Marriages may be made in heaven. But they have to be solemnised on earth.
And with marriage frills undergoing changes in colour and scale, the demand for professional event management companies and wedding planners is on the rise. While the rich are going in for concept and destination weddings, the middle-class is assigning the management of the event to specialised people.
Industry players say the organised event management industry is projected to grow to Rs 5,000 crore by 2015, with a CAGR of 14 per cent. And of this, the annual wedding spend is estimated between Rs 1,500 and Rs 1,800 crore.
Tracing the growth of this industry, the demand for wedding and event management education is also on the rise. Hyderabad-based Rachnoutsav Events has tied up with Leeds Metropolitan University of UK to launch one of the few structured courses for wedding planning and designing in India.
A South African wedding planning school is also in talks with the company to train students in Indian wedding planning, as the region has a significant Indian population.
“Today candidates taking basic wedding planning courses are getting into event management companies for entry salaries of Rs 25,000 and Rs 35,000 a month. With the budget for Indian marriages ranging from Rs 5 lakh to a few crores, event management companies earn a margin of 20-25 per cent,” Mr Sanjay Kankaria, Director of Rachnoutsav Events, said.
The domestic organised event management industry has about 100 players, with some 20 of them run by Bollywood celebrities such as Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgan and Juhi Chawla and few others by major media houses.
“Destination weddings to places such as Mauritius, Malaysia and Thailand involve a margin of 30-35 per cent of professional event managers. They take care of the entire event from chartering out to chartering in of the guests,” Mr Kankaria said.
Rachnoutsav handles about 200 events across occasions a year, with an increasing number of destination weddings. It is planning to set up similar training units at Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Nagpur, Vizag, Pune and Bangalore in the next few years, involving an investment of Rs 75 crore.