Four things changed: gifting moved online, vouchers became socially acceptable, corporate gifting professionalised, and a small but fast-growing slice moved from consumables to keepsakes. The last one is the least obvious and the most interesting, because it runs against the direction everything else went.
What stayed exactly the same
Worth saying first, because most trend pieces overstate the change.
Sweets, dry fruit, clothing, cash and gold still account for the overwhelming majority of gifts given in India every year. Weddings are still cash in an envelope. Diwali is still the largest window. The core of Indian gifting is conservative and has not moved.
Everything below is happening at the edges. The edges are just where the growth is.
The four real shifts
| Shift | Then | Now | Likely to last? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where gifts are bought | In person, locally | Online, negotiated on WhatsApp | Yes |
| Vouchers | Read as thoughtless | Read as practical | Yes |
| Corporate gifting | A box of sweets per employee | Sourced, branded programmes | Yes |
| Close-relationship gifts | Consumables | Keepsakes, from a small base | Growing, but narrow |
Gifting moved online, then moved to WhatsApp. The first change was buying gifts on the internet. The second, less discussed, was the conversation moving to WhatsApp — sending photos, approving things, chasing an order. For a lot of Indian sellers WhatsApp is now the actual storefront and the website is the catalogue.
Vouchers became acceptable. A decade ago a gift card read as thoughtless. It now reads as practical, particularly between colleagues and across generations. This is the single biggest behavioural change in the period.
Corporate gifting professionalised. It went from a box of sweets per employee to sourced, branded, catalogued programmes with budgets and vendors. Diwali corporate gifting is now its own industry.
Consumables started losing to keepsakes at the personal end. Slowly, from a small base, and only for close relationships. This is the shift worth understanding.
Why keepsakes started growing
One contradiction explains most of it: the generation with the most photographs has the fewest printed ones.
Someone in their twenties today has tens of thousands of images and almost nothing on paper. Their parents have four albums covering thirty years. The abundance made the individual photograph worthless and the printed one scarce — and scarcity is where gifting value comes from.
The second reason is that consumables ran out of headroom. Once everyone gives sweets, a better box of sweets is not a better gift. A record of a shared decade is not competing in that category at all.
Why buyers are moving from sweets to keepsakes →
What is changing right now
Automation in personalised printing. A number of Indian printers now advertise software that selects your photographs and builds the layout. It is genuinely fast and genuinely cheap.
We do not do it, and the reason is a judgement rather than a fact: we think the choosing is the gift. A piece of software has no opinion about which photograph from that trip matters, because it does not know that one of them was taken twenty minutes after an argument. If you disagree with that, automated is cheaper and you should buy it.
Buyers asking better questions. Paper weight, binding type and who does the design come up in conversation far more often than they used to. Sellers who cannot answer are starting to be visibly filtered out.
Delivery expectations tightening. Quick commerce has reset what “fast” means, which is awkward for anything made to order. Our own honest number is 5 to 14 days from order to doorstep, because there is a design and proofing stage before anything prints. That gap between expectation and reality is the main friction in this category right now.
The prediction we would not make
That personalised keepsakes will displace traditional gifting. They will not, and anyone selling you that is selling you something.
Cash at weddings is not going anywhere. Sweets at Diwali are not going anywhere. This category grows by being the right answer for a narrow, specific case — the close relationship, the milestone, the person who genuinely has enough things — and it gets worse the further it is stretched beyond that.
Frequently asked
Is personalised gifting actually growing in India? At the edges, yes, and faster than gifting overall. From a small base, and concentrated in close-relationship and milestone occasions rather than broad festival gifting.
Why are printed photo gifts becoming popular again? Because digital photographs became abundant and printed ones became scarce. The generation with the most images has almost nothing on paper.
Are vouchers a bad gift in India now? No — that changed. They read as practical rather than lazy, especially between colleagues. For a close relationship or a milestone they still read as a default rather than a choice.
Is automated photo-book software worse than a designer? It is faster and cheaper. Whether it is worse depends on whether you think choosing which photographs matter is part of the gift. We think it is, which is why we do it by hand.
Part of our guide to gifting in India. See also: made in India gifts worth buying and personalised gift trends in India for 2027.
Laid out by a person, not software: Photo magazines from ₹499 · All 11 keepsakes