Husband-wife team from Delhi School of Economics & XLRI promises to ease your wedding planning
Anand Shahani and Mehak Shahani met in a health nutrition company in 2010 during their internship and fell in love with each other. After four years of long distance relationship, they tied the knot last year. While planning their wedding the duo had to face difficulties in discovering the right venue, vendors like band-baja and catering service among others. To solve this pain the husband-wife duo started a wedding centric blog –Wedmegood (WMG).
”We realised there was a lack of ‘wedding blogs’ in India that people could really trust and connect with. So we decided to marry the concept of a ‘wedding blog’ with a curated vendor listing which has been pre-screened and can help couples not only find the best wedding professionals for their style and budget, but also give them ideas and experiences from other recently married couples,” says Anand.
Wedmegood is a wedding portal which makes the process of planning a modern Indian wedding easy. “We stress on ‘modern’ because our content is tailor made for today’s generation -- one which understands the difference between candid and traditional studio photography, one which wants to do something unique and different, to take just a few examples,” adds Mehak.
Besides this, visitors on the platform can also view the wedding photographs of recently married couples in their city, see their reviews of the vendors they hired and browse through a hand-selected list of wedding vendors.
Anand is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, while Mehak has a post graduate degree from the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Before
Wedmegood, Anand was the marketing manager for Abbott Nutrition and Mehak worked as a risk manager at American Express.Mehak is a serial entrepreneur and runs a makeup and fashion blog, Peaches and Blush. “It’s a blog that was quite honestly started as a hobby and is read by mostly women across the age groups of 17 to 35,” adds Mehak.
Peaches and Blush is a four-year-old portal and clocks around a lakh unique visitors a month. Wedmegood in just two months since its launch and has surpassed all initial traffic estimates projected by the duo. “WMG is a comprehensive wedding resource with a blog, its wedding professional guide and other sections get more than double the amount of time spent per user,” says Anand. Both sites get significant amount of user interaction, which could be gauged through comments and social media interaction.
Wedmegood earns revenue via marketing tie-ups for the WMG featured vendors, and in the future it will explore monetization through advertising and even full-fledged wedding planning. For Peaches and Blush, all the revenue is through ads and content partnerships.
Being a husband-wife team is never easy. “It comes with a warning -- don’t try this at home,” quips Anand. One of the major challenges for Wedmegood is to make people understand that it’s not a directory that anyone can just sign up and get started on. “We are a curated portal and take a lot of pride in recommending the people we do because we truly believe they are the best your money can get you in that city,” says Mehak.
The duo believes that there is space for a lot of wedding websites to coexist together because the market opportunity is really big. “Our differentiation is based on a number of things. Firstly, we are not a simple directory, listing anyone who wants to be featured. Entry into WMG is by invite only. Secondly, our content is a major strength. The Wedmegood blog has some of the most unique, fresh content and solutions to problems that new age couples can identify with and we are already seeing a fantastic response to that,” says Mehak.
Website: Wedmegood and Peachesandblush
