WedWise: India’s largest Online Wedding community with YouTube Channel

You might get several online lists of top 10 wedding planners, best wedding planners in your city, best five budget wedding planners, etc. Most of such listings are not reliable since they are neither created by experts nor based on user recommendations. WedWise, India’s largest online wedding community, is the best solution to it. This real-time vendor recommendation platform is revolutionizing the way brides and grooms are connecting with vendors for wedding planning solutions. Founded by Ginny Kohli in May 2015, WedWise connects the would-be couples with wedding experts, wedding planners and newlyweds at the same time.

What made Ginny Kohli found WedWise? Was it her zeal to be an entrepreneur or a sudden new beGinnyng? Throwing some light on the initiation of WedWise, Ginny Kohli says, “It’s not like I woke up one fine day to decide I wanted to be an entrepreneur. The way we do business in India is definitely different from that in other parts of the world.” After a stint of two years in a corporate setup, she worked with her father in his business of British bikes for one year. Then she found the gap between the would-be married and wedding vendors in the Indian wedding marketplace as a promising business opportunity which resulted in WedWise.

Ginny Kohli earned an electronic & computer engineering degree from Aston University in the United Kingdom. Then she worked as a design engineer for Trent1000 & BR725 engines of Rolls Royce in the UK for 2 years. After return to India in 2010, she did MBA at Infinity Business School in Gurgaon and then worked as a consultant for Groupon for 2.5 years. She found it a bit challenging to adjust herself in an altogether different corporate scene in India. It was then she decided to quit the job and start something new on her own. Currently, she is the CEO of WedWise, headquartered in New Delhi.

While talking about the USP of WedWise, Ginny Kohli says, “WedWise is an online advisory & discussion platform on Facebook with an effort to help people get ideas, discover new trends and book authentic & credible vendors who are backed by customer delight to have a stress-free way of planning a perfect wedding. Indian wedding market is flooded with all sorts of wedding services & professionals but to find the one that fits an individual’s need and budget is always a task. This is where WedWise comes into play.”

Is there any competition for WedWise in the market? Being the first of its kind in the wedding space, WedWise has no competition but competitors. Unlike other existing wedding portals, WedWise is not just a portal but an online community with two dimensions: B2B and B2C. “We have positioned ourselves as an all-in-one wedding platform where prospective brides and grooms can get ideas, discover new trends, seek suggestions and book authentic wedding vendors. We are a community driven wedding startup,” says Ginny Kohli.

She adds, “Another thing that makes us stand out from others is the fact that we also have a strong offline community. In the past, we have organized quite a few innovative events and meetups, well attended by new and old community members and seasoned wedding professionals. Our next networking event is scheduled for the month of June.”

Challenges come with experiences for entrepreneurs. The same happened to Ginny Kohli during the inception of WedWise. Being a single woman, she faced some inherent issues in the wedding sector at the initial phase of WedWise. So foraying into this space with a non e-commerce platform was a challenge. What she found the biggest challenge was to bring all wedding related vendors together to connect with each other and grow their businesses holistically in order to create as well as develop a community driven ecosystem. Now WedWise is adding all stakeholders to its community, which did not happen in any wedding fraternity in India so far, according to Ginny Kohli.

It has been a year since the inception of WedWise. It is a frequently trodden road to many while it was the road not taken to Miss Kohli. Unlike other online businesses in the wedding space, WedWise did not limit itself within the dimensions of a website. Today it is a thriving and evolving community of over 25,000 members actively interacting with each other. Every day, wedding management professionals, wedding fashion designers, wedding planners and other vendors answer hundreds of queries by prospective brides and grooms in the community. They can showcase and share their portfolios with prospects in real time. Even home-based entrepreneurs and homemakers are members of the community. It bears evidence to the growing traction of WedWise.

Being a promising startup, WedWise has managed to raise seed funding from STEP (Startup Equity Partners), which has made it possible to carve a niche in the market. In current times of digital boom, WedWise is all set to leverage the potential of digital platforms including YouTube. “We have recently launched India’s first ever Wedding Channel, WedWise TV, on YouTube as an initiative to ease the process of planning a wedding in India.

What does future have in store for WedWise? “The next plan is to expand our community reach to the UK and the US in order to help the Indian diaspora connect with wedding vendors in India,” says Ginny Kohli.

“Consistent innovation keeps a product alive. Just as a rolling stone does not gather moss, an evolving product never fades away. That’s what we have realized in a short span of time, even less than a year. WedWise has managed to stand out in the Indian wedding market by means of innovative events such as the Bride Crawl and the Make up master classes. Entrepreneurship and innovation should go hand in hand,” says Ginny Kohli ebulliently on a closing note.