What the studio is reading.
Daily, curated. 5 to 7 items a day across design, branding, packaging, consumer trends, technology, and India. Every link goes to the source.
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massimo dutti reincarnates 16th-century palace as rome flagship store
Massimo Dutti didn't build a Rome flagship, they restored a 16th-century palace and let the architecture do the selling. Worth studying if you think retail design is just fixtures.
Read on Designboom -
Health Marketing Is Moving From Information to Navigation
Health marketing is shifting from broadcasting information to actively guiding decisions, and brands that treat patients as navigators rather than audiences are pulling ahead on trust.
Read on Adweek -
Building TenxYou Beyond Sachin Tendulkar
TenxYou is trying to build a brand that outlives Sachin Tendulkar's name on the tin. That is a harder problem than most founder-led brands in India are willing to admit they have.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
ArtCraft Launches an Open-Source, AI-Powered Alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud
ArtCraft is building an open-source, AI-powered design suite to challenge Adobe's Creative Cloud monopoly, and the timing, with creative teams watching subscription costs closely, makes this worth watching.
Read on Dieline -
Magic Spoon Gets a Shelf-Friendly Redesign Without Losing its Saturday Morning Essence
Magic Spoon's packaging redesign proves you can make a DTC-born brand work on physical shelves without gutting the personality that built its following in the first place.
Read on Dieline -
ink traces and rotational gestures shape polkadot design’s visual identity for athens epidaurus festival
Athens Epidaurus Festival's new identity uses ink traces and rotational mark-making to build a visual language that actually earns the word 'performative' rather than just claiming it.
Read on Designboom -
james chinlund fills louis vuitton’s louvre runway with hovering concept vehicles
James Chinlund filled Louis Vuitton's Louvre runway with hovering concept vehicles, and the line between set design and world-building is now effectively gone for luxury fashion.
Read on Designboom -
Reinventing Retail Icons: Ken Ohashi and Marisa Thalberg on Making Legacy Brands Relevant
Ken Ohashi and Marisa Thalberg on what it genuinely takes to make a legacy retail brand feel current again: a useful conversation for any Indian brand sitting on decades of equity and unsure what to do with it.
Read on Adweek -
Oura Wants Wellness to Mean More Than a Personal Best
Oura's new brand direction pushes wellness beyond personal metrics and into something more social, a signal that the category is maturing past self-optimisation as a selling point.
Read on Adweek -
How Bacardí and AMC Resurrected the Crypt Keeper After 30 Years
Bacardi and AMC brought the Crypt Keeper back after 30 years for a Halloween campaign, a case study in how nostalgia works when the brand actually earns the reference instead of borrowing it.
Read on Adweek -
How Clevertap’s decade-long data bet laid the foundation for AI decisioning
CleverTap's decade of first-party data infrastructure is now the backbone of its AI decisioning layer, a reminder that the brands building AI advantages today started the groundwork years before the hype.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
AI Is Pushing Advertising Back Into the Physical World
As AI floods digital channels with generated content, advertisers are rediscovering physical media, billboards, packaging, retail, because scarcity of attention has shifted back to the real world.
Read on Adweek -
How Indie Agencies Are Setting AI Guardrails to Keep Their Cultures Human
Indie agencies are writing actual AI policies, not vibes, to decide what work gets automated and what stays human, and the ones doing it early are winning the culture argument with clients.
Read on Adweek -
Kraft Mac & Cheese Launches Cheesy Ramen in Its First New Category in Nearly 20 Years
Kraft Mac and Cheese entering ramen after nearly 20 years of category silence is a reminder that brand extension works best when the flavour logic is obvious and the audience overlap is already there.
Read on Dieline -
jaguar type 01 launches electric era with four-door grand tourer
Jaguar's Type 01 grand tourer is finally real: a four-door electric with a design language so polarising it has already done more brand work than any campaign the company has run in a decade.
Read on Designboom -
Why Banking Needs FMCG-Style Consumer-First Thinking
Indian banks are sitting on rich customer data and still market like it is 1998. This piece makes the case that FMCG-style segmentation and consumer-first thinking could reshape how financial brands grow.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
Who Owns Agency-Client Secrets?
When an agency builds strategy on a client's internal data and the relationship ends, who owns that knowledge? This question is becoming urgent as AI tools make institutional memory far easier to retain and reuse.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
The Jaguar Type 01 is finally here to herald the brand’s electric era. Can the cat strike back?
Jaguar's Type 01 is finally out, and the brand's full electric rebrand now has a car to justify it. Whether the design earns back the skeptics is the real question.
Read on Wallpaper* -
‘for life is not a spectacle’ barbara kruger wraps tadao ando’s rotunda in monumental texts
Barbara Kruger wrapped Tadao Ando's rotunda in monumental text, and the result is one of those rare collisions where two uncompromising practices make each other sharper, not louder.
Read on Designboom -
7 Billion Impressions Without Paid Media: Fanta’s Halloween Strategy
Fanta drove 7 billion impressions for Halloween without spending a rupee on paid media. The strategy is worth studying before your next campaign brief.
Read on Adweek -
A Practical Guide To Naming Things
Smashing Magazine's naming guide is unglamorous and genuinely useful: the kind of thinking that saves a product team three meetings and one bad rebrand.
Read on Smashing Magazine -
In Defence of Soan Papdi
Brand Equity makes a straight-faced case for Soan Papdi as a cultural product worth defending. Odd brief, but the argument about Indian brand nostalgia holds up.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
K-Pop, K-Cart, K-Ching!: How Zepto is "Korean Maxx-ing" India’s Shopping Habits
Zepto is running a full Korean aesthetic playbook, from store design to product curation, and Indian shoppers are buying it. Cultural branding as commerce strategy.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
Festive adex rises up to 15% as quick commerce, creators gain ground
Festive ad spending in India is up 15%, with quick commerce and creator channels taking the largest share. Traditional media is not where the growth is going.
Read on Brand Equity (Economic Times) -
Beecee Brings Clean Beauty to a Younger Audience with Genuinely Cool Design
Beecee's clean beauty packaging skips the clinical white-and-green playbook entirely, proving that reaching a younger audience sometimes means designing like you actually know them.
Read on Dieline -
studio KO turns historic 1960s bus palladium nightclub into five-star hotel in paris
Studio KO converted Paris's 1960s Bus Palladium nightclub into a five-star hotel, keeping the building's cultural memory intact rather than erasing it, a lesson in adaptive reuse that brand teams should study.
Read on Designboom -
OpenAI Is Piloting Brand Suitability Controls With DoubleVerify and IAS
OpenAI is piloting brand suitability controls with DoubleVerify and IAS, which means AI-generated surfaces are finally being treated like real media inventory, with all the accountability that implies.
Read on Adweek -
TikTok Adds an AI Shopping Assistant and Lets Users Buy Direct From Brands
TikTok now lets users buy directly from brands inside the app and ships an AI shopping assistant, collapsing the gap between discovery and purchase in ways most Indian D2C brands aren't ready for.
Read on Adweek -
valentino’s ‘antibiblioteca’ looks to unread books to rethink the value of clothes
Valentino built a concept around unread books to reframe how we value clothes, and whether or not you buy the idea, it's a sharper brand argument than most fashion houses manage in a full campaign.
Read on Designboom -
TEMPER Turns One Legendary Tennis Point Into 60 Bottles
TEMPER bottled a single legendary tennis point across 60 limited bottles, a packaging concept that shows how a precise, specific story beats a broad brand narrative almost every time.
Read on Dieline
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