Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) across the festive-season sales funnel, moving beyond chatbots and automated advertising to predict hyperlocal demand, manage inventory, improve product discovery and drive higher basket sizes.
With festive demand concentrated in a six-week window, brands are using AI to identify changing consumer preferences and respond faster rather than relying on fixed seasonal plans. Feminine hygiene brand Sirona Hygiene, for instance, is tracking how women search for period-care products during Navratri and Diwali, when travel-related searches such as ‘period kit for travel’ and ‘leak-proof panty’ tend to rise.
It is using these insights to optimise product listings in real time and in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi. “AI helps us spot a non-obvious insight. For instance, intimate hygiene gift sets get searched significantly more during the festive season. We built curated Sirona gift sets around this behaviour, something that didn’t exist in our portfolio two years ago,” Deep Bajaj, re-founder and CEO, Sirona Hygiene, told Fe.
Search volumes for the brand are up 40% from the same period last year and it expects more than 2 million search impressions during the festive window. Regional search optimisation is delivering 18% higher click-through rates in Tier 2 and 3 markets, while the company expects overall growth of 35-40%, with gifting contributing 12-15% of festive revenue.
Sleep solutions brand SleepyCat is using AI further upstream, with an in-house supply chain planning agent that integrates festive spike projections, seasonal trends and previous-year performance to plan demand and supply at the SKU and category level. It is also analysing demand by catchment to determine product mix by market, while integrating vendor locations and factory-level raw material availability to make supply decisions in real time.
The company expects overall sales to grow 100-150% over last year. Consumer-focused venture capitalists said brands are also ensuring that product pages are structured and crawlable by AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini, with clear information on product features and differentiation.
“Brands are also doing better work on their chatbots, their AI content, their GEO, and AEO content after purchase. For instance, answers to queries like how do they use the product? What can they expect in terms of results? How to maintain the product?” Vinay Singh, co-founder and partner, Fireside Ventures, said.
For D2C brands, this is also changing the way consumers discover products. Regional snack brand Sweet Karam Coffee is focusing on organic search visibility rather than deeper discounts. “We found that a product’s organic share of search results correlates far more strongly with sales than discount depth does. Most brands’ festive playbook is ‘discount harder’. Ours is ‘win the search result first,’” said Veera Raghavan, CMO, Sweet Karam Coffee.
The brand is targeting a 10-20% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) through AI-led efficiency rather than higher advertising spends. Sirona is using three years of festive data to pre-position inventory at dark stores before demand spikes, while Bajaj said festive advertising costs can rise three to four times, making it important to focus spending on high-intent searches.
The use of AI is extending from discovery to conversion and post-purchase engagement. Apparel brand XYXX has introduced AI-led cross-selling to identify products that complement a customer’s purchase and expects these interventions to contribute 30% incremental topline growth during the festive season. Its creative production is also increasingly AI-enabled.
According to Pankaj Srivastava, founder and CEO, UnoSearch, brands are moving from having little or no presence in AI-generated answers to being consistently mentioned for their core festive categories within a quarter. He said traffic originating from AI recommendations tends to be higher quality as consumers arrive with “borrowed trust” from the AI’s recommendation, shortening the path to purchase.
Experts said brands are also using AI models trained on regional festival calendars and historical search patterns to forecast SKU-level demand by city cluster, instead of applying a uniform pan-India festive forecast.
“I think this year is going to be a seminal shift in brands that have adapted to AI, have set up their systems and processes to leverage this technology to get more intimate with their consumer,” Singh said.