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MARRIED TO THE MALL

In India, weddings are big business. Big enough, in fact, to support entire shopping centers that sell everything from gowns to honeymoons

By Sascha Brodsky

You might say Shah Jahan set the standard for extravagance in Indian conjugal spending. It was this Mughal emperor, after all, who built the Taj Mahal in 1632 as a memorial to his late wife, Mumtaj Mahal, mother of their 14 children. Since then, Indians spare no expense, it seems, in following Jahan’s breathtaking example of marital prodigality. Indeed, today these lavish expressions occur not at the end of married life but at its very beginning.

This summer Ashok Gupta, a 32-year-old software engineer from Dehli, invited some 200 wedding guests to his four-day ceremony of feasting, dancing and gift-giving, all of which cost the family of his bride, Anil, about $80,000. And there is nothing unusual about that, says brand consultant Radha Chadha, managing director of Hong Kong-based Chadha Strategy Consulting. Indians spend decades saving up for weddings, which typically cost about $35,000 but can reach upwards of $2 million, she says. Gifts include jewelry, expensive watches, and even houses and cars.

Indians spend about $1.08 billion a year on weddings, and this is growing rapidly with the economy, says Divya Gurwara, CEO of the bridal trade show Bridal Asia. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before some mall developer smelled an opportunity. To capture some of this revenue, Delhi-based Omaxe Construction is building wedding malls — enclosed shopping centers offering everything needed for an elaborate ceremony, all under one roof. Omaxe opened wedding malls last year in Gurgaon, near Delhi; and at Patiala, in Punjab. These malls were packed during November and December, India’s peak wedding season. The 275,000-square-foot malls each contain about 110 shops and cost about $16 million each to build. Omaxe is opening a similar mall in July in the city of Agra. The malls are performing “extremely well” and have “exceeded our expectations,” says Suren Goel, general manager for sales and marketing at Omaxe.

“The key to our success is that shoppers realize they don’t have to go from shop to shop in a crowded bazaar,” said Naren Kumar, chief engineer at Omaxe. “You can buy everything in the air-conditioned comfort of a mall.”

The mall tenants are a mix of international and Indian brands, and wedding-related goods and services providers, including planners, bridal-wear makers, florists, jewelers, grocers, vendors of cosmetics, footwear and formal wear, and providers of home decor, beauty and travel services, says Rohtas Goel, the chief managing director of Omaxe. “The focus will be on maximizing customer comfort and providing as many products as possible under one roof,” Rhotas Goel said.

Wedding malls are “a sign of the development of the Indian economy,” said Chadha. “The way people shop is changing. Indians are very value-conscious, and they tend to not spend as spontaneously as in other parts of the world. But at weddings, it’s all about spending. And they are spending more and more on weddings over the last 10 years. The gifts are getting more elaborate and the weddings are getting longer.” These malls are a “good way to cash in” on the rising expenditures of Indian betrothals, Chadha says.

The wedding industry in India is growing at a rate of about 30 percent annually, Gurwara says. The weddings are so expensive that many Indian families prefer sons to daughters, because the family of the bride pays most of the wedding costs.

Proportionally, Indians spend far more on weddings than people in most other countries do. In the U.S. the average wedding costs about $7,500, or roughly a third of the average annual per capita income, according to the Association of Bridal Consultants, a trade group. But even poor Indian families spend upwards of $3,000 on a wedding — about 10 years’ wages for the average worker.

The success of Omaxe’s wedding malls is indicative of the larger Indian retail boom. A retail space surge is being driven by an economy growing at about 6.5 percent a year. There will be some 26.2 million square feet of malls across India by the end of 2005, according to ICSC. The National Capital Region — made up of Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida — will account for 40 percent of that. There are 200 malls under development in the country now, up from just three that existed in 2000, says V. Vaidyanathan, country head of retail banking at Hyderabad-based ICICI Bank. Total retail space in India is projected to triple to roughly 90 million square feet by 2007, from 32 million square feet today, according to retail consulting firm Images Multimedia.

Not all of it will be pretty, though.

“Shopping center development in India continues to be carried out in the most haphazard, unplanned manner,” said ICSC India director Amitabh Taneja. “Traffic, infrastructure and ecological issues come to the fore only after the situation becomes intolerable and unmanageable.”

Retail of all types is expanding in India, but the wedding business is particularly attractive, because it is resistant to seasonal downturns. Though Hindus consider November and December auspicious for marriages, wedding ceremonies are celebrated year-round, not just during those peak months, says Hitesh Kumar, head of Delhi-based bridal supply company Bridal Affairs.

Gupta, the recently betrothed software engineer, says he was overwhelmed in trying to help plan his wedding.

“Traditionally, there are just so many stores you have to go to in all different parts of the city,” he said. “It could take six months. But with the wedding mall, we were able to do most of our shopping in one place. It was a huge savings of time.”

The time savings did not transfer to money, however. His bride’s sari alone cost about $2,000.

But the location probably helped put the costs into perspective. The wedding took place in Agra, one of India’s most popular wedding spots — and home to the Taj Mahal.