The first full-fledged festive season after the pandemic has been celebrated with great joy and enthusiasm. For retailers, festive sales can make all the difference and by all accounts, it seems to have been a great festive season.

Major e-commerce platforms reportedly saw sales of Rs 40,000 crore in just the last week of September. Gold sales are the best in four years and according to the Confederation of All India Traders, business was expected to cross Rs 1.5 lakh crore by Diwali.

CNBC-TV18 spoke to Venu Nair, MD and CEO of Shoppers Stop to understand consumption patterns, consumer demand, and expectations, especially in the key categories of apparel, cosmetics, and lifestyle.

According to Nair, Shoppers Stop saw strong sales driven by footfalls in the store as well as eyeballs online. The total number of customers that we engaged with in Q2 was 40 percent higher than pre-COVID. So that gives an indication of consumer sentiment.

He said Shoppers Stop as a department store is a house of brands, "We are a women-centric brand to that extent as a retailer because the majority of the categories that we retail are for women. So within those categories, which did see a good surge were Indian wear, home as a category saw a surge as we went into Diwali."

"We are also a destination for men’s wear and it had the strongest growth, especially categories such as suits and jackets which had not seen growth for more than two years came back. Bandeya which is our Indian wear brand grew 3 times over the last year. Gifting as a category with things like watches also saw good growth. So we saw multi-category growth across our stores," he added.

Watch the video for the entire conversation.