Porcellia's festive scaling playbook – 2026 OND

1

Major events - October 2026

Sales are usually announced about two weeks before they begin. Estimated dates are marked and will be updated here.

2

What this means for your business

1. 01CPMs go up sharply as the festive marketplace frenzy begins.
2. 02Marketplaces start running ads about 3 days before the sale, with full inventory. That's when the frenzy begins.
3. 03Unless you are a brand with solid brand equity, customers will choose the products with the higher discounts.
4. 04Marketplace transactions skyrocket and D2C revenue across the country largely crashes.
5. 05Categories that do well on both marketplaces AND D2C (protein powder, A2 ghee, kitchen and home accessories, anything highly search-driven) will be demolished. Expect a 30-60% dip in efficiency.
6. 06Premium fashion and new-category brands that make 80-90% of revenue from D2C will not crash as hard, but Myntra and Ajio are running their biggest sales of the season right now, so it will still be substantial enough to make you lose sleep.
7. 07Salaried cohorts spend a considerable chunk of their income, then wait for the next salary.
8. 08Don't expect sales to behave normally for the next few weeks. Expect weird, inconsistent, erratic revenue.
9. 09If you are looking at your October numbers and thinking “we are ahead of target”, be very careful. The next few weeks can completely change that picture.

3

Mindset

1. 01Monitor ads 3-4 times a day, not 1-2.
2. 02Know exactly how much you will make by 12 pm, by 3 pm, by 6 pm. If you're not making that at the desired efficiency, change the ad account.
3. 03Don't worry about making too many changes. It will be more than your average month. We still try to minimise them.
4. 04Hyper-vigilance is a must. Even your most trusted performance marketer or agency needs to be managed.

4

What to look out for

1. 01Marketplace sale days and their ad ramp-up, about 3 days before each.
2. 02Baseline ROAS against your own target, not against yesterday.
3. 03Your category's exposure. Search-driven categories get hit hardest.
4. 04The Oct 17-20 long weekend.
5. 05Whether your October targets already account for the next 2-3 weeks. If you're behind, you can't make it up by burning money.

5

How to scale

Your plan

October calendar and budget plan

Karwa Chauth (Oct 29) and Valmiki Jayanti (Oct 26) are not long weekends, so we don't expect changed behaviour on those days.

Before Oct 17-20

Long weekend analysis

Mandatory. Deep dive into the last 20 long weekends your business has seen. Look at:

• → Did ROAS improve?
• → Did baseline ROAS improve?
• → Did baseline ROAS reduce?
• → Did repeat customer revenue increase?
• → Did new customer acquisition behave differently?
• → Did AOV change?
• → Did your category see a spike or a dip?
• → What happened to your Meta and Google efficiency?

Identify the pattern your business follows. If it's positive (for most brands it is), scale accordingly.

If it's negative, you need to know BEFORE the long weekend starts. If you are a new brand, you won't know until the weekend whether to keep spending aggressively. If numbers stay flat or deteriorate, abort mission.

You cannot follow a generic playbook. Understand what YOUR business does, and stay on the scaling structure, projections and targets you built for October. If you're behind target, you can't “make up” for it by burning money. You will buy revenue at terrible economics.

6

Basic daily SOP

Your job now

The learning phase does not exist anymore. Your creatives and concepts should already be ready. Minimise creative testing in this phase. Don't hand your accounts to an AI or a new media buyer during these periods.

Recognise patterns, protect baseline ROAS and scale when the market actually gives you the opportunity to scale.

This is our 10th or 11th festive season owning P&L for our D2C brands. The entire playbook and SOP is standardised and every media buyer has it hardwired into their daily ops and calendars. October is just the start. The volatility continues into December.