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When you chat with Devanshi Patel, the conversation may seem like a Rolodex of the biggest stars. For the young wedding planner has brought together some of the most mega-opulent celebrations in celebrityville from Anshula Kapoor and Rohan Thakkar’s wedding to Allu Sirish and Nayanika Reddy’s and Viraj Ghelani and Palak Khimavat's wedding. And artist management for Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s big day.
It's applaudable, to say the least. For someone who entered the industry at just 19, she's racked up the lessons with the roses, has a strict checklist to boot before every do and rides on clarity and personal relationships as being an 11th hour lifesaver.
In conversation with Manifest, Devanshi takes us into her playbook, revealing her skill to managing global events and artists, and why ego should have no place in wedding planning. Here's a peek into our candid chat with her:
Devanshi Patel (DP): At that scale, a guest list stops being a list, it becomes an entire operational ecosystem.
When you are dealing with VVIPs, celebrities, business families, international guests and artists under one roof, the biggest requirement is information control. Not everybody needs to know everything. We create layers within the team, very clearly define who handles whom, establish access protocols, movement plans, arrival and departure grids, holding areas, security coordination and escalation points.
My background in large-format entertainment and award shows, including my early years working on projects such as IIFA, taught me this discipline very early. An award show is live, an artist may arrive late, a performance can change, a celebrity movement may suddenly need to be rerouted, and yet the audience should never sense the chaos backstage. Weddings of this magnitude require exactly that temperament.
The other thing I have learnt is that with VVIP guests, discretion is as important as hospitality. You have to know when to be visible and when to disappear.
For us, success is when hundreds of things have happened behind the scenes and, for the family and their guests, the experience has simply felt effortless.
I always say that in weddings, something or the other will happen. Experience doesn’t mean problems stop happening , it means you learn how to solve them before they ever become the client’s problem.
I remember a destination wedding we were executing in Dubai. We had an artist flying in from Mumbai for one of the celebrations, and at the last minute, he tested positive for COVID and simply couldn’t travel.
With entertainment such an integral part of the energy of an Indian wedding, that telling the family, “Unfortunately, there will be no artist tonight,” was never an option for us.
This is where years of artist management and relationships really come into play. We immediately started working on Plan B. Sukhbir was already associated with the wedding as our baraat artist, and we reached out to see whether he could step in and perform at the Mehendi as well. He graciously agreed, we reworked everything behind the scenes, and he came in and performed for us.
For the guests, there was no crisis. They never needed to know how different the original plan had been.
That experience reinforced something I strongly believe in: a luxury wedding planner isn’t just somebody with a Plan B. You need a Plan B, C and sometimes D — and you need the network to activate them.
This is also why our background and hold in artist management has become such a strength for Shreem Events. When something changes at the eleventh hour, you’re not starting by searching for a phone number, you already know who to call.
The same philosophy applies beyond artists. At a recent high-profile Mumbai wedding, we were working through extreme rains and red-alert conditions. Venue movements and several operational elements had to be reconsidered and adapted in real time. Again, the teams dealt with it behind the scenes while the celebration continued.
After so many years, I’ve realised that there will always be a story backstage. The art is making sure it never becomes the story in front of the stage. The family shouldn’t inherit the planner’s panic. They should only experience the solution.
I always think three steps ahead of the event.
If an artist is meant to perform at 9:30, my mind isn’t at 9:30. I’m thinking about when the artist lands, where the car is, who receives them, their room, soundcheck, technical rider, green room, stage access, security, food, costume requirements, the cue before their performance, the cue after it and what happens if any one of those elements gets delayed.
That habit comes from live entertainment.
My mental checklist is essentially:
People. Movement. Time. Dependency. Backup. Communication.
Every major element has a dependency. If the bride’s entry is at a particular time, what needs to happen 15 minutes before it? If an artist is performing, what needs to happen two hours before it? If 500 guests are moving from one venue to another, where is the bottleneck likely to occur?
Over the years, you develop an instinct for identifying the place where something can break before it actually breaks.
And then there is one principle I am extremely particular about: one clear command structure. Ten people cannot be giving ten instructions. Everyone should know who is taking the final operational call.
That clarity saves events.
After planning weddings professionally for so many years, one of the most emotional experiences for me was planning my own sister wedding.
I have spent years standing beside families during some of the most important days of their lives. Suddenly, I was on both sides — I was the planner, but I was also the sister.
We planned celebrations across Ahmedabad and because I knew my sister so intimately, every decision felt different. It wasn’t simply about what looked beautiful; I knew the memories, relationships and emotions behind what we were creating.
There comes a moment at almost every wedding when the timelines, production sheets, artist calls and guest lists disappear from your head and you simply watch the family experience what you’ve spent months creating.
At my sister’s wedding, that feeling was amplified enormously.
It reminded me that no matter how large Indian weddings become, the heart of a wedding is still incredibly small and personal — it is about two people and the families standing around them.
That is something I never want scale to dilute.
I actually entered the events industry when I was around 19.
My initial exposure wasn’t to conventional wedding planning. I started with Wizcraft, working around large-format entertainment and projects such as awards nights, and later gained further exposure through few other wedding companies.
That was my real classroom.
I saw what it takes to put together productions where artists, celebrities, technical teams, backstage operations, hospitality, logistics and show-calling all have to come together at exactly the right moment.
It taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my career: what the audience sees is perhaps 10% of an event. The remaining 90% is invisible planning.
When I eventually moved deeper into weddings and founded Shreem Events in 2014, I realised that Indian weddings required precisely that combination of skills, creativity, production, people management, hospitality, entertainment and extraordinary attention to detail.
I loved the emotional aspect of weddings, but I also loved their complexity.
And artist curation naturally became one of our strongest verticals because entertainment has always been part of my DNA. Today, whether we are curating an intimate musical experience or working with some of the country’s and world’s most recognised performers, that early training continues to influence how I operate.
The transformation has been extraordinary.
When I started, luxury was often measured through scale — bigger décor, bigger venues, bigger artists and bigger guest lists.
Today, luxury is increasingly measured through access, personalisation and experience.
Clients still want magnificence, of course, but they are asking much more interesting questions now: Has this been done before? Does this feel like us? What will our guests remember? Can we create an experience they couldn’t simply buy themselves?
Destination weddings have also evolved enormously. Indian families are much more adventurous geographically, and planners are consequently operating in environments where we have to understand local authorities, international production regulations, artist movements, cultural sensitivities and destination logistics.
We have coordinated internationally across destinations from Cannes and Japan to Dubai and Sri Lanka, and experiences like coordinating directly with the Mayor’s Office in Cannes teach you that a luxury wedding planner today almost needs to operate like a combination of producer, concierge, diplomat, creative director and crisis manager.
Another major shift is that guests have become far more discerning. They travel extensively and have experienced the world’s best hotels and restaurants. Simply putting them in a five-star hotel is no longer enough.
The experience has to begin before they arrive and continue until after they leave.
That, to me, is where Indian luxury weddings are heading.
Artist management is genuinely one of my favourite parts of what we do, and it has been a forte of mine since the beginning of my career.
Over the years, we’ve developed relationships across the artist ecosystem — artists, managers, agencies, technical teams and production partners. That relationship capital matters tremendously, but relationships alone cannot run a show of that magnitude.
When you are dealing with major artists or global performers, precision earns respect.
A technical rider isn’t a suggestion. Arrival timings aren’t approximate. Soundcheck, security, stage access, green rooms, backline, hospitality, travel and performance cues all have dependencies.
My early experience around award shows taught me how artists and their teams function at that level. So when we communicate with an artist’s management, we understand their language as well as the event’s language.
At extremely large-scale celebrations such as Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s, there are obviously multiple specialised teams and layers of management involved. Our role within artist management required us to work within that larger ecosystem with absolute clarity about responsibilities, timelines, curation and communication.
The biggest mistake in artist management is ego.
You don’t manage a superstar by trying to demonstrate authority. You establish authority by being so prepared that their team trusts you.
When an artist’s manager knows that you’ve understood the rider, anticipated the questions and have the right answer before they need to chase you, the entire relationship changes.
That is the difference between merely booking an artist and actually managing an artist experience.
For a luxury destination wedding, I would ideally recommend 12 to 18 months, particularly if the couple wants a specific destination, hotel, date or artist.
The earlier you begin, the more choice you have.
However, I have also executed weddings within much shorter timelines. Experience allows you to compress a process but you cannot manufacture hotel inventory, artist availability or certain permissions.
The first few decisions are actually the most consequential: destination, venue, guest count, budget framework and the broad experience you want to create.
Once those are right, everything else begins to fall into place.
My advice to couples is not necessarily “start planning every detail 12 months before.” It is: secure the things that cannot easily be replaced first.
Then allow the wedding to evolve.
Absolutely. I think AI has become a fascinating addition to the creative process but I see it as a tool, not the creative director.
Earlier, a client might say, “I want something inspired by Italy, but I don’t want it to look like an Italian-themed wedding,” and then we would spend hours finding references to communicate what that feeling could look like.
Today, AI allows us to visualise an initial thought much faster.
We can experiment with spatial ideas, mood boards, colour directions, tablescapes, welcome experiences or even unusual combinations of references and give the couple something more tangible to react to.
We also use technology and AI in the less glamorous but equally important side of planning research, documentation, drafting, structuring information and ideation alongside collaborative systems for guest tracking, RSVPs and planning.
But I am very conscious of one thing: AI can generate an image; it cannot understand a family.
It doesn’t know why the goorms grandmother’s recipe matters, why a particular song makes the bride emotional or why one tiny ritual means everything to a parent.
That human information is what turns inspiration into personalisation.
So for us, AI makes the process faster and expands what we can visualise. Human instinct is still what makes it meaningful.
Ownership.
You can teach someone how to make a production schedule. You can teach budgeting, hospitality, artist coordination, décor terminology and software.
You cannot easily teach somebody to look at a problem at 2:00 a.m. and instinctively say, “This is mine. I will solve it.”
This industry looks glamorous from the outside because people see beautiful destinations, celebrities, couture, artists and extraordinary celebrations.
What they don’t see are the sleepless nights, airports, loading docks, soundchecks, last-minute room changes, delayed flights, missing baggage, weather changes, emotional families and the hundreds of decisions being taken while everyone else is celebrating.
I started very young, and I think that helped me enormously because I was willing to do everything. I watched. I asked questions. I stood backstage. I learnt from people who knew more than me. And even today, I believe there is something to learn at every event.
After more than a decade in this business, my biggest learning is simple:
You don’t become a great wedding planner because you know how to create a beautiful wedding. You become one when people trust you with one of the biggest days of their lives — and you understand the weight of that trust.
That is something no classroom can teach.