- What inspired you to establish House of Festivals in 2022, and what gap in India’s festive shopping market were you looking to address?
Think back to the last time you bought colours for Holi or diyas for Diwali. Do you remember the brand? Most people don’t, because there usually isn’t one. India’s festive category is almost entirely unorganised, with every city relying on its own local suppliers.
We discovered this first-hand while organising festive celebrations at our corporate workplaces. Buying décor, puja items and gifts meant days of running from shop to shop, with uneven quality and missing products. We kept asking: in a country that celebrates almost every week, why is there no festive brand you can trust?
The gap went further. Families who moved to big cities for work had carried their festivals with them, but not the markets that served them. Meanwhile, quick commerce was changing how India shopped, and festive needs—urgent and often last-minute—were a natural fit.
The demand existed; the brand didn’t. So in 2022, we started House of Festivals in Mumbai to bring quality and trust to India’s celebration shelf, so that wherever a family lives, it can celebrate the way it did at home.
- How did your professional backgrounds in data, strategy and design influence the way you built House of Festivals?
House of Festivals sits where two very different skill sets meet. Dhaval brings data, and I bring design. On their own, each is an advantage. Together, they give us an edge that traditional players in this category find hard to match.
Dhaval’s strength is turning a seasonal, unpredictable category into something we can plan. Traditional festive trade has long run on instinct: order roughly what sold last year and hope the season goes well. But when demand lasts a few weeks and unsold stock is almost worthless the day after the festival, guesswork is expensive. We read how each festival performs by city, platform and product, track what sells and how fast, and use that to decide which designs to scale, which to retire and how much stock to place where, months before the season begins.
My training at NIFT shapes what we make. I learned to think about a product from the first sketch to the moment it is used. A puja thali should hold everything a ritual needs in an order that makes sense. A diya pack should be easy to store and to light. A murti should be packed to arrive intact. Good design also makes production efficient. Standardised sizes, smart material choices and modular components let us make products in large volumes without losing the craft. Colour carries meaning here too: reds and golds for Navratri, bright, playful tones for Holi and Raksha Bandhan, and warm, rich shades for Diwali. Customers also want variety. Nobody wants last year’s rakhi, and tastes differ by region, age and budget. So we design many styles, finishes and price points within each festival and refresh them every season.
The two disciplines work as one. Data tells us what to make and where to send it; design makes sure it is worth choosing.
What ties it together is our experience. Dhaval and I spent years in corporate roles and in start-ups, setting up and scaling new businesses under tight timelines and with limited resources. Corporate life taught us structure, process and planning at scale. Start-ups taught us speed, ownership and how to build something from nothing. Festive commerce demands both: precise planning months ahead, and the agility to move fast when a festival is days away. In many ways, our careers prepared us for exactly this fast-moving category.
- India’s festive market is highly diverse and fragmented. How does House of Festivals cater to the varied traditions, rituals and shopping needs of consumers across the country?
India has a rare ability to hold diversity and inclusion together. Every region has its own festivals, rituals and ways of celebrating, and each community guards them with pride. Yet as Indians, we love to celebrate almost every festival, wherever it began. A Gujarati family joins its Bengali neighbours at Durga Puja pandals. A housing society in Bengaluru plays garba at Navratri. Office colleagues from every state light diyas together at Diwali and exchange gifts at Christmas and Eid. That spirit of celebrating together, whatever a festival’s origin, is one of the most beautiful parts of our culture.
For a festive brand, this means serving two needs at once. Families want the authentic products of their own traditions, made the way they remember. And people joining a festival for the first time want an easy, respectful way to take part.
We serve both through breadth and authenticity. Our range spans more than 5,000 SKUs across nearly every festival and occasion, from Sankranti and Pongal to Onam, Chhath Puja and Christmas. And we make each ritual item where its craft is rooted: Ganpati murtis in Pen, deity dresses in Mathura, ghaghra cholis in Gujarat, and Durga murtis and Puja sarees in Kolkata. Even our murtis for the Hyderabad region follow that region’s own style. Whichever festival a family celebrates, whether it is their own or one they have embraced, they can find what they pray with, decorate with and wear in one place.
- What differentiates House of Festivals from general e-commerce marketplaces and traditional festive retailers?
The local festive market has character, but quality varies from stall to stall and its reach ends at the neighbourhood. General marketplaces have reach, but festive products are just one category among thousands, often from unbranded sellers.
We are a specialised festive brand. Celebrations are all we do, and we bring four things together:
- Authenticity: ranges curated festival by festival and made by regional artisans.
- Consistency: the same reliability from a diya or a murti as from any branded product.
- Speed: built for quick commerce on Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes, JioMart, BigBasket and DMart, so products reach customers in minutes.
- Delivery without fail: in festive retail, a late delivery means a missed festival. Every commitment to our platform partners is non-negotiable, and orders arrive on time and in full, even at the peak of the season.
That last point is what our partners value most. When they order from us, they know the stock will be on their shelves well before the festival. Our support goes well beyond the delivery itself.
Every partner works with its own systems, formats and processes, and festive season brings a constant stream of data requests and last-minute internal meetings. We meet those needs quickly and in each partner’s own format, so their teams can plan and decide without waiting on us. We also take care of everything a festive campaign needs to go live on time: consistent product quality, and photography and videos ready for every listing. When a partner’s festive campaign launches, our products are ready to sell from day one.
- What have been the biggest challenges in building a festive commerce business, particularly in managing seasonal demand, inventory and timely fulfilment?
Festive commerce gives you no second chance. Demand peaks on an exact date and disappears the next morning. Nobody restocks a Ganpati murti after Chaturthi. Within that window, two challenges stand out.
The first is giving every platform something of its own. Each of our quick-commerce partners has loyal users, and even though the brand is the same, we want each platform’s customers to find something unique there. That means designing separate collections, styles and variations for every partner, festival after festival, while keeping quality consistent and launches on time.
The second is coordination. Take one truck of rakhis leaving our warehouse a few days before Raksha Bandhan. Before it moves, a delivery slot has to be booked with the partner and a decision made between courier and direct dispatch. Once it leaves, we stay in touch with the courier partner, the driver on the road and the operations team at the distribution centre. In peak season, every brand is chasing the same slots, and a truck that misses its appointment can be turned away. Its stock could then reach shelves after the festival.
Our start-up instincts help here. We treat every shipment like a high-profile event that has to go perfectly, because at the other end is a family waiting to celebrate. We plan months ahead and execute precisely on the day. The more spontaneous the shopper becomes, the more planned our supply chain must be.
- What key milestones has House of Festivals achieved since its launch, and are there any business growth indicators you can share to demonstrate its progress?
We began in 2022 with a small office-cum-warehouse in Andheri, Mumbai. Within two years, quick-commerce orders had filled every corner of it, and we moved to a larger space. Today we run three warehouses, we are growing 1.5x year-on-year, and our annual GMV is over ₹50 crore. Along the way, we have expanded from puja essentials into festive apparel and gifting.
The scale of a single year tells the story best. In 2026, we supplied:
- 20 lakh+ rakhis for Raksha Bandhan
- 5 lakh+ kites for Makar Sankranti
- 24 lakh+ diyas, in 3.5 lakh+ packs
- 30,000+ Ganpati murtis and 10,000+ Laxmi Ganesh murtis
- 15,000+ Janmashtami jhulas and 10,000+ Navratri shringar sets
- 25,000+ dupattas, 10,000+ ghaghra cholis and skirts, and 10,000+ Onam sarees
- 10,000+ festive gifting mugs
- How do you see consumer behaviour around festive shopping evolving, and what opportunities do you foresee for specialised festive commerce platforms in India?
It is Makar Sankranti, and a group of children are on their terrace, kites in the air. Then one kite catches on a rooftop antenna and tears, and a ten-year-old’s festival is about to end in tears. A decade ago, that meant waiting until the next day, if the local shop even had any kites left. Today, a parent taps a phone, and a new kite and a fresh spool of string arrive before the sun is high.
That moment sums up the shift. Quick commerce is growing at around 40% a year, more than twice the pace of overall digital commerce, and celebrations are among its clearest beneficiaries. Shoppers now leave things to the last minute because they trust that what they need is minutes away. Gifting has become more impulsive, and festive products such as a diya set or a puja thali are becoming gifts in their own right. Celebration is turning year-round, with birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine’s Day filling the gaps between festivals. Consumers are also more discerning. They aren’t necessarily spending less, but they expect trust, quality and good presentation.
That opens a real opportunity for specialised brands. As the category organises, people will turn to names that understand their traditions and deliver the same quality at every festival.
- What is your long-term vision for House of Festivals, and what are your key business priorities and expansion plans for the next few years?
We want a family in a small town to have the same festive choice as one in Mumbai: the right murti, the right colours, the right gift, at their door in minutes. Whatever India is celebrating, and whenever it is celebrating, we want to be the destination people rely on.
Our priorities for the next few years:
- Infrastructure: adding over 10,000 sq ft of working space for our next phase of growth.
- Assortment: expanding our festive, apparel and gifting ranges, with better design and faster launches.
- Artisans: deepening our network of regional craftspeople.
- Reach: going deeper into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as quick commerce spreads beyond the metros.
However busy life gets, no one should have to miss a ritual or a celebration because they couldn’t find the right item in time.
