Digging Deeper | Band Baaja Billions: The Business of Weddings

 In 2010, a sleeper Yash Raj hit called Band Baaja Baraat rejigged a lot of things not just in the Hindi film industry but in the way middle-class India looked at the business of weddings.

It spun a story that blended the youthful yearning for a better life with the idea that even small budget weddings could be managed professionally. Just a delicious twist of fate that both stars of the film ended up having designer weddings though of course, the budget was far more than Bittu or Shruti in the film could have envisaged.

By 2016, many young aspirants like the protagonists of Band Baaja Baraat had joined the recession-proof, ever expanding wedding market. In May that year, a Business Standard piece reported that booming start-ups and wedding planning websites had replaced uncles and aunts as event managers of the quintessential Indian wedding and the industry, was hovering around the staggering figure of $40-50 billion.

The piece reported how even Wharton-graduate Dharam Mehta had founded Wedwise in October 2015 and 25-year-old Sanna Vohra’s Wedding Brigade had raised Rs 4 crore in pre-series A round of funding led by Blume Ventures.

In this Moneycontrol Deep Dive podcast, we will try to examine the all-consuming business of the big, fat, Indian wedding.