The Business of Onam in Kochi: Broadway, Kakkanad and What Actually Moves

Onam gets sold to the rest of India as a harvest festival, boat races and a banana-leaf feast. Inside Kerala, it is also the single biggest stretch on the retail calendar, and Kochi's share of it runs through a jewellery showroom on MG Road, a thousand shopfronts on Broadway, and a tech park in Kakkanad that has been throwing its own mass Onam party for at least a decade. None of that gets the postcard treatment, but it is the part of the festival that actually moves money.

How much does Onam shopping actually add up to?

Industry trackers put Kerala's total Onam-season consumer spending, across every category combined, at somewhere in the region of Rs 20,000 to 25,000 crore, a figure large enough that advertising and retail analysts treat the festival as the real start of the state's festive economy each year. On top of that overall number, a 2026 retail report tracked a 20 to 30 percent jump in shopping activity through the festival window, alongside more than 21 million digital interactions with Onam-linked retail content, and found that shoppers aged 25 to 44 spent the most while 41 percent of buyers were actively hunting for discounts rather than paying full price. Those numbers are state-wide, not Kochi-specific, but the city is where a large share of that spending physically happens, because Ernakulam is Kerala's commercial capital and its Onam-season crowds concentrate in a handful of very identifiable places.

Metric	Kerala-wide Onam season figure
Total consumer spending, all categories	Roughly Rs 20,000-25,000 crore
Retail activity increase	20-30 percent versus a normal period
Digital reach around Onam retail content	More than 21 million interactions
Shoppers seeking deals	41 percent, per a 2026 retail tracking report

Where does that spending land in Kochi?

Broadway, Kochi's oldest shopping street, is the clearest physical answer. It packs close to a thousand stores into roughly two kilometres, and Onam is one of its three peak seasons alongside Vishu and Christmas, when the narrow lanes fill with people buying new clothes and jewellery in the same afternoon. That combination, textiles and jewellery together, is not incidental. New clothes and jewellery are the two purchases Onam custom treats as close to mandatory, which is exactly why Broadway's crowds get genuinely difficult to move through in the run-up to Thiruvonam rather than merely busy. If you are shopping there this week, go early or accept that you are shopping at the pace of the crowd, not your own.

Is Onam actually good for business, or just loud?

It is good for business, and specifically for the categories that can attach themselves to the festival's two non-negotiable rituals: the onakkodi (new clothes) and the sadya. Everything else, the market fairs, the mall footfall, the office parties, is downstream of the fact that this is the one week a year when spending on both is treated as expected rather than optional. That is a genuinely useful thing to understand about Onam commercially: it is not diffuse festive cheer translating into vague sales, it is two specific purchase categories carrying almost the entire economic weight, with everything else riding along.

What does Onam look like inside Kochi's tech parks?

Kochi's other Onam economy runs on a very different rhythm, inside the IT campuses rather than the shopping streets. Infopark Kakkanad now houses more than 580 companies employing roughly 72,000 people, and mass Onam celebrations, pookkalam competitions, tug-of-war, staff in traditional dress, have been a fixture of the campus calendar for years; a 2016 account of the campus's celebrations described close to 200 firms taking part, with employees from outside Kerala joining in as enthusiastically as locals. There is no reliable, current figure for how many companies still run their own celebration this specific year, and it would be a mistake to claim otherwise, but the tradition itself is well established rather than a one-off, and the scale of the campus, more than half of Kochi's entire IT workforce concentrated in one place, means that whatever happens there this week happens at a genuinely large scale.

• Broadway Market: ~1,000 stores in about 2 sq km, Onam's busiest shopping stretch in the city
• Jewellery and textiles: the two categories Onam custom treats as essential purchases
• Infopark Kakkanad: 580+ companies, ~72,000 employees, a long-running campus-wide Onam tradition
• Best time to shop Broadway: mornings, before the lanes fill up

If the retail side is what interests you, our Onam shopping guide covers the clothes side in more detail, and the Business section has the rest of what is moving in the city's economy this season.