Lavish weddings are not enough. Indians want bespoke celebrations

Tanishqa Navani and Khriish Chheda travelled for months across the world, scouting a wedding location that would fit their vision board and 500-odd guests. The Dubai-based couple, childhood friends turned sweethearts, zeroed in on the Shangri-La Hambantota hotel in Sri Lanka, which has an 18-hole golf course. “We saw a group of peacocks on the path leading to the hotel,” Navani, 25, recalls. “It was an instant sign.”

Navani knows exactly how she will make an entrance on 15 November, her wedding day: While ocean waves splash and palm trees sway in the background, she will cross a makeshift bridge over a swimming pool to reach an oval-shaped mandap in the middle of the golf course. Adding colour to the scene will be two life-sized peacocks—made with flowers—floating in the pool. “Think of it like an enchanted forest,” she says.

The other reason for choosing the location was that they didn’t want to host their wedding ceremonies in any of the “usual spots”. A friend had recently tied the knot in Bali, another in Mauritius. Europe was an option, “but it’s just so overexposed and clichéd,” says Chheda, 27, who works at a building materials trading company. “Sri Lanka hasn’t been explored as much, comparatively. My family is coming from Mumbai, hers from Dubai. We have guests from the US, UK, Singapore, Hong Kong. It’s a good location to give people a different experience.”

The couple’s desire to offer something unique reflects in the months-long planning they’ve been doing for the three-day wedding at the five-star hotel. Take the mehndi ceremony: It’s a sundowner party with the theme “Chasing Sunsets”, since Navani and Chheda like to travel. On the wedding day, the couple plans to arrive at the venue in a tuk-tuk, each customised with a crafted, decorative elephant head, while guests will dance to the tune of dholwallas, who are being flown in from Delhi. “Tani (Tanishqa) was feeling FOMO,” laughs Chheda, when asked the reason behind a non-traditional, joint barat. “She doesn’t want to wait around and miss the fun of making a grand entry.” For the reception, they’ve decided to turn a ballroom into a forest. “There will be 3D mountains, trees, floral animals, mermaids and butterflies (women dressed with fins and wings, serving food and beverages),” says Navani, who’s currently building a pet products company. “Each day will have theme-based food, music, dress codes... We don’t want our wedding to be just another destination wedding, where people come, eat, stay and leave. We want to tell them who we two are, what our story is, and get to know each other.”

Indian weddings have always been lavish social events, even for those with modest means. An average Indian spends double of what they do on education on weddings, says a recent report by Jefferies, a US-headquartered investment bank and financial services company. This is about ₹12 lakh on marriage-related ceremonies. Even two decades ago, families were spending six times their annual income on a wedding, concluded a 2004 study, Wedding Celebrations As Conspicuous Consumption: Signaling Social Status In Rural India, published in the Journal Of Human Resources. When it comes to the rich, spending has been consistently limitless. After all, weddings are also a way to display social capital, status and wealth.

A display of extravagance is no longer enough, though. Many couples, much like Navani and Chheda, are increasingly looking for one theme when planning their wedding: everything bespoke. They seek to add a “wow” factor to their celebrations that also reflects their selves. The recent Ambani wedding, for example, grabbed global attention not just for the extreme display of wealth and the celebrity-heavy guest list but also for personalised themes like a Mela Rouge-themed party in Gujarat and a black-tie Le Masquerade evening in Cannes.

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There’s no limit to customising a wedding. It can range from something as simple as adding six themed, pre-wedding events where different sets of family and friends jet off to different parts of the world just to party, to something as elaborate as a drone show narrating the story of how a Ukrainian and a Punjabi fell in love in Dubai. In other words, the kind of wedding that knocks guests’ socks off and makes them spread the word that the one-of-a-kind Chinese dosa they ate at a French château, made by a south Indian chef trained in Beijing (yes, true story) was to die for. Or that the fragrance at a wedding venue in Jaipur instantly transported them to alpine meadows of Switzerland, the country where the couple first met.

There’s no official data to reflect the rise in demand for personalisation, given that weddings are a personal affair. But ask any established wedding planner in metro cities what couples demand nowadays, and “something new” is the recurring response.

Of the 10 requests Devanshi Patel receives a month, almost all come with one keyword: customise. Patel is the Mumbai-based founder of Shreem Events, which is currently handling Navani and Chheda’s wedding. “Gone are the days when planners used to offer fixed gold, silver, platinum packages; it’s become a black hole of customisation requests,” says Patel, whose clients are mostly high net-worth individuals or HNIs (an individual with investable assets of $1 million, or around ₹8.3 crore, or more). “Ten years ago, people wanted red roses. Today, they will only settle for tulips from Amsterdam. Renting beaches, palaces, islands, has become common now. Given the limitless demands, customisation services have increased, especially after the pandemic.”

Going bespoke is also a way to live in the moment. The you-live-only-once mindset, as Madhu Viswanathan, associate professor of marketing at Hyderabad’s Indian School of Business, points out. People started embracing the live-in-the-moment concept “in a big way post covid, especially youngsters who are more experience-driven rather than asset-driven (in other words, they are keener to invest in experiences rather than, say, a house or a car). They might get inspired by Bollywood celebrities, but they don’t want to copy them,” he says. “Today’s millennials and Gen Z are more about ‘me’.”

This desire to be “me” may account for the steady rise in wedding costs. Going by the estimates given by wedding planners in Delhi and Mumbai, two major centres in the field, an average bespoke wedding can range from ₹50 lakh to hundreds of crores, depending on the level of customisation. Couple the willingness to spend with the growing number of HNIs (India had 35,000 HNIs last year, a number expected to grow by 40% in the next five years, according to market research firm Euromonitor International), and you will get an idea why the big Indian wedding industry is getting larger. It is currently valued at $130 billion, nearly double that of the US but smaller than China ($170 billion), states the Jefferies report. Last year, the homegrown industry saw ₹4.74 trillion in earnings, marking a 26.4% rise compared to the previous year, shows an annual report by WedMeGood, a wedding planning website and app. “Wedding professionals have reported a 15-22% increase in their business year-on-year from 2022 to 2023, coming off the back of the rise in destination weddings,” Mehak Sagar Shahani, co-founder of WedMeGood, told Mint in January when the report was released. “The customer base is also evolving and is paying more and more attention to detail.”

One of the reasons for the growing focus on the smallest details of wedding planning is that couples, not parents, are now actively controlling the narrative—though the latter are still paying the bills. “It’s no longer about ‘you marry only once’. It’s about, ‘I want to cherish this moment’,” says Ruchita Sharma, founder of Globaluxuria Ethical Luxe, a luxury consultancy firm. The shift in attitude, she explains, has a lot to do with social media. “While people say they want to be themselves, they also want to one up the person whose wedding photos they saw on their feed,” she says. “And how will that happen when you’re surrounded by so many trends? By being yourself.”

Strictly personal

A few months ago, calligrapher Sanjana Chatlani received a call from a London-based NRI couple. They wanted an image of the temple the groom’s family owned handpainted on their wedding invitation. As with most of her clients, Chatlani, founder of The Bombay Lettering Company, a Mumbai studio dedicated to calligraphy, design and stationery, spent months coordinating with the planner, the décor team and the couple to understand the moodboard of the wedding.

“The card should be more than a card,” Chatlani recalls the client telling her. Finally, each of the inserts in the invitation—save the date, pre-wedding party, wedding and reception—carried a Sanskrit mantra hand-lettered on the back, so that the cards could eventually be framed. The cost of each individual invitation ended up crossing ₹4,000, including the printing cost. Chatlani’s design fee starts at around ₹2 lakh. As the customisation changes, so do her prices.

“Since many non-Indians were on the guest list, the family wanted the invitation to be a memento,” she says. “They also wanted to ensure the cards didn’t end up in the dustbin. Such consciousness is getting popular now.”

So are requests regarding destination wedding paraphernalia. For a recent destination wedding, Chatlani designed boarding pass covers, airport placards, luggage tags and backrest covers for guests arriving in chartered flights—all carrying symbols, like logos, favourite flowers, or just their initials wrapped together in a wreath, to reflect the couple’s journey. “It’s personal branding in a more seamless way,” she says. “These small things help elevate the feel and look of any wedding.”

Agrees Itchha Talreja, the founder of wedding invitation company Itchha Talreja Designs. She gives a recent example of a Delhi-based bride-to-be who had the following idea for her invitation logo: it should reflect the idea of “balance, good vibes and growth”. “So, we made a ying and yang (for balance) in a shape of moon (for growth) and sun (good vibes),” Talreja says. 

While Indian weddings have always been spectacles of varying scale, such attention to detail didn’t exist till a decade ago. During the 1990s and early 2000s, around the time the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding laid bare the crudeness of the wedding contractor, nuptials were still a family-managed affair, where the most was spent on food, jewellery, clothes and gifts. Bollywood celebrity weddings used to be hush-hush events wrapped up in a day, unlike today’s highly publicised, extravagant productions.

A big change came in the 2000s when the internet started spreading its web, says Parthip Thyagarajan, co-founder and chief executive of weddingsutra.com, a 24-year-old media brand dedicated to all things bridal. “More brides started experimenting with designer clothes, fashion jewellery became a thing, and Bollywood started influencing people in a big way,” he says.

The next big pivot in the wedding industry began before the pandemic. “Many things started happening around 2017-18,” Thyagarajan explains. “Celebrities were publicising their weddings in exotic locations, people’s spending power was increasing, more luxury brands were entering India. And then, suddenly, the world stopped. Once people came out of their houses (post covid), they were already exposed to too many trends. They now wanted to live the good life on their own terms owing to an extreme realisation of self,” he says, adding an anecdote to illustrate his point. “A decade ago, people weren’t so bothered about flowers and décor, but now they want everything to be top notch and very specific, since it’s going to live forever in a photograph.”

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What’s the moodboard?

Navani is thinking of getting cascading English florals in blush tones to deck up her mandap, matching the wedding day’s “soft pastels” theme. “It will make for a nice, subtle visual contrast to the lush green golf course, right?” she asks, confirming with her moodboard.

Saanya Sharma, on the other hand, opted for a variety of flowers to match the theme of her mehndi ceremony: “Rainbow of Love”. “Each table had a different colour of the rainbow,” says Sharma, 30, co-founder of wedding designing and production company Three Entertainment, who got married earlier this year in Mumbai. Among the other décor elements were 10ft-tall flower installations and a wall with 19 compartments, each filled with a variety of flowers to look like a vertical garden.

Such requirements were largely unheard of 16 years ago, when Jehangir Readymoney joined his mother’s business, Afreen Wedding Services, specialising in floral design. The requirements were then largely restricted to stage design, mandap, entrance and perhaps tables, divided into themes like Indian or Western. “The scale has now increased,” says Readymoney, who’s also a direct importer of peonies, tulips and Delphinium from countries like New Zealand, Kenya and the Netherlands. In the past two years, Afreen Wedding Services has done around 160 weddings annually in India and abroad. This year, they have completed about 120 weddings. “When we sit with the client, most say they want everything to be bespoke... bespoke bar, bespoke stage. We have turned a wedding venue into an opulent living room in someone’s house. That’s the level of detailing people want now.”

And it extends to food. Flying a famous chaiwallah from Kolkata to Lake Como or a popular Delhi chaat maker to Calgary is becoming as common in rich Indian weddings as having a Belgian couple fly to Mahabaleshwar to make waffles at a ring ceremony or inviting a Michelin chef from Japan to make sushi at a Mussorie villa. “Imagine you are offering your guests fresh masala chai and malai toast while they are sitting in a palace in Greece. That’s a service beyond expectations,” says Akshay Gupta, director of sales at luxury catering company FoodLink, explaining the rise in customisation. FoodLink offered catering services at the recent Ambani wedding events. “And it’s limitless. People don’t want to eat pasta in Italy; they want their butter naan and chhole bhature. We’ve had people requesting nine to 10 cuisines for one event.”

In a year, FoodLink does about 200-plus weddings in India, and over 20 abroad, for which their staff travels, along with the spice box, a sigri (tandoor; just transporting it in a plane can cost a few lakhs) to make naan, and seasonal items that might not be available in a foreign land.

On an average, such a lavish spread comes at the cost of ₹5,000-plus per plate in India.

“India is a country known for its hospitality; we eat with our eyes,” says Gupta. “Even at home we always have two-three items on our plate. So, the growing desire for variety when looking for customisation isn’t so surprising.”

He gives an example of a recent wedding party, catered by Foodlink, where prasads were brought from temples across India. Gupta says, “If one is prepared to invest, sky’s the limit.”

Let’s keep it OTT

Navani and Chheda, too, are contemplating adding a Dubai and Mumbai chaat corner, featuring sev puri, shawarma, falafel and vada pav, as a tribute to the cities each grew up in. The other thing they are contemplating is a drone show, which will depend on the permission they get from the government authorities.

When Shobhit and Ashi Jain, founders of event planning company Event Casa, did perhaps India’s first drone show for a recent wedding, they had to seek several approvals. Till then, only the Indian government and the Indian Premier League had put on a such a show. “This couple had a lovely story, and they wanted us to show their journey with a drone show. It was difficult, but not undoable,” recalls Shobhit. Finally, with the help of 400-odd drones, some planning using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to visualise how everything would look and a spending of thousands of dollars, guests at Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan Palace saw the couple’s journey in the sky: a Ukranian woman meets an Indian man in Dubai, they fall in love and get married in a palace.

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The hunger for something new and more is also an indication of how bored people have become with following a set template —including the colour of garments. Reds are fading; light pinks, blues, even blacks, are shining.

When Delhi’s Naushita Jaising, 32, wore a black-silver gown with a splash of copper, custom designed by Amit Aggarwal for her cocktail, the groom’s side wasn’t too happy. “They thought black was inauspicious, but I convinced them since the dress matched the theme of the day (‘forest’),” says Jaising, an education consultant. “It was glam, not blingy, very avant-garde—exactly my personal style. I used the original belt of the dress as a headpiece. I don’t think it’s fair to compromise when you are celebrating one of the biggest moments of your life.”

When it comes to customisation of wedding clothes, designer Aggarwal has seen the attitude shift from close quarters. Over 40% of his men’s and women’s collections are geared towards wedding festivities. “There was a time when men only wore black tuxedos and women, bright reds and pinks. Now, things have changed, with people becoming more conscious about personal style,” he says. “It’s not about challenging traditional norms. It’s an indication of more confidence in today’s generation.”

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Mumbai-based Nisha Kundnani, who runs bridal styling company Bridelan, says brides-to-be from metros and tier-II and III cities approach her with AI references of what they want to wear on their ceremonies—it could be a Manish Malhotra-esque fishtail lehnga combined with a sheer, embroidered blouse they saw actor Jahnvi Kapoor wear at an event and a veil they stumbled upon on Etsy. “The modern bride doesn’t need a celeb to inspire her,” says Kundnani. “They will see everything but what they will wear at the end would be completely different.”

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She also agrees that constant exposure to social media is encouraging couples to put their own spin on traditions. But there’s another side to it. “There’s so much fatigue around trends that some people are now also tired of chasing them,” Kundnani says. “That’s why they want everything to be bespoke.”

The social aspect

Irrespective of the love-hate relationship with social media, the hope to go viral remains intact. Couples are now opening their Instagram pages, dedicated to document their wedding celebrations. For some, it’s a way to become famous.

In a year, Digisha Shah creates social media content for 15-20 weddings across the world. Her work could mean generating pre-wedding buzz with Reels, behind-the-scenes imagery of ceremony preparations, quick interviews with grooms and bride, even helping guests create videos at the functions.

“After Bollywood, people love watching weddings,” says Shah, the founder of Mumbai-based PR firm DSPR and Yours Truly, a social media agency. Pre-covid, she used to get three-four clients. “It’s like a digital memoir of your wedding,” Shah explains. “There are people who turn their account into a family page, documenting their post-wedding life, like influencers.”

Some even want a reality show-like film. “I have had brides and grooms tell me to not take their left or right profile shots, because they will not look great on the (Instagram) grid,” says Mumbai-based Himanshu Patel, the founder of photography company Epic Stories. His schedule for the year is packed with weddings in India, Canada, the US, Greece and Europe. “In 2017, when I started this work, wedding photographers weren’t given as much respect as they are shown today. We spend days with families, talking to them, interviewing them, so that the film looks authentic.” He’s referring to the new trend where the bride, the groom and their families talk about each other in a documentary-style production. Think Indian Matchmaking but only happy stories.

Navani and Chheda are open to the idea of such a film. They have also decided on a dedicated Instagram page. Two months before the wedding, their account will be up and running. “It’s going to be a three-day long party,” says the bride-to be. “We want people’s jaws to drop.”

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