Kellogg Grad Student, Booth MBA Turn Love Into A New Venture

In 2018, Raj Kamaria met his now fiancée, Manali Shah, on the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. They agreed to meet at a restaurant in Chicago; two years later, they got engaged.

Kamaria, currently a Class of 2022 MBA student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Shah, a Class of 2020 MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, quickly realized how labor-intensive it was to plan a South Asian wedding.

“Typically three to five days in length, most cultural weddings are big affairs,” Kamaria says. “The average South Asian wedding costs $285,000. It’s a big industry, and it’s completely unorganized. There’s a lot of pieces of the pie; hotel venue, priest, henna artist, DJs and bands, food caterers, and more.”

Overwhelmed at the extensive planning process, Kamaria and Shah realized the potential in making wedding organization easier.

“Many of the vendors are first-generation immigrants who’ve opened up a restaurant or do henna on the side,” Kamaria says. “It’s not a formalized process like you would expect, and it’s difficult to find many of these vendors because most of them don’t have proper websites or marketing — it’s all word of mouth.”

Laughing as he reflected on the process, Kamaria recounts calling extended relatives who knew friends of friends that offered the services they needed. “It was a very inefficient process.”