Brand Strategist

Brand strategy is a very broad church, so let’s be specific. I’m good at reading the runes. Finding that special quality that is at the heart of every brand (sometimes lying dormant) and using visual and verbal identity to bring that story to life in a way that engages and resonates with customers and stakeholders, immediately and over time.

I’ve got a track-record of bringing dusty brands back to life; of making fledgling tech start-ups understandable for markets that have never seen their like before; and of finding that secret sauce that enables businesses to grow dramatically – by connecting with, and create communities for, the people who love what they do.

Sometimes it’s through laborious research, sometimes it’s all gut – and every client deserves a process that’s unique to them, understands their corporate personality and reflects where they are at. Whether it’s a quick deep-dive or an extended hand-hold, I work alongside organisations to solve their problems – to create solutions that they can easily adopt and love, and, most importantly, that serve them well.

Chambers

I didn’t know before I worked with them, but if you are passionate about words, you love Chambers’ Dictionary. They are the word book for word people – intelligent, irreverant, insightful – but you would never have known that from their covers. And covers sell books. I started by getting them to think about what words made each of their books special, and focused each design there. The new stories worked – bookshops wanted to stock Chambers, sales grew by 40% in year 1.

Simpli Namdhari’s

In largely vegetarian southern India, Namdhari’s is the only vegetarian supermarket chain – I shopped there and loved them for being chaotic but dependable.
An influx of western and western-inspired supermarket brands pushed them to expand from local grocer to food destination, and I was asked to create a brand to define that transition. I focused on provenance – they owned their own farms and supply chains, so I knew they could talk obsessively about detail, trust and quality.

Standard Fireworks

How do you unite 500 disparate products aimed at different consumers and occasions to fend off competition? Standard Fireworks, the world’s largest fireworks manufacturer, came to me with just such a problem. The answer? To create a cinematic universe for their brand, where each firework could have its own personality – from beautiful fountains to angry bangers – but they could all play together under the Standard banner; the assurance of a universal quality stamp.

Loccul

Ten years ago, the incubator fund I was working with had an idea. Real world concierge services for HNWIs were a growing industry, and we had programmers who believed that they could replicate them for India using machine learning (or ‘almost-AI’).
Concierge services are only worthwhile if they are used habitually and so I focused on defining how and where Loccul needed to show up and interact to be genuinely valuable – the fine details of a phygital experience.