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Imagine the situation, it is the morning of Holi. You have been planning this for days. The gulal is sorted, the water balloons are filled and sitting in a bucket, and you have even had the foresight to oil up before stepping out - because nobody wants colour sitting in their hair for a week. You are ready. You are armed. You are confident.
And then you see it.
Your friend, standing across the terrace, holding a watergun the size of a small rocket launcher. The kind that can drench you from fifteen feet away before you even register what is happening. You have colours. They have range.
There is only one move left. You open a quick commerce app, type ‘water gun,’ and in twelve minutes, a Spyra blaster or a NERF Super Soaker is at your doorstep. You step back out.
Now it is a fair fight.
This is not hypothetical anymore. For millions of people living in Tier I and select Tier II cities, this is simply how Holi works now. Quick commerce platforms - predominantly Zepto, Blinkit, and Instamart - have spent the last few years quietly embedding themselves into festival culture.
The quick commerce sector is not a niche anymore. Revenue in the global Quick Commerce market is projected to reach US$6.94 billion in 2026, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.41% through 2030, reaching a projected market volume of US$11.08 billion.
Festivals, with their last-minute purchase patterns and emotionally-driven buying, tend to be among the clearest use cases for a format built around speed.
In 2026, all three rival platforms understood this festive need and the festive market.
OOH: Taking the festival to the streets
Instamart went the most visually ambitious route with its out-of-home campaign. A truck carrying an oversized, larger-than-life water gun was driven through parts of Gurgaon in the days leading up to Holi. The installation was modelled after the kind of water blasters available on the platform, and the activation was developed in collaboration with MOMS (Madison OOH Media Solutions).
The truck did not need a billboard. It was the billboard. Commuters slowed down. Children pointed from the sidewalk. People pulled out their phones. Within hours, videos of the giant water gun were circulating across Instagram and X, doing the kind of organic amplification that a static hoarding simply finds hard.
Blinkit took the textbook approach to OOH - the quieter one. Its hoarding read "Holi pe rang jamao, baalon mein nahi" paired with Parachute Advanced Gold coconut hair oil.
Rather than talking about the pre-Holi rituals, it spoke about the post-celebration tasks. Hair and skin care before and after Holi is something most people think about, but often underprepare for.
Zepto partnered with confectionery brand Chupa Chups for a live activation at Worldmark Gurgaon, centred on an installation that would spray water on unsuspecting visitors who stepped onto a designated platform.
The surprise element was the point. People walking through a mall were not expecting to get soaked. The installation mimicked the classic Holi ambush - the same kind that the installation read ‘Missing Bachpan wali Holi?’ - and forced people to respond the way Holi actually makes you respond: by dropping composure and laughing. Every participant walked away with a Chupa Chups candy.
Holi becomes an in-app experience
Beyond campaigns that lived outside the app, platforms made visual changes to the shopping experience itself.
Demand for Holi-adjacent categories surged significantly across platforms.
As per the data shared by Fortune India, Instamart reported a spike across the board:
- Water guns: up nearly 36x week-on-week
- Water balloons: up more than 44x
- Holi colours: up nearly 33x
Zepto highlighted strong city-level patterns. Bengaluru led across gulal, Holi colours, and water gun orders. Delhi became the gujiya capital of the season, with festive sweets driving demand alongside Mumbai and Bengaluru. Mumbai earned the thandai title, with Delhi and Bengaluru close behind.
Blinkit created a dedicated ‘Holi Hai’ storefront - a curated section. It included herbal gulal, water balloons, spray cans, pichkaris, and other festive essentials.
The storefront also extended into fashion, with white cotton kurtas and t-shirts (a Holi staple for obvious reasons), and into the festive food and accessories space - body oils, jhumkis, gujiyas, and thandai.
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As per Business Standard, Flipkart Minutes noted that women's ethnic dresses and casual wear were seeing strong traction in the run-up to the festival - suggesting that the ‘white kurta for Holi’ category is now a legitimate quick commerce play, not just an afterthought.
Zepto went further with its interface experiments. The platform introduced a feature that allowed users to send Holi greetings directly to someone's Zepto homepage - actual greetings, with a colours-and-balloons visual delivered into the app itself.
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It also rolled out a Holi shade card dispatched with orders, letting users compare their post-Holi colour coverage and ‘rate their Holi game.’ These were small, playful touches, but they turned a transactional platform into something that felt, briefly, like it was part of the celebration rather than just a utility for it.
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Instamart's festive assortment was anchored by its larger-than-usual water gun range, alongside the full spectrum of colours, including UV, phool gulal, organic, and body paints, plus aftercare products.
Creator collaborations & digital campaigns
All three platforms invested in influencer marketing, though with different approaches.
Zepto collaborated with beverage brand Non Stop and brought in multiple creators across social media platforms, with Instagram as the primary channel.
Instamart worked with creators like Funcho and others to advertise its water gun assortment on Instagram, linking the category directly to creators whose content skewed playful and high-energy - a natural fit for a festival that runs on the same currency.
The creator layer served a specific purpose: it put the product in context.
Meanwhile, Zepto also launched a digital campaign with ad spots in collaboration with Scotch Bright, Cerave India, Nivia Sports, as well as a standalone ad spot. All focusing on different aspects of the festival, where Scotch Bright came to rescue post-mess of playing colours in the house, the Cerave facewash came to the rescue post Holi, and Nivia Sports encouraged consumers to let their inner child come out and celebrate.
Meanwhile, the standalone ad spot highlights the familiar celebration of the festival with the family, and all the elements of the celebration including the colours, the shared emotion and sweets.
Instamart too posted multiple short videos highlighting its product assortment of Holi essentials.
The shift from ‘I forgot to buy colours’ to ‘I want the best water gun on the market delivered before 10 AM’ might be a meaningful one.
It suggests that quick commerce might not be just a convenience fallback for Holi or any festival per se - it could become a planned part of how urban India prepares for the day.