Verve Wedding Diaries #12: The Match Fixers

Text by Wyanet Vaz

Luxury wedding planners Yamini Shah and Rishi Rochlani create the ultimate bridal experience, and talk to us about start-up challenges and the best part about planning and plotting

“Behind every wedding lies 200 hours of planning. We never get tired because we love what we do and we do what we love.” Yamini Shah and Rishi Rochlani, founders of The Wedding Designers, revel in the joy of co-ordinating, researching, planning and putting together the big fat Indian wedding. With the bridal season in tow, we go behind the scenes with these wedding planners as they talk about start-up challenges, destination weddings, perks of their job, and juggling lives as work partners and even life partners.

Idea behind The Wedding Designers (TWD)… “We always wanted to do what we love so we don’t end up doing what we hate for the rest of our lives. Neither of us is made for a nine-to-five desk job. Wedding planning and designing seemed to be the perfect blend for both of us. We wanted to plan each wedding as if it were our own.”

A start-up is… “Challenging, exciting, stressful.”

The best part about being an entrepreneur… “You get to do what you love for people in love.”

Greatest challenge… “Your paycheck is not guaranteed but you have to keep going.”

The best part about working with each-other… “We have each other’s back. Individually, we have our own strengths and weaknesses, but together, we make up for each other’s shortcomings.”

The challenging part about working with each other… “There are times when we have to bring work back home. It becomes a little difficult to balance work and personal life.”

A memorable wedding… “Even though all the weddings we take up are close to us, if we had to choose, our favorite would be the one at Aamby Valley City Wedding. Not only were the wedding celebrations fabulous, but the eight months of planning and designing with the couple was wonderful.”

Top 5 destination wedding spots in India… “Jodhpur, Udaipur, Aamby Valley City, Goa, Jaipur.”

A change post TWD… “We search for inspirations everywhere we go, right from the food we eat at restaurants, to the movies we see, to the holidays we plan. We try to inculcate different styles and cultures in the weddings we plan.”

If not TWD, then what… “Being a creative person, for Yamini it would’ve been interior designing whereas Rishi’s chosen field would’ve been finance.”

Looking forward… “We hope to become the ultimate luxury service providers of weddings in Asia that would entail event consultation, a gift registry and home interior planning for newly-weds.”

Success to you is… “The smiles on the faces of our clients, when they see the end result after all the hours we put in, to make their wedding the way they had imagined it to be.”