OPEN Strategy & Design: Started Lean, Emerged Convincing
OPEN Strategy & Design, a brand design company, commenced operations in the year 2011 to facilitate the growth of brands and businesses and recently bagged Design Agency of the Year award, 2018 at ABBY’s, Goafest 2019. Initiated by the founders – Rahul Kaloti and Mangesh Rane, the agency has managed to execute the desire to leverage big-brand thinking to drive business growth with both startups and legacy brands.
The year started on a good note for OPEN Strategy & Design with the company winning big as Design Agency of the Year, 2018 at ABBY’s. “Yes, we have been winning big and consistently at both ABBY’s and Kyoorius Design Yatra over the past couple of years, ever since we started entering these awards. What is more heartening is that all the work that has won was created for the market and not just to push creative possibilities,” the much elated Rahul Kaloti speaks.
“In fact, when we started off, we bet on the coming together of two strong forces – strategy – sharp, with-its-nose-on-the-ground, big-opportunity-grabbing-idea kind of thinking married to design, which can envision and deliver the brand as both a system and a desirable world. The two combined give you the power to build big business opportunities,” he adds.
This starting belief has only gotten stronger with time. The desire was to leverage big-brand thinking to drive business growth. And the company have managed to do that with both startups and legacy brands. “There is beauty in a media-agnostic approach where the focus is on delivering the brand in its most potent form across different platforms. Today, our team comes from diverse backgrounds – allowing us a more robust perspective on brands – marrying cultural truths to retail intelligence and so on,” Kaloti further elaborates.
“We work with entrepreneurs, private equity companies and established brands. But we are trying to bring in the big-picture brand perspective, even if we are tackling just one part of the problem.”
A Series of Astute Stratagems
While there are many things that company is proud of, they still assume themselves to be ‘work-in-progress’. “What is exciting to us is the approach. There are two parts to our approach – one, create brands that are remarkable. This might sound simple and obvious, but it is at the heart of most of marketing woes. Brands need to be designed with distinctiveness at their core. And looking around you realise that not enough brands are conceived to be remarkable,” Mangesh Rane explains.
The second part – is about building the brand from the inside out. Branding not as an artificial top layer, but something that is built from within. Starting with internal culture, to product, to packaging, to retail experience, and all the way to communication, all the layers building a single cohesive, desirable world.
Rane believes that the joys come from the shifts they engineer. Whether it is birthing a new brand and getting it quick traction or revitalising a legacy brand and setting it on a new growth orbit. “We have, since we started in 2011, addressed such a wide variety of challenges – From re-vitalising a 100-years old retail brand (Nilgiris for Future Group) to building India’s most prestigious journalism awards (RedInk Awards for Mumbai Press Club) and from creating one the buzziest new diamond brands in the world (ALTR) to creating a highly effective social good programme (Main Pragati for CRISIL Foundation). We have also worked with homegrown brands like MeeMee (babycare), Opium (eyewear) and Imaginarium (3D Printing) and helped put them on a different growth trajectory,” Rane shares.
The company has been convinced of being fortunate to work on brands across different markets –Europe, the US, and China, and collaborated with people across geographies, which helps it bring in a bigger perspective to everything the company does. According to the founders, there’s so much more to learn and draw reference from.
Work Quality Obscure Hardships
Every working operation faces initial hiccups. The challenges come even after well-establishing your name in the industry. However, OPEN Strategy & Design, fortunately has been lucky enough to have not faced any unsparing hardships. “We haven’t really faced any adversity as such. We have focused on the work. Going by the measure of the quality of talent and the impact that we have had on the client businesses, we believe it has worked quite well for us,” gladdened Kaloti avers.
“We had a strong initial core team and then the work helped us attract talent. We do not need to fill massive teams, so we get to be selective about who we take in.”
Having said that, the industry as a whole does face the unique challenge of attracting talent from next generation to work with them. “There does exist a talent crisis in the industry. While there are many aspects to the problem, the solution is straightforward – the work. Stellar, impactful work that captures people’s imagination was always the best recruitment ads we put out as an industry. Maybe we aren’t doing enough of that. We solve that and the rest of it will take care of itself,” he points out.
Digital Needs Brand Thinking and Good Design
As per the common belief, the advent of digital media has caused creative carnage in the designing part of advertising. However Rane beleives, “Looking at digital from the media-end is not going to work. It can only be leveraged by brand thinking. Right now, there is not enough conceptual thinking that one gets to see. When we were working on designing the e-commerce experience for MeeMee, we imagined an exhausted, sleep-deprived mother who gets on to the website at midnight and we asked ourselves what should be the experience be like? Fundamental thinking opens new doors. Creates fresh, compelling experiences.”
“The other big drawback is design. Digital is a great place to build experiences – and quality design sensibilities is so critical there. We believe that when you put brand thinking and design with digital, you get work that’s worth people’s time,” he speaks.
Synergy Between Brands and Agencies
There is this entrepreneurial spirit that the company believes it need to adopt. Kaloti thinks it’s optimism, energy, and big-thinking what OPEN Strategy & Design needs as an agency. “We need to build brands with the kind of zeal and contextual awareness that today’s entrepreneurs have. One of our closest relationships, is with this amazing Indian group with whom we are together building opportunities across the globe. It is this symbiotic kind of relationship which has helped us become sharper at building businesses and them getting more brand intuitive in their internal thinking. It is with these kinds of associations that the new agency model is finding shape.”
Style of Creativity – Not Easy but Powerful
The power of a brand lies in its ability to deliver non-linear growth for businesses. And that only happens when there is a brand that is designed to engage. “On our credential book, there is a quote from the American Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel – ‘the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference’. If we have to fight indifference of the consumer, we have to be remarkable – engaging at every possible opportunity, whether it’s the product or retail or communication. It is not easy, but it is powerful. It creates moments of bias. That is what we aim for, whether working with a startup or an established brand. Having our eye on the business task all the time is our biggest edge,” Rane apprises.
Past, Present, and Future
The agency seems quite satisfied with the amount and quality of work it is delivering to the brands and other clients. Taking pride in contemplating the framework and having a sharp point of view in any category is what gives them an edge over other contemporary new players. “It gives us a real sense of satisfaction when we get to put out a sharp point of view in any category. One such current assignment was for Zivame, which operates in the Indian lingerie market and has leveraged e-commerce powerfully to create an inviting interface for women. To unlock the next phase of growth, the brand needed a promise, language and a vocabulary of its own. We defined its codes, built the world and created the operating system of the brand, setting directions for everything – from retail to e-commerce to communication, Kaloti shares.
Then there is this precious gifting brand called Unsaid Library, which the agency just launched in Belgium. It translates emotions into beautiful gifts, creating the perfect gift. “We have led the conceptualisation, product design philosophy, testing it across the globe, brand design, retail experience design (both online and offline) and communication. It’s now in the process of a European roll-out.”
Another brand which the agency is very excited about, is the New York-based lab-grown diamond brand ALTR. “When the whole industry was looking at lab grown as the ethical/cheaper other, we took a contra stand. We realised that the lab-grown diamond could actually deliver both higher quality and bigger size. So, we built it like a modern luxury brand. ALTR is already amongst the biggest lab-grown companies in the world.
“Honestly, we don’t know what box we belong in. So, we do not really have a reference point in terms of competition, etc. We are a brand design company, here to do strong work that delivers business growth and the future for that, we believe, will always be bright,” Kaloti concludes.