BigIndianWedding Raises Funds

Delhi: Delhi-based wedding planning services portal BigIndianWedding (BIW) has raised an undisclosed amount of funds, reportedly less than $5 million, from a privately held Indian business family. The funds would be used to launch its ecommerce section.

Talking about the investor interest in BIW, Ashish Abrol, Founder, BigIndianWedding says, “The wedding industry in India is estimated to be at 50,000 crore and growing at the rate of 20 percent per annum. Though we don’t have the exact numbers for the overseas NRI market, but with over 25 million NRIs spread across the globe, we believe there is enough room for growth for BIW. There are approximately 20 million subscribers on matrimonial sites in India, but they do not have an online resource to help the subscribers plan their wedding. BIW aims to address this gap by assisting the bride and the groom with the wedding planning needs.”

The site aims to simplify the complex wedding planning process by doing research and mapping out the best possible vendors in each category, which is presented to the customer to make his choice. It also provides advices to the customers on the latest trends in the fashion and fitness industry.

It provides a one-stop-shop for all the wedding needs: finding the venue, the caterer and the couture. The company procures the products from its vendors and maintains its own warehouses for storing the products, and currently has 23 employees.

Talking about post-acquisition plans, Abrol says, “We plan to launch our ecommerce site in the coming week. We will be hiring aggressively over the next few months in sales, buying/merchandising, technology, for our call centre, and many other segments. There is no other portal that provides the breadth and depth of services like we do. We provide listings through an online magazine and ecommerce. We intend to be the largest platform for Indian weddings on the Internet.”

The company was founded in 2011 by Ashish Abrol, who has worked with IBM, CSC, and Deutsche Bank. He holds a degree in B.E from Malviya National Institute of Technology.

The website gets its revenues through advertisements and had planned to introduce another revenue model where it would be paid by the merchants every time a customer used the website to reach the merchant and purchased something.

Abrol also adds, “We believe that we will generate a lot of our ecommerce sales from overseas markets like U.S., UK, Canada, and others. We foresee huge demand for our listing services (vendor listings) from users with India. NRIs have been using our listing services very successfully as well.”

The company is present in 11 cities: Delhi & NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, and Ludhiana. It plans to increase its presence to 15 cities, in the upcoming months. Also, it has over 6,100 vendors in more than 30 categories, which it plans to increase to 10,000 in the coming month. The company is adding more suppliers to its already existing list of 25 suppliers.