Brand Development & Strategy

Story time!

This client was a young woman trying to take forward her family business. Ushnakmals is an Indian brand that has been known for its luxurious, beautiful Banarsi fabrics.

Typically their fabrics have been targeted towards middle-to-older aged women, but this client wanted to expand that range & demonstrate how younger women can associate with this brand. She wanted to make her product more accessible to younger audiences & portray these fabrics in a more trendy way.

Because Ushnakmals is a very established brand, it would have been difficult to completely change their strategy without losing their former audience. Hence we strategized to make a branch of the original brand.

Here’s where it got interesting! This branch was pretty much a blank slate, so we had to find a new name, logo, tag line & figure out where & how to position them. After weeks of research, short-listing, & feedback I came up with the name “Resa” which sounds youthful, elegant, & has a hint of a legacy. “Resa” has multiple meanings which ended up being the perfect fit for the vision this client had. “Resa” in Hindi means “fabric”, in Norwegian means “journey.” This one word embodied the story of this brand & its history while sounding approachable to younger women.

While we didn’t take forward their social media, we did get the opportunity to design their logo (which now has been modified slightly). We focused on gold to highlight luxury & royalty, and the teal to highlight the elegance like that of a peacock which is a worshipped bird in India. The needle symbolizes the intricate work of the brand, & the tip of the thread has a mandala which was intended to symbolize a journey.

Banaras historically is an extremely spiritual place. Thousands of people visit it every year & is known to have a sense of trance in the air. Keeping this in mind, I created their tag line “A Banarsi trance”. This tag line is intended to approach a younger audience, & create an association of their idea of trance, which is often portrayed through music & art and to the traditional spiritual trance that exists in Banaras since centuries. With this rebranding, Resa is now on track to establish its desired audience & has worked with several young fashion influencers in the country.