A local brand sold 1,500 shirts in 52 minutes at full price. Your festive calendar taught your customers to wait.

Open your marketing calendar for the year and count the discount events. Across Southeast Asia the list barely differs: 11.11, 12.12, Ramadan and Raya sales, Harbolnas in Indonesia, the Mega Sales and Merdeka promotions in Malaysia.

There is barely a month without a regional markdown, and you feel you cannot skip a single one.

Now look at Erigo. A Southeast Asian streetwear brand, born in Indonesia and selling across the region, that moved 1,500 shirts in 52 minutes at full price, and never touched your calendar to do it.

People emptied their wallets in under an hour, and no one waited for a price cut

Erigo and Thanksinsomnia dropped a collaboration that sold out so fast it set a MURI record for the most t-shirts sold online in a single hour: 1,500 pieces in 52 minutes (Erigo, MURI Indonesia).

On a separate Shopee livestream, Erigo pulled Rp5 billion, roughly US$305,000, in under ten minutes (Erigo official).

Nobody in those 52 minutes was hunting a discount. They were afraid the drop would be gone before they reached checkout. Scarcity did the job your markdowns keep failing to do.

Your customer does not need a lower price. She needs a reason to buy today instead of next month.

You spent years teaching her to wait, then blamed her for waiting

The scale of the discount machine is easiest to see in Indonesia, but the pattern runs region-wide. Indonesia’s national discount programs moved Rp122.28 trillion, about US$7.5 billion, in 2025, beating the government’s own Rp110 trillion target (Kemenko Perekonomian via Antara, Jan 2026).

Every one of those events teaches your customer the same lesson: hold on, the price will fall again in a few weeks. So your best customer stopped buying when she wants something. Now she checks the calendar, not the product.

Then you point at her patience and conclude shoppers here only respond to discounts. She did not arrive that way. Your calendar trained her, in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur alike.

Harbolnas alone did Rp36.4 trillion, roughly US$2.2 billion, in a single week last December (Kemendag via Antara, Dec 2025). A large share of that was not new demand. It was full-price demand you already owned, rescheduled to a worse margin.

Three questions to ask before your next festive campaign

If you cannot answer these from your own sales data, the discount is running you, not the other way around.

01 · Sells without a cut

Which of your products sell out without ever being discounted?

Those are the ones your customers genuinely want, and the ones you should never mark down. Erigo built its whole model on this: limited drops that clear at full price in under an hour (Erigo, MURI Indonesia).

02 · Discount dependence

What share of your customers only ever buy during a sale?

Split your base into deal-only buyers and full-price buyers. You are almost certainly handing the same markdown to both, and paying to discount people who would have bought anyway.

03 · New versus rescheduled

How much of your festive sales is new demand, not demand you moved to a lower price?

When national programs move Rp122 trillion, about US$7.5 billion, in a year (Kemenko via Antara, Jan 2026), most chains never separate the two. That single number will change how you plan next Raya.

One thing you can do on Monday

Pull your last twelve months of sales and mark every product that sold through without a discount. That short list is your full-price power, and right now it is invisible to your promo plan.

Take one of those products and build a genuinely limited run for your next campaign. A real quantity, a real deadline, gone when it is gone.

Give your most loyal customers first access, not a lower price. Early access is a reward that costs you nothing in margin.

Thanks for reading this far. Shoppers across Southeast Asia are not addicted to discounts. Erigo emptied 1,500 wallets in 52 minutes to prove it. Your customers will pay full price the moment you give them something worth not waiting for.