INDELUST · 2015 · BENGALURU

My first job, and a bit of everything.

Indelust was where I started, straight out of design school. It was a small, high-end store, a website plus a shop in Bengaluru, selling fashion, art and homeware from independent designers and artisans around the Indian Subcontinent, all ethically sourced. The company ran out of Bangalore and New York, and the Bangalore shop doubled as our office. We worked out of the back of the store, a couple of rows of desks tucked in behind the racks.

I came in as the graphic designer and the junior one on marketing. On a team that size, that meant I did a bit of everything. I shot the products, cleaned them up and put them online, designed the site and kept it running, made the packaging and the print, built the ad campaigns, and then helped run them too.

It's mostly graphic and web design, so there's no neat product story to tell. I'm just going to show you the work.

Role
Graphic Designer + Junior Digital Marketer
What I touched
Photography · retouching · web · print · packaging · campaigns
The brand
Ethically sourced fashion, art & design from the Subcontinent
A bit more
Vogue ↗ · Brand film ↗
The brand & packaging
Indelust brand collateral flatlay: a kraft shopping bag with a copper-foil logo, hangtags, business cards, a jute envelope and a printed thank-you note, all in unbleached natural materials.
The wordmark and the packaging. Copper foil on unbleached kraft — bags, tags, cards, a thank-you note in every order. The materials were plain on purpose, so an order felt closer to handmade than to luxury gloss.
Shooting the catalog
Two Indelust web banners reading 'Memorial Day — Looks for Her' and 'Looks for Him', built from photographs shot at a stone quarry.
A lot of the job was photography. I styled and shot the seasonal lookbooks, then retouched and catalogued everything for the site. We shot this series in a quarry outside the city, and the same photos became banners, category headers and ads all season.
Indelust editorial photograph: a model in a white printed shirt and printed shorts standing on rock at a stone quarry, shot in natural light.
Same shoot. Natural light, plain backdrop, let the clothes do the talking.
The site
The Indelust storefront shown across a laptop, tablet and phone: a minimal black-and-white e-commerce site headlined 'Bring it home'.
I designed the homepage and the shop, then kept it running — new banners, new products, most weeks. It read the same on a laptop, a tablet or a phone.
The full Indelust homepage: a large serif 'Spring Canvas' hero over a quarry photograph, a three-up product grid, and a minimal footer.
The full homepage. One big image, a small edit of products, and a lot of empty space.
Campaigns
A set of Indelust display ads for the Abraham & Thakore 'Abstract' handwoven cushion collection, laid out across leaderboard, square and skyscraper banner sizes on a black background.
When a designer collaboration launched, it turned into a whole set of banner ads — every size, every placement. This one was for Abraham & Thakore's handwoven cushions. I designed these, and over time started helping run them too: audiences, placements, and watching what actually worked.
Indelust web banner announcing 'Rahul Mishra, now at Indelust', a model in white in a minimal interior.
Rahul Mishra arriving at the store — treated more like a magazine page than an ad.
An animated Indelust holiday greeting: a line-drawn Christmas tree lights up with a string of twinkling bulbs over 'Merry Christmas from team Indelust'.
A Christmas card for the mailing list, and my first proper go at animation.
In store & in print
The Indelust wordmark above two photographs of the flagship store: a clothing rail with patterned rugs, and a black-and-white home and décor display.
There was a physical shop too — two floors, laid out like a small gallery. Same black and white as the site, carried into the room. And if you look past the rails in the left photo, those are our desks: we designed, packed and shipped from the same room we sold in.
One afternoon at the shop

I was stuck on a small layout problem I couldn't crack. Sujata Keshavan, a regular at the store, walked in, glanced at my screen on her way past, and told me the one thing to fix. Then she looked over the rest of the designs and carried on into the shop. A few of us just sat there wide-eyed, catching each other's eye and quietly clocking which way she'd gone. If the name doesn't ring a bell, she's one of the most respected graphic designers in India. Two minutes, no fuss, and I still remember it.

Indelust print invitations for the Spring/Summer 2015 collection preview and a 'Save the Date' coffee morning, with envelopes.
Invites for a collection preview and a designers' coffee morning.
An Indelust trunk show invitation for an event in New York, two models against a stone wall.
And a trunk show we took all the way to New York.
We made your clothes
A grid of documentary photographs of Indian artisans — weavers, tailors, block-printers and embroiderers at work — around a central card reading 'Indelust, Fashion Revolution — We made your clothes.'
My favourite thing I made there. For Fashion Revolution (the "who made my clothes?" campaign), I put the actual makers where the models usually go. Weavers, tailors, block-printers. For a brand built on paying artisans properly, it felt like the honest version of the whole pitch.

The store worked with Nest and sourced through the AIACA, both of which back artisans and keep handloom and handcraft traditions going across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It later took that story to the US, and Vogue wrote about it. Not a bad first job.

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