Teej, Dashain and the Shape of the Buying Year

The demand curve for gold in Nepal has a shape, and the shape is drawn by the festival calendar rather than by anything economic. Understanding it explains a good deal about why shops behave the way they do, and why the same necklace can be difficult to find in one month and sitting in every window the next.

Teej, in Bhadra

Teej is the most visibly gold-heavy festival in the Nepali year. Women fast, gather, and dress in red, and gold is worn as a matter of course rather than as an exception. Bangles and neck pieces move particularly well in the weeks before it.

What is distinctive about Teej demand is the price point. It is a festival of many modest purchases rather than a few large ones — a pair of bangles, a chain, something added to an existing set. Shops that stock only bridal-weight pieces find they have nothing to sell.

Dashain and Tihar, through Ashwin and Kartik

The long festival season is the commercial centre of the Nepali year across every kind of retail, and jewellery is no exception.

Within it, Laxmi Puja carries particular significance for precious metals. Buying gold or silver on that day is considered auspicious, an invitation to prosperity into the household, and the buying is often symbolic in size — a small coin, a light chain, something for a child. Volume is high and average value is low.

Silver does unusually well in this period, both as jewellery and as puja items, and it is the one stretch of the year when the silver counter can out-turn the gold counter on footfall.

The wedding months

Overlaid on the festivals is the wedding calendar, which concentrates in Mangsir, Magh and Falgun, and again in Baishakh and Jestha. This is where the large purchases sit — full sets, ordered weeks ahead, absorbing most of a shop's workshop capacity.

Where a wedding month and a festival month overlap, a shop is running two quite different businesses at once: high-volume small purchases over the counter, and long-lead custom work in the back.

The quiet stretch

Chaturmas, running roughly from Ashadh into Kartik, holds no weddings. Combined with the monsoon, which suppresses footfall on its own, this is the trough.

It is not dead time for a well-run shop. It is when stock is built, designs are developed, old inventory is remade into current styles and the accounts are put in order. The work done in the quiet months is what determines whether the busy ones go smoothly.

What the pattern means in practice

For a shop, three things follow.

• Stock has to match the season, not just the budget. Bridal-weight inventory in Bhadra and light festival pieces in Magh is the classic way to have capital tied up in exactly the wrong things.
• Working capital is committed months before it returns. Metal bought in the trough is sold in the peak, at whatever rate applies then.
• Workshop capacity must be booked ahead. It cannot be expanded inside a season.

For a buyer, one thing follows, and it is the mirror image: the best time to buy something considered is the time when nobody else is buying. In the quiet months you get the full attention of the shop, the workshop has capacity, and there is room to talk about making charges. In the fortnight before a festival you get none of those.