Wedding is one of the most important events in a person’s life. It is the time when the air is filled with nothing but happiness and love. For the woman, the wedding day is usually a dream to make every single detail perfect for that one day or one night that would change her married life forever.

There are several wedding designers who allow couples to plan the wedding of their dreams without the stress and headaches.

Some of them are in high demand for their exclusive style and theme planning in the Kingdom. 

Although very few professional wedding designers are available in Saudi Arabia as there are no training institutes available in this field, wedding planning has still to gain popularity and hence a slow entry point for many aspiring solo entrepreneurs to break into the industry.

According to a Saudi wedding planner, Amjad Yamani, wedding designing depends mainly on the individual’s willingness to work in this field and his capability to generate new ideas for wedding ceremonies.

He decided to get into wedding designing considering it to be a dynamic field and through this to get into the colorful world, get up with new ideas every morning, and create new things with new concepts.

“It makes me feel like every day is full of possibility. The biggest challenge is that wedding planning is relatively new in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, but it is rapidly getting recognized as something that can help today’s busy couples,” he said.

“Jeddah is the place from where my work started and spread across all over the Gulf,” he said.

“In each place, I put my impression behind in order to immortalize the memory of the bride, the groom and the attendees. One of the best weddings was when the client asked me to create a ceremony that incorporated angels. Rising to the challenge, I asked 40 children to show up in the wedding ceremony with wings and scatter roses during the bride procession.”

However, several people still believe in the traditional way of getting married and say hiring the planners or event managers is a waste of time. Whereas the couples, who are interested to give special care and make their wedding day a happy and unforgettable day, hire a wedding designer.

Mohammed Gosaib, a Saudi event manager, said: “We have helped brides to design the wedding of their dreams and bring a fantasy to life. We can transform a dream wedding into reality for the couples and ensure that the wedding day goes smoothly and ultimately allowing the bride and groom to be guests at their own wedding.”

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Before choosing to get into this field, Ghosaib looked into working for a local wedding planner and saw an opportunity, especially in Saudi Arabia, and chose to work here.

“However, the hurdles were many in the beginning such as convincing people and executing their ideas into reality. But once I got my feet wet in the wedding business, I never looked back. I was ready to launch my own business not only for the couples in the Kingdom but elsewhere in the Gulf as well,” he said.

With rising numbers of wedding planners tapping niche markets, the opportunities are many, but the main challenge for them is to distinguish in a crowded industry and educate people about the merits of wedding planning and providing quality services.

Sara Mahmoud, a local wedding planner, commented: “People these days are looking for event planners to theme their wedding impeccably. We advise the couples on how efficiently, we can distribute our budget spend to have the perfect wedding as they dreamed of. Likewise, this gave us the exact challenge and drive to success we needed with an urge to show the difference we have in terms of design, service and the overall experience.”

She said that modern specialties range from day-of coordination for the bride-on-a-budget to exotic wedding place. Setting the ambient with color theme, use of the ballroom lighting or an ambient color is popular these days.

Most of the wedding planners said that the major challenge is the current reality shows, where they give brides a perception on exclusive and massive weddings.

However, to keep up the expectations they adopt different styles and tastes to design dream weddings.

They believe that a person needs to understand the building blocks of running a wedding business in order to create fabulous events.

Heba Suleiman, a wedding expert, said that the number of wedding planners is less and many people still don’t hire wedding planners because of their high budget.

The wedding planning industry is still clogging up and requires event planners to organize low-budget weddings.

“Setting the goals for the things that matter the most and focusing on the smaller details that can really make the guests admire and leave a beautiful memory to talk about are the main factors that will encourage people to hire a wedding planner,” she observed.