Are you a freelancer? Are you an agency? Are you a consultant? A bird? A plane? What are you? — I get this question too often to not address it once and for all — in the first post of my website.
I say before we slap labels and I start dishing out ‘millennial job description neologisms’ let’s take a moment to look at the scene.
The Indian creative industry woke up with a jolt and became much more than advertising sometime around 2012. At this point the creative industry for making and maintaining brands primarily bifurcated into:
a) Large / medium / small scale advertising agencies
b) Medium to small scale design/film studios
c) Boutique firms specialising in single-industry projects like fashion or hospitality
d) Social media / content creation / digital marketing agencies
e) Freelance designers / artists / illustrators / filmmakers / content creators / copywriters / photographers
f) In-house designers/filmmakers/content creators of brands
Having worked and experimented in and with many of these structures, I realised the ground reality is, there are way too many high-quality creative individuals/agencies in India who are right for a particular project at the right time but never as a standard all the time.
Agencies handle big budgets, timelines and deliverables better but fall short on custom hyper-specific brand solutions. While at the same time individuals are ripe with new ideas and approaches but lack the opportunities or project budgets that might allow them to execute to their greatest potential.
Sometime around late 2016, I made up my mind that I do not want to be either of the extremes. I do not want to be a ‘freelancer’ and I do not want to own an ‘agency’.
What I did and do want to work with is individual teams made up of creative and executive individuals whose skills, experience and perspectives intersect exactly with the right curation at the right time for the right brand with the right project.
I have secret wishlist teams, I know I will reach out at the next opportunity I get. I started applying the same for every big and small project — in whichever way possible. Convincing clients was and still is the most difficult. Most times the conversation stops at the apparent ‘expensive’ nature of such a structure. While it is definitely an investment and a risk for businesses to experiment with such a choice, HAS ANYONE SAT UP AND MADE A BALANCE SHEET OF THE AMOUNT OF MONEY LOST BY BRANDS DUE TO BAD DESIGN?
The number of work enquiries I get by potential clients who want someone to come and fix an expensive-job botched by an agency or a short-cut job left undone by an individual is astronomical. All these come attached with a sunk-cost far greater than what it would cost to hire the right team at the beginning.
On another note, brands can no longer afford to not have individuality and nuance. In a post-truth world where stories are becoming brands and brands are becoming stories, the only way forward is breaking the old ways and looking at the new, the local and the rooted.
Such future-forward brands need iron-clad foundations and culturally nuanced positioning — which can only be achieved by looking at culture, capital-flow and changing identities of society. A design process of that nature works best when ideas, creative teams and narratives are curated to military precision in a custom-capsule for that and that business only.
And that is what a capsule creative consultancy is. A hyper-specific micro team made of curated individuals and/or agencies that produce a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Here’s to hope that we can achieve this with projects to come.