/work · 04 projects · 2023–2025
Selected work.
The studio doesn't publish everything. These are the projects we think about when someone asks what we do.
/work · 04 projects · 2023–2025
The studio doesn't publish everything. These are the projects we think about when someone asks what we do.
/open briefs · 07 unfinished · always
Some briefs you write because a client hired you. Some you write because you couldn't sleep. These are the second kind.
“Every woman's nightmare is simple: the wings should not move. We turned that into India's most dangerous brand apology.”
A speculative cultural repositioning - not a rebrand deck, a public reckoning. Whisper stops defending the category, apologizes for it, and launches Whisper Organics while the internet argues about a Fevicol collab that should never have worked.
“Sylvester daCunha conceived the Amul Girl in 1966. She's been having the same conversation ever since.”
Amul Topical is the longest-running advertising campaign in the world - over five decades of weekly hoardings from a single Bombay agency. It's also lost its bite. We'd return the girl to commentary, not commemoration. Same character. Sharper teeth.
“IndiGo carries six in every ten Indians who fly. They have the brand equity of a wholesale rice supplier.”
IndiGo won the Indian market on punctuality and price. Now the whole category is on time and cheap, and the airline is stretching into business class, widebodies and the A321XLR - all without a brand voice that can hold any of it. The brief also lands during the biggest leadership transition in the airline's history.
“Royal Enfield went from old men's bike to cult brand in fifteen years. They have ten years left before they're a marketing case study.”
Eicher Motors took a dying British brand and built a global cult around the Bullet's thump. Honda has now entered the segment, the demographic that founded the cult is aging out, and Royal Enfield has to decide whether it's still a religion or already an institution.
“Boroline has used the same green tube, the same elephant logo, and roughly the same formula since 1929. We wouldn't change any of it. We'd change everything else.”
GD Pharmaceuticals' Boroline is one of India's quietest brand miracles - almost a century of unbroken household loyalty by changing almost nothing. The product is sacred. The product is also doing all the brand work by itself. We'd build the layer around the product that the next thirty years requires.
“Mysore Sandal Soap is owned by the Karnataka state government and has barely changed since 1916. That is the brand. That is also the problem.”
Karnataka Soaps and Detergents has been making the most authentically Indian luxury soap for over a century - pure Mysore sandalwood, the Sharabha mark, the green-and-gold pack. The brand is loved, undervalued, and structurally constrained by being a public-sector undertaking. We'd write the strategy that respects all three.
“Estée Lauder just finished acquiring Forest Essentials. The brand's whole story was built on the opposite of that.”
Mira Kulkarni built Forest Essentials from a small operation near Rishikesh into a brand that sold its handmade, slow-batch authenticity for two decades. The Estée Lauder Companies has now completed a slow-motion full acquisition - 20% in 2008, 49% in 2020, the remaining 51% to take it to a wholly-owned subsidiary. The brand the West takes seriously is now inside the most western beauty conglomerate there is. The next move decides whether the Rishikesh story survives the cap table.
If you work at one of these brands and want to talk - the email is at the bottom of the page.