This sister duo want to put India on the global map with big fat Indian weddings

As a child, Prerana Agarwal Saxena was always interested in making rooms and spaces look pretty. After an MBA degree and a career in the financial and banking sector, Prerana finally gave in to her inner creative calling to become a professional wedding planner.

In 2008, Prerana and her sister Anushree Agarwal founded Theme Weavers Designs to provide complete wedding planning and designing services in India and abroad.

The duo is now competing in the growing wedding market that was estimated to be $50 billion in 2020, according to a report by KPMG.

The big fat Indian weddings

Prerana’s journey in the event planning space started when she organised her son’s birthday party, where a corporate event planner lauded her work and suggested she take it up professionally. 

After taking a sabbatical for a couple of years, she experimented with planning several birthday parties and corporate events and officially founded Theme Weavers Designs in 2008. The Gurugram-based firm emphasised on recreating different places of interest for its customers to deliver unique experiences.

In 2010, Prerana and her sister worked on their first wedding project and decided to focus on planning luxury destination weddings. 

“Working on the wedding of Shivraj Singh, the Yuvraj of Jodhpur, to Gayatri Kumari has been a highlight of our journey,” Prerana says.

Although anybody involved in planning wedding celebrations know it is a very frustrating experience, the sisters say that the love and affection they receive from the family members of the bride and groom is the most gratifying feeling. 

“Weddings used tobe an unorganised market, mainly dominated by men. As a woman, sometimes you have to tell people it is not a hobby and you mean business,” she adds. 

The thrill in making creative and innovative wedding experiences keeps them going and ensures that no two weddings are the same.

Before signing on a client, they get on a 30-minute “discovery call” for free to explain how the wedding plan works. If the clients are interested, they proceed by creating a word map based on their conversations to draw a theme, develop a mood board, and start working in consultation with the family to incorporate any changes.

Based in Gurugram with an office in London, the firm handles an average of five to ten weddings in a year, with themes ranging from quirky Delhi-meets-Mumbai (based on bride and groom’s native place) to traditional Indian experience.

With little to no investment, Theme Weavers Design was started with a capital of 50 percent advance payment for each project. They have worked on more than 250 projects so far.

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With the coronavirus-induced lockdown, Prerana says several weddings were put on hold and cancelled, but the team managed to pull off a memorable wedding of less than 50 people in July 2020.

At the same time, it has given her more time to spend with her friends and family. The peripatetic nature of the work meant that some days, her goal would be to just be home. 

Resolute and happy with her choice of profession, Prerana hopes to put India on the global map through her wedding planning and management services.

“Frankly, the government has not encouraged wedding tourism enough when so much can be done. We have done weddings in India and abroad and what India has to offer in terms of hospitality and cultural appeal cannot be compared to any other place in the world,” she says.

In 2019, she started Royal Rendezvous, an event where planners from across the world were invited to experience India. Although the event did not take place in 2020 due to safety concerns, Prerana hopes to continue this year onwards. The idea is to draw the planner’s attention to India as a place for destination weddings.