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Ashish Abrol

Ashish Abrol

Founder
BigIndianwedding.com

Short Description

He is the founder of BigIndianwedding.com

Company Profile

BigIndianwedding.com is a first of its kind wedding planning portal.  It is a one stop shop for all your wedding planning needs –be it finding a venue, a caterer a lehenga or a makeup artist. BigIndianwedding.com is the place where brides and grooms to be and their families can start their wedding planning search 24X7 from the comfort of their bedroom. The website provides listings of thousands of vendors across 13 cities in over 35 categories. Currently, we have over 11000 vendors listed on the portal. Moreover, our listings are not limited to the expensive designer lot but instead our vendor listings are chosen to cater to every whim, every style and every pocket. The convenience of a portal like BigIndianwedding.com reduces the need to collect information about vendors by physically travelling long distances. This is especially a great help when a family is planning an out of town wedding. Besides providing listing of vendors who can customise your wedding to your tastes, BigIndianWedding.com also provides expert advice from leading lights on subjects such as wedding fashion, jewellery selection, decorations, stylists, make up artists and much more.The company was founded in June, 2010.

Most Critical Decision

The most critical decision was to start the company. I had come on a holiday to India (I was settled in the US) to relax, unwind and take a short sabbatical from work. It was then that the idea of starting a company in the Internet space was born. I quickly realised that  the wedding market was huge in India and despite that there was no credible player in the market addressing the segment. So, I decided to jump in and started www.bigindianwedding.com and today we are India's #1 wedding planning portal in terms of traffic and overall reach.

Doing things differntly
I would not say that everything we've done so far has been perfect but we can say with reasonable amount of confidence  that we have not gone wrong with any major decision so far. With God’s grace, the journey so far has been satisfactory. However, looking back, I would probably like to slow down a little. I feel we have established a lot of things in our first two years. We have over 11,000 vendors listed across 13 cities, we have over 250 articles published by our editorial team, we have interviewed over 50 designers and jewellers and make up artists. In short, we are the largest destination for Indian weddings on the planet. We launched our e-commerce with over 20 of the top designers. We are now ready to slow down!
Motivating Employees
Well, maybe you should ask that question from the  troops! But seriously, I do not believe in specific strategies to motivate people. I choose to be myself. For some of people, this works and they choose to continue with us and for some it doesn't and they choose to move on. Fortunately, my approach has worked so far and I hope to continue in the same vein.
Making right decisions
Well, the job of a leader is to be absolutely sure that he is on the right path. Having said that, one needs to constantly challenge oneself to ensure one is on the right path. We started with a grand vision in mind and we try to execute on that grand vision every single day.  Seeds of doubt do creep in from time to time, but if the heart and mind is set, I believe you may falter but you will recover and move on. As I  mentioned earlier, so far, no significant decision has gone wrong for us.
Advice to young entrepreneurs
As clichéd as it may sound, do not stop dreaming. Though I wouldn’t like to single out any particular group, in these last two years, I have noticed a herd mentality as far investors in India are concerned. Do not let investors or anybody else be a deterrent to accomplishing your dream. There will be many days through this journey when you may question your decisions but if you stick it out long enough, success is inevitable.