Black Friday & Cyber Monday sale: How Made in India brands fared

Amazon’s recently concluded Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) events generated robust sales growth for participating Indian brands, helping them build—and solidify—their global footprint. Hundreds of Indian exporters across Amazon’s global marketplaces recorded more than 100% business growth between November 24 and November 28.

Customers from North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa shopped the most from Indian exporters with highest growth coming across categories such as Toys, Kitchen, Home, Jewelry and Grocery. Executives with participating Indian brands such as Homespun, VAHDAM, Imagimake, Indocount and Gurananda are buoyed by the traction recorded this year.

Bedding brand Homespun had targeted—and achieved—six times higher than regular sales during BFCM 2022. “This is by far our best performance during an event this year,” said Hemant Pisharody, Global E-Commerce Head, Homespun. Inventory planning had started 3-4 months before BFCM. “All the lightning deals which we got during both these days got 100% claimed within no time and coupled with our aggressive push on ads helped us to get best out of the resources,” said Hemant.

Homespun’s wide selection ensured that the company wasn’t dependent on one product to clock the desired numbers, he said. The company’s performance during BFCM has given the team enough confidence to scale their business “to thrice the size for 2023.”

The team at Imagimake, a startup offering a range of educational toys, art & craft kits and learning aids for children, was banking on a successful BFCM to build some momentum getting into the holiday season. They weren’t disappointed.

“The event surpassed our expectations,” said Ravi Jalan, Co-founder, Imagimake. The company clocked close to 200% year-on-year growth during the sale and 6-fold jump over its business-as-usual figures. “We had offered great deals on a wide range of assortment and most of them got a great response. Now the focus has shifted to the next 3 weeks which is the most crucial period specially for our category,” says Ravi.

For the Maharashtra based Indocount that deals in specialty bedding, sales grew several times year-on-year during the BF&CM sale events. Kumud Goswami, VP at at Indocount, says, “This Black Friday & Cyber Monday, we saw our business on Amazon grow 15 times compared to 2021 and 10 times compared to average daily sales. We saw great demand from customers in the US and Canada owing to enhanced discoverability and organic searches by customers.”

The brand ‘s executives believe that creativity, providing value, and sticking to the basic rules of business worked in their favour.

“Being the world’s largest manufacturer in our category, we need volume to run our facilities, and Amazon provides that scale,” he adds. Enthused by this success, Indocount is planning to launch new brands and categories at Amazon for the next season.

Bhupen Wakankar, Director of Global Trade, Amazon India, said, "The accelerated growth of Indian exporters during the annual BFCM sale events globally is a testament of the momentum we are seeing in our ecommerce exports program. With Amazon Global Selling, entrepreneurs of all sizes from across India are able to leverage Amazons’ investments in logistics and infrastructure to cater to customers across the world.”

“We are humbled to play a role in taking their ‘Made in India’ products global as we continue to work towards our pledge of enabling $20 billion in cumulative exports from India by 2025,” he added.