Mumbai, July 10: Fynd, an AI-native retail technology company backed by Reliance Retail Ventures Limited, today released its Festive Readiness Report 2026, a forward-looking intelligence report for fashion, lifestyle and retail brands preparing for India’s biggest shopping season.

The report analyses shifts from the 2024 and 2025 festive seasons and outlines what brands must do before Festive 2026 begins. It draws on Fynd’s marketplace intelligence data collected between March 2025 and June 2026, covering leading marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, AJIO, Nykaa, JioMart, and other major commerce platforms. The report aims to highlight that Festive 2026 will be won before the first sale goes live. Brands will need to move from reactive discounting to early planning, sharper inventory allocation, faster fulfilment, marketplace-specific strategies and prepaid-first checkout.

“Festive 2026 will not be won by the brands that discount the deepest, but by those that prepare the earliest and execute the fastest,” said Ragini Varma, Chief Business Officer – India, Fynd. “The 2025 season showed us that people shopping from Tier III cities are now leading mainstream growth markets and store-led fulfilment is becoming critical to speed and margin protection. Brands need one real-time operating layer across inventory, marketplaces, fulfilment, pricing and checkout. That is where Fynd helps them turn festive readiness into measurable growth.”

Six signals for Festive 2026

The report identifies six signals every fashion brand must act on this year:

  • Inventory is now a competitive advantage: Real-time, unified stock visibility will decide who captures the earlier festive peak and who loses sales to stockouts.
  • Tier III cities are mainstream demand centres: Tier III cities contributed 46% of festive demand, ahead of Tier I at 35% and Tier II at 19%, making smaller-city assortment, sizing, pricing and delivery promises critical.
  • Speed beats discounts: 77% of returns happened when delivery took more than three days, making sub-three-day fulfilment a direct lever for both conversion and margin protection.
  • Marketplace dependence is rising: Myntra, JioMart and Flipkart together accounted for nearly 80% of festive demand, with Myntra alone contributing 49%, requiring brands to allocate inventory and ad spend by marketplace strength.
  • Store fulfilment has become essential: Store-led fulfilment rose from 29% of orders in 2024 to 51% in 2025, overtaking warehouses and helping brands ship faster from locations closer to customers.
  • Prepaid customers are the healthiest cohort: Prepaid crossed 53% of payments, while COD drove 73% of returns-to-origin, making UPI-first checkout and prepaid nudges important for healthier festive margins.

In 2025, festive demand peaked eight days before Diwali, while pre-Navratri D2C order volumes were already up 16% year on year. Average markdowns fell from 44% in 2024 to 34% in 2025, showing that shoppers continued to buy even as brands protected margins. At the same time, 55% of sales happened below ₹2,000, making value-led pricing more important than blanket discounting.

For brands, the report breaks festive readiness into three clear moments: plan early by forecasting demand and placing inventory where it is needed; stay agile during the season by tracking stock, pricing and stockouts in real time; and use the post-festive period to learn from returns, recover inventory and build stronger customer cohorts

Fynd helps brands act on these signals through one platform for marketplace selling, unified inventory, store-led fulfilment, real-time demand intelligence, value-led pricing and prepaid-first checkout. The platform enables brands to sell across marketplaces including Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon, AJIO, Nykaa and JioMart, while turning stores into fulfilment nodes through intelligent order routing and inventory hopping.