The wedding planner’s silver guide.

01 · The maths

How many pieces, and how much per guest?

The first mistake a planner makes with silver is counting heads. Return gifts go to households and couples, not to individuals — so a 400-guest wedding is rarely 400 gifts. It is usually 130–160 families, and that is the number your budget should turn on.

Take that 400-guest list. Round the households to 150, add 12–15% for late additions and the odd piece damaged in transit, and you brief the workshop for roughly 170 pieces. At the ₹1,500–₹3,000 return-gift band, that is a ₹2.5–5 lakh line — usually the single largest silver figure in the whole wedding, and the one worth getting right first.

Pieces start from ₹1,500 each, and the wedding minimum is 30 pieces. That floor is deliberately low: it means even an intimate 60–80 guest wedding — call it 30–40 households — still clears the minimum comfortably, and a planner is never forced to pad an order just to qualify. For a full analysis of what silver weight buys at a given rate, our weight and pricing guide does the sums.

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Count households, not heads. Split the budget seventy-twenty-ten. Order eight weeks out. The rest is taste.

Atelier note · the planner’s rule

02 · The budget

Where the silver line actually goes.

We tell planners to split the silver line three ways. Roughly 70% goes to the volume return gift — the piece every household leaves with. About 20% goes to a heavier close-family shagun piece, the ₹5,000–₹15,000 tier for the ten or fifteen relationships that carry weight. The last 10% goes to two or three milestone gifts: the parents, the person who ran the day.

That split keeps the arithmetic honest. It stops a planner from putting a ₹6,000 piece in 170 hands — a ₹10 lakh line that no one asked for — and it stops the opposite mistake, a thoughtful volume gift undercut by nothing special for the people who matter most. The bands map cleanly onto our catalogue, so you can price a full brief in an afternoon.

• Return gift₹1,500–₹3,000 per household. ~70% of the silver line. The volume tier.
• Close family₹5,000–₹15,000. ~20%. Shagun and tilak pieces with real weight.
• Milestone₹15,000+. ~10%. Parents, planner, a 25-year jubilee piece.
• SparesAdd 12–15% on the volume tier for late guests and transit damage.
• MinimumThe wedding minimum is 30 pieces, from ₹1,500 a piece.

03 · The calendar

When do you place the order against the date?

Work backwards from the wedding. Made-to-order and bulk pieces take 3–4 weeks from order confirmation, so the order wants to be confirmed six to eight weeks ahead. If names, the wedding date or a monogram are being engraved, add a week for sampling and the run — personalisation is not the place to compress a timeline.

The season matters. India’s wedding dates cluster around the autumn festivals — Karwa Chauth falls on 29 October 2026, Dhanteras on Friday 6 November, and Diwali on Sunday 8 November — and every silver workshop in the country is running flat out through that window. For an October or November date, brief us a clear eight weeks ahead; a December or January wedding has more slack.

One reserve to protect: your proof. Sign off a single engraved sample before the full run leaves the bench. It costs a day and it is the cheapest insurance a planner can buy against a spelling on 170 pieces.

04 · The functions

Which silver suits which function?

A wedding is not one gifting moment; it is four or five, and each has its own register. The pre-wedding functions want lightness — playful favours for the mehendi and sangeet that a guest can slip into a clutch. The tilak and roka call for a shagun piece with weight in the hand, the kind that reads as a blessing rather than a keepsake.

The reception drives the volume — the return gift every household leaves with, and where most of the 170-piece maths above is spent. And then there is milestone silver, which sits apart from guest gifting altogether: a 25th-anniversary jubilee piece for the parents whose own marriage the wedding quietly echoes. Each of these lives on its own page in the wedding hub.

05 · The logistics

How split-dispatch and delivery work.

On any order above 100 pieces we split-dispatch by default. The bulk arrives two weeks before the date, so your team can unbox, label and pack in calm rather than on the morning of. A reserve of 8–12 pieces is held back and delivered close to the day, which covers the guests who confirm late — and there are always guests who confirm late.

Delivery runs 3–4 weeks from order confirmation, with ready-stock pieces available same-day across Delhi NCR for orders confirmed before 2 PM. Where a family wants a piece that holds its silver weight — a shagun coin, an heirloom milestone gift — we move from plated to BIS-hallmarked 999 pure silver; the 925-versus-999 question is worth reading before you decide which grade a given piece should be.