What I love most about Indian/South Asian Weddings is the traditional sense of community and support the family provides during the planning process. Especially when the couple is planning more than a single day celebration and choose to incorporate various cultural fusion elements as Indian/South Asian Weddings often do. Here are 7 tips for pros to help fellow pros plan an outstanding Indian/South Asian Wedding!
1. Be the Planner Your Couples Need
Now, amidst a global pandemic, it is extremely important to have a wedding planner who can plan around ever-changing COVID-19 regulations. This presents a unique opportunity for wedding planners and professionals to show how they will support their clients despite complex logistics. While the family and couple may be experts in their traditions and culture, you are the expert in your field and should market yourself as such. Couples are being faced with the enormous task of moving their wedding date and additional events, as well as making sure they are preparing for socially distanced celebrations. As wedding planners and seasoned event pros, we understand the immense value of a couple hiring a wedding planner for their big day to achieve this goal. I’ll take you through several ways you can do your part to assist.
2. Picking your Date(s), Are They Auspicious?
With South Asian weddings there is much thought and consideration that goes into selecting wedding dates. Often, these dates are considered auspicious or lucky dates that will bring success and blessings to the couple. This can differ by region, religion, and family culture. For example, you may find that with Hindu weddings the couples’ parents and priest discuss and decide on the “Mahurat” (or auspicious date). The calculation is decided by Hindu Vedic Astrology many times by the Priest. Depending on the culture, the couple’s horoscope, birth dates, and names could be used to determine an appropriate wedding date. As wedding professionals, especially in a COVID-19 climate where couples may encounter needing to change their date, it's important for us to respect the cultural importance of auspicious dates and not be flippant in our attitude about this. As a best practice, my company, Denise Lillie Engagements asks all of our couples at the Initial Consultation if their wedding date needs to be an auspicious date or not, to better understand and respect the significance of this tradition. If you need to move the wedding to a new date and this is a factor, I suggest you get new auspicious dates from their family and or priest before you contact the other vendors about availability.
3. Be COVID-19 Conscious
As wedding professionals, it is your responsibility to be aware of City, County, State, and Federal Guidelines required to do business in your area. If you haven’t already, you should definitely consult with an attorney to update your contract(s) to reflect your businesses’ COVID-19 policies to limit your liability. For example, many companies are now offering rapid COVID-19 tests on-site at events. This may be something to consider but always keep in mind your liability! Your couple will be looking to you for ideas to ensure their event is Covid Complaint to avoid being shut down or fined. Here are a few ideas to consider:
Prior to guests arriving at the event, you and the couple can prepare guests to be conscious and compliant with the most current COVID-19 regulations. Planners can encourage couples to include on their wedding website that masks will be enforced for all events, and testing negative for COVID-19 will be a requirement for attending. Couples also can have their RSVP cards echo this, and provide additional verbiage to communicate the importance of masks being worn at all times. With South Asian weddings I have found that the RSVP process is best executed when you enlist the family to follow up with guests.
What I have found helpful for my couples is to add the question: “Who is in your bubble?” to their RSVP cards to assist in creating seating charts where guests can be seated with people of their own household or social bubble to reduce exposure.
Due to local COVID-19 regulations, one of my couples had to scale down their wedding from 287 guests to 50 guests. South Asian Weddings are traditionally known for large guest counts so do understand the couple may be frustrated with being required to scale back. However, some couples may be relieved to scale down, because they may not even know the majority of the guests personally. Take the time to ask them how they feel about this so you can work to support how they feel. Either way, It’s important to support them in finding other ways to include guests outside of the allowed guest count. Helping them with this will likely help reduce a lot of stress and pressures they may be having with their families. Live streaming has been a popular option for my couples along with sending virtual guest gift boxes with sweets, favors, and a note encouraging them to dress up for the wedding. We also had some of our videographers finish editing within the wedding week to send videos to guests who could not attend.
For many of our Intimate Weddings this year we moved the wedding from an indoor to an all outdoor venue to follow the county regulations. Another great venue option is their family home. Either way, the layout is where you really should guide your couple and they will likely need the most help. In creating the seating chart for dinner, they also found it helpful to enlist the support of their parents and wedding party to ask guests what bubble they felt most comfortable socializing in.
On the wedding day, we created a Welcome Table complete with a “Sanitation Station.” This table included items such as a thermometer for temperature tests, personalized masks, hand sanitizer, and even a traditional guest book where each guest in attendance signed in–should there be a need for contact tracing post-event. We also had a seating chart in lieu of escort cards and place cards at each table setting and provided individual hand sanitizers as favors.
4. Who's in Your Court?
As you may find with Indian/South Asian Wedding Planning, many couples have no shortage of eager and willing friends or family members who wish to help out in some capacity. The wedding party and family can be huge assets to you in pulling off a COVID-19-friendly celebration. To do so, I suggest helping the couple to create a “Host Committee.” This committee can consist of 3-5 people who the couple have assigned to set a good example in maintaining COVID-19 protocols. You can do this by holding a meeting with the couple and those in their chosen committee during the week of the event to review current guidelines and regulations. This will allow everyone to help each other make guests aware of the rules and enforce guidelines.
Another way family members can help and support the couple, is to facilitate the ordering of their traditional wedding attire. With Indian/South Asian Weddings, it’s common for couples to travel to India to purchase their wedding attire. If this is the case with your couple, and may no longer be an option due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, I suggest encouraging them to work with family members in India along with wedding shops virtually to do so.
5. Vision & Budget
Although their date may be changed, encourage your couples to not give up on achieving their dream events. Although they may need to scale down guest count, with the proper safety measures they can still have the wedding they desire with all the cultural fusion elements they wished to incorporate. For example, traditional Indian/South Asian cuisine may often include numerous menu items that contain curries and gravies, making buffet the most common style of food service for lunch or dinner receptions. When exploring options to ensure safety with meal service, your couple should consider ordering plated meals to minimize COVID-19 risk.
The addition of masks does not have to ruin the design aesthetic, but it can add to it! Couples can personalize masks to match the color and design of the event too, so everyone from the guests to the vendor team can match the event! It’s very important to help your clients understand that although their wedding may now be a more intimate affair, their budget and vendor costs may not necessarily go down.
For example, photography and videography costs will remain the same or may increase, as a more intimate celebration does not affect the necessary hours of coverage. With Indian/South Asian Weddings, since many of the guests may be traveling from overseas (likely India) and potentially unable to attend in person due to travel regulations, we advise providing a virtual streaming option for those guests. This option may be an added service cost to your videography package, but it is well worth it. The cost for your DJ to play for the event should not change if the cost is based on hours of coverage needed. Floral costs may also remain the same (or potentially increase) as flowers will still be necessary for the Ceremony Arch or Mandap, and more tables may be needed to accommodate smaller groupings of people for social distancing.
6. Book Your Team of Vendors
Part of preserving and achieving the dream vision for your couples is retaining all of the expert vendors you worked thoughtfully to book for their event. When moving to a new date, the goal is for all of the originally scheduled vendors to still be a part of that day. This is not only important for the couple but necessary as an Industry to support our fellow wedding vendors in keeping doors open to serve future clients.
As of last year, my business, Denise Lillie Engagements was able to successfully move all of our clients’ booked weddings to new dates and retain all booked vendors. If you find yourself in a similar position with your booked couples, consider my effective strategy for pulling this off in the most efficient way:
After discussing the relevance of auspicious dates, we then contacted venues to gain their full availability for next year. We also explored the option of having events at home. Then I created a Doodle poll for the couple’s vendor team to vote with their availability. This streamlined the process so our couples could see easily which of their vendors were available for what dates. Using this process we successfully rescheduled 100% of our booked clients with their entire vendor teams. Our couples were grateful for this because it allowed them to protect the investment of their initial deposits!
7. Let Go and Enjoy!
All wedding professionals will do well to serve their couples by maintaining a positive tone about their event(s) despite changes and challenges. We should be able to lean on each other in this effort. Wedding pros should consider eliminating the word COVID-19, completely when discussing their client’s wedding. Even the word COVID-19 could be triggering for couples who may be emotional about sacrificing the many elements that are often unique to Indian/South Asian weddings; such as scaling down their guest list to a more intimate size. It’s common that a large percentage of their guests may have been traveling from India or other locations abroad and are now unable to attend due to travel restrictions.
I’ve found it helpful to change the narrative with my events: We call them S.I.P. weddings, short for ‘shelter in place’ because we thought S.I.P has a more fun, playful word association. It makes us think about sipping a glass of champagne and celebrating! I also found it helpful to be realistic and honest with couples about the planning and execution of a socially distant event. However, as planners or vendors, it’s not our job to make our couples feel even more limited or constrained. We want them to feel like they still have options in working to achieve a magical and memorable event!
If you do not include this in your contract already, I also suggest for planners to act as the sole point of contact for their couples at least six weeks before the event date, regardless of the level of service. This is the best way to keep couples relaxed, and in a better position to truly “let go and enjoy” the remainder of their planning experience and ultimately, their event.
Creative Contributors
Wedding Planner
Denise Lillie Engagements
http://www.droyalengagements.com/
@deniselillieengagements
Photography
Anza Photography
Anza Photography
@anzafotofilm
Decor
Aesthetika
Aesthetika
@aesthetika_beauty
Catering
Jalsa
Jalsa
@jalsacatering
Makeup Aritst + Hair
M Sutra
M Sutra
@msutra_bride
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