Mukesh Makhijani is the founder of Wednue – Wedding Venue Booking Company helping you find and book the Perfect Venues for you.
Mukesh is an hospitality entrepreneur with 25 years’ experience of running a successful Meeting and Incentive Travel company. Prior to Wednue, his company has successfully managed more than 400 events in 200 destinations across 24 countries for leading corporate houses.
Wednue is his new venture co-founded with Amit Chawla and Tarun Goyal, seasoned professionals from the hospitality and travel trade.
We have an interview with Mr. Mukesh Makhijani CEO and Founder, Wednue.com
What is Wednue ?
Wednue is a full service wedding venue booking start-up helping users to discover and book the right venue for their wedding and social events and connect with verified vendors and services related to wedding planning.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? How different is it to the existing wedding planning companies ?
Wednue is in a very sweet spot of wedding market. Weddings in India can be broadly categorised in 3 levels.
- Entry Level - A mass market DIY category with no headroom for planner due to budget constraints.
- Top Level - Highly customised and creative space which is fulfilled by wedding planners. It’s cost agonistic to high level but on the other hand has scalability constraints.
- Mid Level - We exist in the mid-segment which aspires and needs assistance for big fat Indian wedding but at the same time does not want to incur a heavy cost of wedding planner eating into their primary budget.
Our target group is weddings with a hospitality budget of 20-50 lacs. We are able to add serious value here ensuring customer satisfaction.
Tell us about how did the idea to start Wednue strike?
Though Wednue is a Covid start-up, the idea germinated some time back when some wedding planning companies and our corporate customers reached out to us to manage their wedding hospitality. At that time, we were too busy managing the corporate events to give it a serious thought. It took covid to wake us up and see the growing wedding market.
Do you mean to say that you are also working with Wedding Planners on a B2B model?
Yes. Wednue also assists wedding planners to find and book the right venue for their clients under their banner. By out-sourcing the venue search, the planner can focus on his creative core while we contract venue for them on a profit sharing model. It saves them the cost of maintaining a venue search team and hence is a win-win partnership.
How has the journey been so far ? What are your initial learning and course correction?
We are happy with the initial traction we are seeing. We entered the market in Feb ‘21, just before the second wave. Our Micro-Wedding campaign for 50 people wedding packages was taken really well. Our initial idea of going fully online had to be tweaked to a hybrid model. So now the discovery phase is online driven and the booking phase is hand held by our venue specialists.
Which problem do you solve for customer and What value does Wednue add ?
Venue is the first problem to solve to kickstart your wedding planning process. We save a lot of time, money and hassle of finding the right venue. We help you arrive at the short list of probable venues with budget sitting at home and then the guided recce with our venue specialists helps you lock the venue. Our reach, scale and insights help us find the right venue match faster and on better terms. This let’s you enjoy and focus on your special day. Once you have booked the venue, we connect you to our hand-picked verified vendors like wedding decoration, entertainment, photography etc. required to turn your wedding into a memorable one. In a nutshell, you get all your work done through the qualified vendors without the assistance and extra cost of planners.
What is the future plan of your start-up? Are we looking at something bigger?
We plan to add 1000 venues on the platform by the end of the year. Our International Destination Wedding Venues will start as soon as the outbound flight connectivity gets better. Geographically, we are looking at opening our partner offices in Mumbai, Kolkata and Jaipur, as we see lot of queries coming in for / from these three cities.
Want to reach Wednue ?
Follow the links
www.instagram.com/wednue
contact@wednue.com
www.wednue.com
