Post the two-year lull, with physical interactions now heading towards normalcy, the brands are seeing a healthy increase in positive consumer sentiments over the last few months, making this festive season one of the most anticipated periods for the D2C industry.

The brands are looking at exciting increases in their festive sales this year. Plum, for instance, expects to maintain a 2.5x growth multiplier over last-year-same-time this festive season, while Candere is expecting a 50 percent growth in its sales compared to last year’s festive season and True Elements expects to grow 4-5x vs last year.

“While the pandemic did slow us down a bit during specific quarters, demand has always rebounded in the festive season, and we see the same continuing this year. With a host of exciting planned launches and positive consumer sentiment uptake combined with the right marketing strategies, we do expect to maintain a healthy growth this festive season,” Shankar Prasad, Founder, Plum Goodness said.

“On the back of Covid driven concerns, last festive season, interestingly, we saw 3x growth in our gifting business, largely driven by products that aided building immunity and were protein and fiber-rich. This increased interest in healthy food has sustained (more so for gifting occasions) and we are expecting to grow 4-5x vs last year,” Ved Agarwal, Head of Marketing, True Elements added.

Expansion In-Line with Festivities

This festive season, Plum plans to rapidly scale up its product offerings across categories, especially its makeup range, which the brand claims witnesses maximum uptake in the festive season. Recently, the brand launched its compact, and primer. Plum would also be launching a range of makeup essentials, along with shade extensions for its bullet and liquid lipsticks. In addition to this, it is also further expanding its skincare range through the launch of more face wash variants. “Fueled by the positive response for our recently launched Onion Hair Oil and Shampoo, we also plan to expand our hair care essentials and advanced portfolios in the coming months,” Prasad asserted.

To provide more experiential touchpoints to its consumers, Plum is aggressively expanding its offline footprint, especially in terms of its Exclusive Brand Outlets (EBO). The brand opened its first EBO in August 2021 in Mumbai, and it currently has 7 EBOs, spread across Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Trivandrum. It is further planning to scale this up to 50+ in the next 12 months.

Similarly, Candere has lined up 3 new jewelry collections for the upcoming festive season. This year, the brand already launched around 6-7 collections and received a good response from its customers. “We are extremely positive and optimistic for this festive season. While our campaign structure is always pre-planned, we do check a lot of data points from time to time in order to make modifications as per the user behavior,” Rupesh Jain, Founder, and CEO, Candere by Kalyan Jewellers stated.

True Elements, too, has strengthened its gifting range this festive season with the introduction of 7 new gifting packs, including Nutty Chocolate Hamper, Premium Dry Fruit Gift Hamper, Crunchy Nuts and Seed Hamper, Healthy Snacking Hamper, Festive Delight Hamper, Crunchy Munchies Hamper, and Wellness Hamper. The brand plans to introduce 30 new products in the next few months fueled by product innovation and customer insights. “We have been very active on our new product launches, be it product extensions or new category entrants such as Dry Fruits or even our patented product- Cereal Biscuit that will be coming out soon,” Agarwal noted. The brand’s bestselling categories are oats and seeds with an average price point of Rs 350-500 across marketplaces.

Engaging with Consumers

People have started looking for more interactive content with a human element to engage with when it comes to brands. Consumers now look for conversations and not just replies, which have also helped the brands understand them better and cater to their requirements more effectively. This has further encouraged brands to try out more UGC and new formats such as Live Shopping along with IG Lives in collaboration with their marketplace partners.

Also, people now resort more to the online space to seek product information and reviews prior to purchase. This has led the brands to focus more on educational content for their audience to feature in their consideration set. Influencer marketing is one strong peg that brands can continue to focus on with this objective, since these influencers, with their expertise and credibility, have become one of the major levers to induce a purchase.

“We see a high potential and hence would be focusing on the vernacular or ‘Bharat’ influencer space with creators that have cult-like followings. Quite against the assumption that long-form content is no longer preferred, we see long videos as a heavy preference for our target audience in terms of product suggestions and reviews, and hence we plan to create more content in this space as well for better engagement with them,” Prasad explained.

Identifying Growth Drivers

With the onboarding of Rashmika Mandanna as its brand ambassador coupled with the fact that its retail presence is the strongest in the South, Plum is expecting the southern market to be one of its strongest growth drivers. “This is in addition to metros such as Mumbai and Delhi which have always been our key markets over the years,” Prasad said.

Meanwhile, Candere has a fair hold of the market in Tier-I cities. However, the brand also expects an overwhelming response from Tier-II cities. “Our data also indicates that there is great potential in Tier-II cities and we are leaving no stones unturned to cater to their jewelry needs,” Jain asserted.

True Elements believes two key customer groups would drive growth - inbound interest from new customer sets and order requests from corporates. “One of the key differentiators for us is high repeat rates which will ensure that a high number of existing customers come back to shop with us for their festive gifting needs. We have seen corporations come back requesting curation based on their employee feedback. This is an advantage for us, especially since this space thrives on novelty,” Agarwal concluded.