Houston South Asian wedding startup Jab We Wed expands to Dallas

Houston’s South Asian wedding scene is big enough, intense enough and complicated enough that a local wedding singer turned his own planning headache into a startup.

Jab We Wed, which translates to “when we wed,”  is built around the kind of vendors South Asian families often have to find through word of mouth, Instagram, family WhatsApp threads and whatever auntie has the strongest network. The platform lists 577 vendor profiles across 12 categories, including venues, catering, photography, decorators, DJs, live singers, and dhol (double-sided barrel drum) players.

Houston is already home to one of the largest and most diverse Asian American populations in the country, and South Asian communities are a major part of that story. A Rice University study found that Asian Americans in Houston often navigate identity across family, religion, school, work and media, especially in a city where communities can be large but still spread out. That makes the word-of-mouth networks behind Desi (an umbrella term for the South Asian diaspora) weddings feel even more important.

For anyone unfamiliar with Desi weddings, founder Hamza Amir put it this way: they are not exactly a one-night ballroom-and-buffet situation.

“Desi weddings aren’t a one-day thing,” Amir said. “My own wedding was five days long, split between the US and Canada. That meant five outfits, five venues, different caterers, and many tired relatives. And that doesn’t count the dholkis before the wedding or the weeks of dance practice where your uncles insist they don’t need to rehearse.”

“They’re bigger too,” he continued. “800 to 1,000 guests is pretty normal, and I’ve been to weddings with over 5,000 people.”

The idea started while Amir was planning his own wedding in Toronto. He had already spent years performing at weddings, but still could not find a singer for his own. Later, when a friend got engaged and asked him to share his wedding vendor research, Amir sent over the Google Drive folder he had built for himself.

“That’s when it clicked,” Amir said. “If she needed that folder, thousands of other couples did too. Jab We Wed is really just that folder, grown up, with a team of 11 behind it.”

The company officially launched July 10. Amir said vendor profiles are up 38 percent, visitors are up 132 percent, website impressions are up 318 percent and couples reaching out to vendors are up 74 percent when comparing the last 20 days of September to the 20 days before that.

And now, Amir and his team at Jab We Wed are already planning to expand to Dallas! 

Dallas was not a random choice. Amir said the plan was always to target cities with large Desi communities, and his years performing at weddings gave Jab We Wed a built-in vendor network in Houston and Dallas. After Dallas, the company is looking at New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto.

“We actually pushed the Dallas launch back a month so we could keep up,” Amir said. “It was supposed to be early September.”

Jab We Wed does not plan weddings. Amir said it connects couples to vendors, and since launch, 108 couples have reached out to vendors through the platform.

“We’re not even 90 days in, and almost all of it has been word of mouth,” Amir said. “Couples tell their friends, vendors share their profiles, and aunties do what aunties do best.”

The platform is also getting requests beyond Houston. Amir said a groom getting married in New Orleans on Nov. 7 could not find a dhol player until he sent a request through Jab We Wed. The company found one locally within 24 hours.

“A wedding without a dhol player isn’t really a desi wedding, so we took that one personally,” Amir said.

The vendor side matters too.

“A lot of our vendors are small, family-owned, immigrant businesses: the henna artist working out of her home, or the caterer who’s been feeding the community for 20 years,” Amir said. “Helping them get found matters just as much to us as helping couples.”

With Dallas next and vendors already signing up from other cities, Amir said Jab We Wed is not waiting for every official launch to start making connections.

“We’re also not turning anyone away in the meantime. Vendors from cities we haven’t launched in yet are already signing up, including Atlanta, San Francisco, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.