stead.
In addition to that, it has been very motivating to receive feedback from community members who have grown with WedWise. Small-scale entrepreneurs like boutique owners, freelancers like make-up artists and photographers, extending all the way to luxury wedding service providers have all reached out to us to share their enthusiasm and gratitude for the avenue WedWise has created for their businesses.
As far as my worst memory goes, I don’t feel that I’d like to change a thing. I’ve learnt vital lessons of running a business at each stage even when I’ve made mistakes and as Oprah Winfrey said “I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you’ve enjoyed the process.”
