How to Design Unforgettable Environmentally Friendly Social Events

Nikita Khandheria is the founder and CEO of Eria Hospitality, a high-end event planning and execution company in the San Francisco Bay Area that is making waves. Nikita, born and raised in California and India before college in Scotland, says she gets her standard for immaculate hospitality from Asia, her efficiency and decorum from England, and much of her drive from America.

So far, in four years, Nikita and her firm Eria Hospitality have opened four venues to create unforgettable experiences… and things are going really well. She is hosting birthday and anniversary parties, and corporate events. At a recent wedding, the bride was delivered by a hot air balloon onto a deck overlooking water. At one venue, she and her team recently managed 52 events in a single month.

Nikita explains that her job is to make peoples’ lives more fun. In addition to providing unforgettable experiences… she is true to her values, which include being green. Ted presses on this point: Isn’t the hospitality industry at odds with sustainability? Seems that when one is on vacation, or partying, being green is not important. Isn’t it fundamentally a decadent industry? Nikita says no… and that her scale of operations made it clear to her, waste was getting out of control. She discusses temporary materials like banners, marquis and the like… and how her team now uses high-tech projection instead of paper and cardboard that goes to waste as soon as the event is over. Her works with branding and corporate logos are now more poignant, and gone is the costly waste.

While each venue is equipped with a full commercial kitchen, all of the events are catered. She notes that the firms that cater her events all must uphold a green standard too… with food locally sourced, purchased from farmers markets, organic as requested. All plates are ceramic; glasses are glass. There are absolutely no paper plates or napkins, and no plastic utensils. These are classy events… and luxury is green she says. The Eria venues filter and ionize water and use a top-end bottling system to repurpose glass bottles, avoiding water purchases and single-use bottles. Eria’s motto used to be “Never say no to clients,” but now her team presents classy and green alternatives and the motto has evolved to “Eria: Impossible to forget.”

Nikita’s view is that the world is your oyster… you can do anything, she says, even overcoming math dyslexia and participating in an international math competition. For Eria, her first venue was in Sausalito. Now she has prestigious clients like Google, Johnson and Johnson, Salesforce, and high, net-worth families. Her first wedding was memorable… a $300,000 event.

Nikita’s personal career is impressive. Business is in her bones. She hired her first employee at age 13. By the time she was 21 she had taken a 30-year-old company that was losing money each year and made it profitable. With two, $10 million contracts she sold the company for an eight-figure price tag, allowing her to launch Eria in a big way. Her business plan calls for owning spaces to give her complete creative control of events there. And all the while she’s creating a gold standard for her events.. the Eria standard.

Ted asks about her biggest challenge? She’s quick to respond that it’s turning down events and opportunities that are not squarely on her business plan, her 50-year goals. She reports a hugely able staff and the need to keep focused. It’s not time to open a restaurant on Mars… but perhaps a winery in Napa and a rooftop venue in San Francisco are tenable in the short term. As for balance in her life, Nikita walks and runs every morning for an hour, brain-dumping her thoughts into AI which drafts notes for her and helps her keep track of myriad details. This is her most productive hour of the day.