The highest-traffic week Kushals has. Two years running, I've owned the end-to-end experience across six teams — and the interesting part isn't the campaign, it's what a sale does to a shopper's decision-making.
Normal browsing at Kushals is exploratory — people wander categories, save things, come back. Sale traffic behaves nothing like that. It arrives in a spike, it's offer-led rather than product-led, and a large share of it is people who have never used the app before and won't again unless this goes well.
The default architecture actively fought that. Someone landing from an offer ad hit a homepage built for browsing, then had to work out for themselves which products the offer even applied to. The drop-off was concentrated in the first two screens, before anyone had seen a piece of jewellery.
For the sale window, the whole page hierarchy inverts. The offer becomes the primary navigation, curated entries replace the general category grid, and every surface answers the same question first: what do I get, and on what.
Category owns the offers, Product owns the funnel, Branding owns the look, Creative owns the assets, Engineering owns whether it stays up. Design is the only function that touches all five, which in practice makes it the place where contradictions surface.
Most of my job during a sale week isn't designing screens. It's holding the line on a hierarchy everyone has a reason to break — the extra banner, the third badge on a tile, the offer that needs to be "slightly bigger". Every one of those is individually reasonable and collectively fatal to a page that has to work in one glance on a mid-range phone.
Traffic grew 53% year on year and the platform held. That's an engineering achievement, but it's also a design one: the sale surfaces were built from the same block system as everything else, so there was nothing bespoke and untested in the path of five million people.
Add-to-cart went up sharply; I'd want to be honest that a chunk of that is offer strength, not architecture. The number I trust more is PDP sessions nearly doubling — that's discovery doing its job rather than discounting doing it.
The thing I'd change: we still design the sale as a special mode that gets dismantled afterwards. A lot of what works during sale — budget-led entry points, clearer pricing — would work in March and also in July.