In a gleaming three-story Reliance Trends store in the western Indian town of Sangli, Alka browses a collection of ethnic Indian kurtas in a range of vibrant colors.
A geriatric care worker in her 50s, she’s looking for a design in a particular shade of pale pink with a dull gold paisley pattern.
“I saw someone wearing it at my workplace and I loved it so much that I immediately wanted to buy one for my daughter,” Alka told the BBC.
Across its three floors, the store has displays showcasing all kinds of trendy clothing, from funky printed T-shirts and distressed jeans to formal office wear for men and women and in-house brands selling mix-and-match Indian or fusion clothing.
Also on display are makeup kits, sneakers, handbags and costume jewelry.
Shopping here in the air-conditioned comfort of the store, with trial rooms, attendants and scratch cards offering discounts on one’s next purchase, is a refreshing new experience for Alka.
Like most Indians, all her life she looked for white label bargains only in street bazaars.
However, budget brands like Trends – managed by Isha Ambaniheiress to the Reliance Industries retail empire founded by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani – and Tata’s Zudio now offer products at the same price as the bazaar, but with a vastly improved shopping experience.
At these outlets, most goods cost between $4 (£2.90) and $15. “Also, the designs are contemporary and there is a growing desire among people to wear designer clothes,” Pankaj Kumar, retail analyst at Mumbai-based Kotak Securities, told the BBC.
This explosion in the number of value-conscious yet ambitious consumers, particularly in smaller towns, is driving extraordinary growth in the bottom line of the country’s organized fast fashion industry, led by brands such as Max, Vishaal Mega Mart, Trends and Zudio.
Quarterly trend figures are not publicly available, but Zudio’s growth has far outpaced global mass-market titans like Zara and H&M, as well as the Tata Group’s mid-to-high-end fashion brand, Westside, in recent years.
Consider these numbers: In 2018, Zudio had just seven stores across the country and did $12 million in revenue. Westside was a much larger brand, with 125 stores grossing about $220 million.
Today, the situation has been completely reversed.
Zudio’s seven stores have grown to 765, with revenues surpassing $1 billion by mid-2025, making it the only Indian clothing brand to hold this distinction.
Westside, on the other hand, has doubled its number of stores, with a three-fold increase in turnover – but the pace of growth is far from comparable.
“It’s a classic bottom-of-the-pyramid strategy: think big by going big,” Kotak Securities says of Zudio’s success, adding that pricing has been a key factor, given that “even affordable fashion is a luxury in India’s tier 2 and tier 3 cities.”
But what’s driving this spending at a time when India’s labor market is weak, wages haven’t exactly risen quickly, and overall private consumption, which accounts for 60% of GDP, has remained uneven?
“This is very clearly a portfolio shift,” says Kushal Bhatnagar of Bengaluru-based Redseer Strategy Consultants.
“Consumers are not buying much more than before; but they have shifted their purchases from mom-and-pop stores to branded outlets.”
This shift is a result of a major push by budget brands to quickly penetrate postal codes and access the deepest pockets of India.
And Zudio and Max first sparked the “trending” of affordable fashion, attracting Gen Z and young millennial shoppers, browsing the latest fashions in Paris and Milan.
An early partnership between Trent – Zudio’s parent brand – and Zara helped it apply the Spanish fast fashion giant’s playbook to its growth strategy, Bhatnagar says.
Just like Zara, Zudio manages an incredibly fast inventory turnaround time, just 15 days compared to 45 to 60 days for its competitors.
“In the world of fashion, speed of inventory is everything,” says Kumar of Kotak Securities. The quicker new styles hit the shelves, the more frequent store visits are.
This growth, however, has come at a cost to local mom-and-pop stores on the high street.
They face competition not only from budget brands but also from e-commerce sites like Meesho, which aggregates sellers on its digital platform and ships cheap products across India. Its net income has increased by 35 to 40% per year.
“When GDP per capita starts to increase in a country, branded products and online shopping naturally become a larger part of retail,” says Bhatnagar.
But the real challenge today, he says, is to achieve an “increase in consumption”, so that in addition to a change in share of wallet, there is also growth in overall market size. The Indian apparel market is currently estimated to be worth $70 billion to $100 billion.
“We don’t spend enough on clothing. Our per capita spending is much lower than China, the United States or even Indonesia. In a good year, this market is typically expected to grow 12 to 15 percent. We’ve seen less than 10 percent growth in recent years.”
Despite the modest growth in market size, the rise of fast fashion is accompanied by growing concerns about the ecological impact of the sector.
The textile industry is the third largest contributor to dry municipal solid waste in India – after plastic, paper and cardboard – according to a study. recent report. And only a quarter is recycled.
“Even as some brands integrate sustainability into their supply chains, real large-scale change remains distant,” according to Deloitte, which estimates that less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new clothing and recycled fibers globally.
For now though, style and savings appear to have taken precedence over sustainability concerns, with many small-town Indians just starting to jump on the fast fashion bandwagon.