The Deliberate Aspirant: How Young India Shops for the Life It Wants

Rohan is twenty-three years old. He finished his B.Tech in Mysuru last summer and, in his final semester, landed a job at one of the big IT services firms that have carried a generation of engineering graduates into India's salaried middle class. He moved into a PG in Marathahalli to wait for his joining date, which the firm has since pushed back twice. And so, he lives in a city organised around a job he has been promised but has yet to begin.

Last week he paid ₹2,800 for a pair of Nike Dunks from an Instagram page selling "export surplus," in a box that listed an MRP of ₹8,999. That same week he sold his college DSLR in a Facebook group to help cover his rent, parting with something he owned so he could keep up with the life he had expected to be living by now.

Rohan is a composite, but all of us know someone like him, or maybe have been him in our earlier lives. He wants the brands his seniors bought three years ago, on a fraction of what they earned. But rather than give up that want, he has changed how he satisfies it. For young people like Rohan, there is a real determined refusal to let a delayed start become a smaller life. I think the next decade of Indian commerce will be built around people like him, and won by the companies that meet his aspirations on terms he can afford.

Meesho has already shown how large value commerce can become in India, and I think the next opportunities lie in two models that are still early here: off-price retail and consumer-to-consumer resale.

A growing economy, yet a more deliberate shopper

India enters this decade in good health, with real GDP growing 7.8% in Q1 FY27 and private consumption up 7.1%, and I expect strong growth to carry through the years ahead. But what makes this moment interesting for commerce is who carries that consumption. India's discretionary economy rests on about 140 million people, and Blume estimates that this top 10% account for 67% of discretionary spending, a group that has been spending more per person without adding many new members. That base is far narrower than in the US, where white-collar workers hold about half of all jobs and drive roughly three-quarters of discretionary spending. In India, then, how quickly young people make their way into the spending class, and what they earn once they arrive, shapes commerce much more than headline growth would suggest.

For most young Indians, the way into that top 10% has run through a salaried first job in tech, finance or consulting, like the one Rohan is waiting to start, and the income that job brings is growing more slowly than it used to. Starting pay at the large IT firms, one of the biggest doorways into salaried work, has moved very little in two decades. A TCS trainee earned about ₹3.16 lakh a year in 2007 and earns about ₹3.36 lakh in 2026, while the cost of living in cities continues to rise considerably.

A slower start naturally changes how much someone can spend, but it does little to change what they have worked towards or feel they have earned. In the face of those constraints, the younger generation in the workforce is looking for other ways to fulfill their goals. They know which brands they want and what those brands are worth, and they are willing to look beyond the usual store to find them at a price that works. The same shift is visible among households already well inside the consuming class.

I read all of this as a portrait of people adapting rather than a warning about the economy, and the opportunity I describe below holds however strongly India grows over the next decade. Rather, the question that I think is interesting is how a generation that is still aspirational, and still determined to live the life it wants, shops within tighter limits than it expected, and how businesses can meet it at those limits. Ultimately, everyone deserves a fair shot at the things they have long hoped to own.

Same tastes, a different store

The shift in the shopping habits of Rohan and his peers shows up across categories. Vishal Mega Mart grew same-store sales 10% in a quarter its management described as weak, and its priciest fashion lines grew fastest, at 13.9%. When shoppers at a value retailer reach first for its most expensive clothes, they're showing they are unwilling to compromise on taste even as their budget has tightened. Meesho Mall, the company's branded storefront, grew NMV 93% in Q1 FY27.

Phones show the switch clearly too. Counterpoint found that refurbished smartphone volumes in India grew 13% in H1 2026 while new phone volumes fell 11%, with the iPhone 13 among the most-bought refurbished models. That suggests many buyers would rather own the phone they wanted secondhand than settle for a lesser one even if it's new. In fashion, Trent grew Q1 FY27 revenue by 19% yet missed estimates as revenue per square foot fell. Affordable own-brand fashion gave many young shoppers a way to dress well on a budget, but it cannot give them the label itself. For a generation that sees the brands it wears as part of how it marks its progress, that leaves an opening for anyone who can sell an aspirational label at a price closer to Zudio's.

Similar behaviour has appeared elsewhere when budgets tightened. In the US last year, secondhand apparel grew 13% while new apparel stayed nearly flat.

All of this points to the fact that people on a budget still find ways to buy the brands they want.

What founders, sellers and shoppers told me

I spent a lot of time this year on two theses, off-price fashion and secondhand marketplaces, and met dozens of founders, sellers, brand operators and users along the way. What I realised is that a lot of this trade exists without any organised player.

Rohan's Dunks are likely to have come from a channel with massive online reach. Jaipur Export Surplus has 129,000 Instagram followers, and Delhi market-tour channels such as Market Guru reach 730,000 YouTube subscribers. One Delhi reseller says about 70% of her sales come from Instagram, and India's secondhand clothing trade is estimated at close to ₹33,000 crore a year, with the stock-lot market alone sized at $3 billion or more.

Brands also hold more unsold stock than they tend to admit. A founder who once ran operations at a brand told me that 35% of its inventory had sat unsold for more than a year. Another ran weekend clearance stalls in Bangalore, where goods with a combined price tag of ₹7–8 lakh sold for ₹3 lakh. What’s interesting is that aspirational D2C labels outsold the mass brands, which is Rohan's behaviour showing up at the point of sale.

The difficulty is that brands would often rather destroy that stock than see it discounted in public. One consumer brand described spending ₹40–60 lakh to burn inventory rather than sell it at 50% off, because discounted goods find their way back into distribution. Another listed FMCG company told me it caps clearance at 10–15% off.

All of this indicates that the off-price business that wins supply will be the one that lets brands decide where their discounted goods show up. Whether that is by selling only to invited members, keeping listings out of search results, or limiting stock to certain cities.

Resale on the other hand runs on a totally different constraint because its supply comes from households. What matters there is an easy, trustworthy transaction more than the best price. Users told me they would rather take a lower price than deal with haggling and arranging pickups themselves. One woman sold a dishwasher worth ₹15,000–20,000 for ₹5,000 because she was moving out that week. Trust here is fragile and even a single unexplained cancellation at quality check can undo months of goodwill. The margins leave little room for error either. On a sneaker resale platform, I followed a pair of outlet Nikes that cost the seller ₹2,600 and sold to a customer for ₹3,400, leaving ₹800 to cover the seller's profit, the platform's cut, shipping and authentication. All of this works only when operations run tight.

How this plays out

Off-price retail and C2C resale each meet Rohan’s generation in a different place, and they stand to gain from AI in their own way. A lot of what makes these businesses expensive to run is the patient, item-by-item work of describing, pricing, and checking goods, which AI now handles well.

Both models serve trades that are large and still largely informal, and each one's job is to move that trade onto an organised platform people can trust. India's apparel market stood at $71 billion in CY24, and Redseer projects it will reach $130–150 billion by CY30, yet online shopping accounted for only about 19% of fashion spend in FY25: so four of every five fashion rupees are still spent in a store. In phones too, informal sellers still handle about 80% of refurbished sales. In essence, what we have here is a market that could roughly double within the decade, with most of its spending still offline and most of its secondhand trade still passing through sellers who offer no guarantees. That leaves a great deal of room for whoever can make buying surplus and used goods feel as safe as buying new.

But room in a market only matters if there is stock to fill it, and there are indications that the stock is already arriving. Indian mills are running at 60–70% of capacity while about $180 billion of clothing sits unsold worldwide, and listed brands such as Jaipur Kurti now route aged stock through discount formats.

Resale is the model that is still in very early stages in India and the US shows how large it can become. India's recommerce market stands at about $5.9 billion across all categories, led by electronics and then fashion. Americans on the other hand spent $55.5 billion on secondhand apparel alone last year, and 57% of ThredUp's US sellers now resell for income, more than double the share a year earlier.

Why this hasn't worked before, and why it can now

Earlier attempts at these businesses in India have tended to fail for reasons that go beyond demand. Brand Factory, the one multi-brand off-price chain to reach scale, went down with Future Group, whose fashion arm left ₹3,477 crore of admitted creditor claims. Early-2010s flash-sale sites such as Fashionandyou shut once brands stopped supplying them. Classifieds platforms like OLX and Quikr drew enormous audiences without ever building the trust, or the economics, to handle the transaction itself. Even in the US, ThredUp says supply holds back resale growth more than demand does.

What has changed now then, is the cost of the work that sits between a seller and a buyer. A phone photo can now become a well-described listing in seconds with an AI model that can flag fakes and fraud before a parcel ships. Support in Indian languages can also be run by voice at a fraction of what a call centre costs. A team I met mentioned adding a 20-second video of a sofa in use raised the share of listed sofas that sold from 10–12% to 18–20%. AI tools can now trim and caption that video on the seller's phone too. Meesho's CFO already describes AI as foundational to discovery, seller growth, logistics and engineering.

As AI brings the cost per order down, even small tickets can start to pay for themselves, so the capital a company raises can go into growth more efficiently.

What would change my mind

A thesis is only worth holding if it can be tested, so I want to set out the signals I will watch over the next few years, and if most of them move against me for three years running, I will say so publicly.

The first two concern the road into the consuming class. If starting salaries in IT services begin to rise well ahead of inflation, or if global capability centres start hiring graduates from tier-2 engineering colleges in large numbers, the distance between what young Indians earn and what they aspire to will close faster than I expect. That would be good news for Rohan and his peers, and I would welcome it, even as it means these businesses grow more slowly than I have argued.

The next two concern how people shop. Vishal Mega Mart’s same-store sales and Counterpoint’s data on refurbished versus new phone volumes will show whether this way of shopping is a lasting habit or a passing phase.

The last concerns resale. ThredUp's data shows a growing share of American sellers reselling for income, and a comparable measure in India would tell us how much of this market's supply comes from households turning what they own into spending money.

A note to founders

The teams that I think will succeed in this space will bring together a rare mix. They will understand how supply moves at street level, whether that means buying export surplus lots or persuading a million households to clear out their cupboards, and they will be able to build operations, with AI at the core, that make even small orders worth fulfilling. Above all, they will build for Rohan with respect. That means goods that are genuine, condition grades that are honest and refunds that arrive within a day.

Rohan wants his Dunks without feeling he has settled for less. The company that gives him that will earn his loyalty for the next decade, whatever the economy does in the meantime, and if you are building it, I would love to meet you.