The challenge of planning an Indian wedding in Melbourne was the inspiration for Simmi Singh's blog, The Crimson Bride. "I really couldn't find a resource that could bring the cultural element of my identity and also my experience of someone who has grown up in Australia," she said. "It is pretty scary to think you are spending that kind of money within 12 months and there are no tools out there to help you make informed decisions."
So Simmi started blogging and as she sourced a niche provider of marigolds, or found a venue that could accommodate a Bollywood dance floor, she shared those moments online.
"Then I realised the blog wasn't going to be enough to solve the real inefficiencies and the barriers to planning a wedding, so I came up with the concept of a marketplace platform that would connect brides with the best wedding professionals and make that connection as genuine and seamless as possible."
Simmi Singh runs Crimson Bride online, catering to women all over Australia. Source: SBS Small Business Secrets
A year on, The Crimson Bride has become the go-to site for more than a 100,000 South Asian brides, with around 10,000 logging on every month.
One such bride is Vruchi Vasudevan who also found planning a niche wedding a major headache.
"It would be calling up thousands of venues asking do you have access to 150 people, do you allow fire, do you allow rose petals, do you allow rice to throw?" Ms Vasudevan said.
"So it was nice to have a curated blog, with these are the venues possible, these are prices they'll give you."
Crimson Bride has a network of around a hundred businesses all paying her site at least $400 a year to connect with her clients.
Gather and Stitch Couture is one of them, whose owner Helani Kumara, signed up to capture a growing client base.
"We can log in and manage what the clients would see when they go on our website and look on our profile. We can put our pricing, clients can review us and put the reviews up there as well," says Ms Kumara.
The average wedding in Australia costs around $50,000, but for a South Asian wedding, the price routinely climbs above $100,000.
Celebrating an Indian wedding in Australia is more difficult than most brides anticipate. Source: Supplied
Traditional events run for three days, which means the cost is triple and instead of one wedding dress, brides need one for each day, according to Ms Singh.
"Then you have multiple events as well, so the number of hours you are hiring the photographer, or the stylists and décor it's just two or three times the cost."
To pay for all this, most South Asian parents start saving for their children's wedding when they're born, with many heading overseas to buy the elaborate clothes and accessories needed for the big day.
The aim of The Crimson Bride is to keep that business here and Simmi says the secret to that is practicality - something customers such as Vasu Singh, appreciate.
"It just said real things like where to get your henna done and to do it before your guests arrive and I was like hey this is really, really useful," she said.
Tying the knot now means binding love and culture, history and home - and that's priceless for The Crimson Bride.
"Looking around the room at 150 people there for us. I just cannot describe it, you just cannot describe it in words."
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