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Name: Ragini Shrivastava

Business: Doli Saja Ke Rakhna 

Location: Mumbai, India

Industry: Arts & Entertainment 

Reason for starting? There are two kinds of families who want to hire a wedding planner: one who wants to be involved in planning a lavish wedding and the other who wants you to get it done without any involvement. There is always a need for people to understand that wedding planners will not just charge you to increase your wedding budget. In fact, they help you save a lot on costs. This is something that we want to change. We have always seen our families, especially the parents, getting so tense in the whole planning process that they don’t even get the time to enjoy their own child’s wedding. We want the parents and the guests to relax and have fun, because it’s their most important day. They have probably been dreaming about this since their children were born. So here, we present “Doli Saja Ke Rakhna,” wherein we plan the complete wedding, from venue selection, catering, decor, invitation cards, return gifts as well as honeymoon planning. Basically, a one-stop solution 🙂

Related: Read about another wedding planner here. 

How do you define success? Success is when you actually get to hear from your clients that you are doing a good job. Success is when you see your clients happy and satisfied with your services on their wedding day. Success is when you manage to make people happy with the simplest of things. Success is making your loved ones proud.

Biggest success: We did a wedding recently, where the whole family was totally unaware of what a wedding planner actually does. The groom being an NRI, had practically no time to look over things, and he did not want to put pressure on his parents. So all this was all happening while we were listening to the parents complain that they didn’t understand why they needed to hire wedding planners and what do these girls actually do. Everything was going as planned and on the day of the wedding, when everything went well, the groom’s parents finally called us and they said that: “We have never seen so much dedication from anyone to make someone’s day so special. We take our words back, and you girls have made the wedding way above what it could have been.” And, that was a small step towards our success.

Related: Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on Resilient Cities and Resilient Women 

What is your top challenge and how you have addressed it? The most difficult part here is to deal with your vendors. We have been listening since Day One that you are girls, you will get everything very easily. And that’s where people go wrong. It’s practically very difficult to deal with people especially when you are new. There have been instances where we were literally being asked to barter, but we decided to stay strong and make these people understand that we are here for business and nothing else.

Who is your most important role model? My sister has always been my role model, and I have been trying to be like her since I was small. She is someone who has taught me patience, perseverance and how to keep smiling irrespective of whatever you are going through.

[box_light]Website   www.dolisajakerakhna.in/
Facebook   www.facebook.com/dolisajaakerrakhna
Instagram   @dolisajakerakhna 
Other   www.dolisajakerakhna.in/blog[/box_light]

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