— Notes from the buying room
What we're writing
about.
Field notes on Indian D2C buying, festive depth-of-buy maths, the seasons that moved the needle, and the ones that didn't. Written from the engine, signed by the desk.
Velvet moves before the festival does
In the quiet fortnight of mid-July, the occasion tags for the wedding season just gone are cooling on the index — while the fabrics of the season still to come are already the fastest risers. A field note on why fabric is the leading indicator, and occasion the lagging one.
— In the journal
Why your Diwali buy is always wrong
Most Indian D2C brands buy too late and too shallow for festive — because their forecasting model cannot see the calendar interaction. A founder-voice essay on chanderi lead times, the cobalt anarkali surge, and the cost-optimal way to size depth-of-buy.
12 May 2026
The MAPE that nearly cost us bridal
A senior buyer's first-person essay about the quarter she over-bought zari for a bridal capsule — the confidence, the data signal she ignored, the markdown disaster, and what calibrated prediction intervals would have shown her at the time.
28 April 2026
What every Indian buying floor sees that WGSN can't
Global trend tools were built for a different market. An analysis of the India-specific signals — the festive calendar, regional fabric preferences, the wedding-guest sub-segment, and the bellwether designers — that a generalist platform structurally cannot price into a forecast.
15 April 2026
— About this journal
Slow writing
in a fast season.
The Journal is the long-form companion to this week's issue. Where the weekly is short and operational, the journal is where we work through the harder questions — the ones a buyer's instinct knows but a spreadsheet can't answer.
Three voices appear here. Field Notes from the desk, Buyer's Diaryin Anaita's voice (a composite character — disclosed every time she signs a piece), and longer-form Trend Essays on the structure of the Indian market.