Ashwini grew up in Aurangabad in a middle class family. Her parents were quite progressive – in the conservative eighties, they let Ashwini’s younger sister start her own girl’s cricket team. Ashwini was good in both academics and drawing. She was looking at becoming an architect, viewed a relatively respectable profession by the middle class, unlike ‘commercial artist’. Design happened as a lucky accident when one of her relatives told her about the NID. Some of the interesting things that NID introduced her to: You can have education without exams, without ranks, without comparisons with other people. You can call teachers by their first names, even when they are your mom’s name. A lot of unlearning, before learning could start happening. And finally a lot of good friends. One very interesting colleague Ashwini had at NID was Kiran Sethi, who today runs a very interesting school in Ahmedabad – Riverside.
Cut to 1987. Ashwini is a by now bum-chums with 5 of her NID batchmates, who were ‘Friends’ like the TV serial that became popular many years later. The friends were discussing their bleak employment prospects after finishing school. They had just finished attending an interesting course on entrepreneurship by a visiting professor from IIM Ahmedabad. They did the math for themselves, and decided to become entrepreneurs because of the TINA factor. Graduation was still 2 years away. The 6 decided to major in complementary areas – so that their future company could offer a larger array of services. One of the first dilemmas they faced was the company baptism. There were huge debates and no consensus about what they stood for. In the midst of all this, one of them thought what was happening was akin to the story of the 6 blind men and the elephant. One of the great agencies at that time was called Frog, and the elephant so stuck a chord. The company would be called Elephant design. It communicated perspective, eco-systems. The mamma elephant was on track to hire some baby elephants soon!
Switch to 1989. One of the 6 friends, Ashwini, was doing her internship with a German company in Pune. She was specializing in communication design – and the company was very pleased with with her work. When they came to know of her entrepreneurial ambition, this company offered her a contract to work on a communication package for the global operations. Knowing that most clients are big on expectations and short on budgets, she asked this client – how much would this contract be worth? 100,000 DM came the answer. Having no clue, about how much a DM was worth – she said, of course we will do it. It later transpired, that it was worth Rs. 13,00,000/-, a princely sum even today. (Btw, thanks to the laxity of RBI, by the time they actually received the payment, the Rupee had depreciated heavily – and they actually got Rs. 18,00,000 for the assignment.) That cleared one more major decision about the company – where to locate Elephant – Pune.
One thing that the team was clear was that they wanted to be an institution. In the late eighties there were no organized design offices, only boutiques. To build the institution, even before the first paisa of cash had come in to the system, the first 3 people had been hired: a typist, an accountant and an artist. They went to a CA to register a company – who advised them sagely to go in for a partnership – it is easier to dissolve. The bank manager gave similar advise – go in for a savings account, why bother with anything complicated. Cut to 2015 – the company still exists – with 80 employees and an additional office in Singapore. Considering the fact that the largest design company in the world has only 500 employees, this is quite an achievement.
Elephant Design made the transition to the simpler Elephant, about a decade ago. She justified this transition through a beautiful example. The world’s largest ad agency group is WPP. The abbreviation stands for Wireless Plastic Products. So all of us need to evolve. What we start off with should not be what we end with. The Elephant logic was that the team wanted to do what all was required for a project – innovation, strategy – not just design. As part of this journey towards turnkey solutions – two decades ago, the company junked all projects – then amounting to 30% of topline – which they perceived were peripheral ones for a client. They wanted to work which was central to the company or product – not just ornamenting a product that had already been designed. After all at NID they had been taught to view themselves not as designers, but world changers.
On the day that Ashwini joined NID, the director addressed the class and made a bold statement. ‘Design is profit.’ If there is one company that validates that statement – it is Apple. I asked Ashwini about why does India (and also the rest of the world) not able to create more Apples – and she had a witty answer ready: because there are no Steve Jobs around. She believes that there are a few Indian companies which have design as a core philosophy. When asked to name a few, she mentioned: Titan, Mahindra, Symphony, Nirlep and Godrej. Interestingly the third generation of Godrej – Jamshyd’s son – Navroze – has even got educated formally in design at Illinois Institute of Technnology, Chicago.
We end with a story about Ashwini when she was 30, she was depressed for some time thinking that she is not yet rich, not yet famous. She then managed to chance on a book, called ‘The Path’, which had some exercises to create a personal mission statement. (Pdf available with me for those who are interested). Using that Ashwini decided that she wants to make a positive difference to people around by doing what she is competent in. She believes that impact making starts in your background. She believes that no problem is too small to solve. She believes that India can teach the world ‘Frugal design’.