How we choose 600 items on our August trip to Sivakasi

Every August, Hetal and Jignesh Patel spend two weeks in Sivakasi. It is the most important fortnight of our year, because what they order then is what you will find on our shelves in October.

They visit around forty manufacturing units, from family workshops making only sparklers to large units producing 240-shot cakes. At each one they look at new items for the season and check last year’s best sellers are still made the same way. They take notes on price, carton size and dispatch dates, because a cheaper item that arrives on 25 October is no use to us.

The most useful part of the trip is the test field outside town, where units light samples in the evening. Jignesh times every new cake and fountain with a stopwatch and records it on video. If a 30-shot cake claims a minute and runs for 40 seconds, it does not go on our list, whatever the price. Hetal watches the colours and how cleanly each item burns out, and notes how much paper and ash it leaves behind, which matters to customers in housing societies.

By the end of the trip they have a list of about 650 items. Around 50 are dropped once the samples have been compared at home. The first lorries reach Ahmedabad in mid-September, and the team of 14 starts sorting the godown into the aisles you see in the store, arranged by type rather than by brand so you can compare easily.