With the sudden lockdown, the fashion industry saw an unprecedented stop in its production and sales. With everyone working from home and clients asking us to hold on to a few projects, we were in a pickle too. With panic and a rush of anxiety, we got onto rewriting and restructuring our functioning as an agency. I read many reports on analytics explaining the next thing to do for creative businesses. Not a single report or an article tried to articulate the importance of basic values that would save us all as agencies, not just during these uncertain and challenging times, but for the rest of the millennium.
A moment of reckoning made me write down as to what the future for creative agencies holds. The most obvious point lies in underlining the factor of going digital vigorously.
But would that be enough? What about the morals and values that we tend to erode while dealing with projects? What about neglecting the well-being of your employees and running after deadlines?
These things urged me to sit down and note a few points that could help our agencies to think better and to create better.
1. The most significant thing to practice would be to unmask ourselves as an agency. To be who we are without a hue of pretense and badge our authenticity.
2. The second thing would be to focus on quality rather than quantity. It’s not the numbers that define us, it’s the content and the soul of our brand connected to the clients that define us.
3. This biblical opportunity to reflect has also helped me understand the need to incessantly promote the strong values and morals that the company believes in and not letting anyone manipulate these.
4. Pay heed to your employees’ mental health and open your minds to help them indulge in a relaxed conversation with you.
5. Foreground humanity; when that’s done right, your organization is molded with strength and courage. Let commerciality evaporate behind the curtains.
6. Find the long lost soul and make it the conversation starter for your next pitch without mincing words.
7. Focus on branding, it is something you cannot buy or sell, branding is evolutional. Let others speak about your brand and its oeuvre right now. It is what you choose to be, so let’s be wise.
8. Last but not the least, make Chai for your team once in a while and maintain the level of humor and sarcasm.
Stay Home, Stay Safe.
Rutuja Kamble
Creative Director & Founder
Ploti
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As a culture that has it’s depth and meaning in textiles, we tend to dismiss fashion as haute couture nonsense. Little do we know where it comes from.
In small villages in Maharashtra and Karnataka, local experts in ancient art, are weaving Khunn to create styles that aim to boom internationally. From a fabric that every home in these regions has seen, Vaishali S Studio creates innovative forms with a global appeal.
While we sit in our off the counter, mass-produced lives, she’s bringing back local style, nonchalantly disregarded. Using a sharp needle and wit, she revives Khunn, recoining elegance in thread work. The beauty of the fabric is in imprints narrated in a vocabulary of sun, stars, animals, and diamonds. Homespun threadwork is rhythmic, a clock turning back time, breathing life into this dying fabric with each handloom’s motion.
Taking this textured design, Vaishali S Studio gives it a signature touch: wearable art. Building a new-age sensibility, they intellectually shape silhouettes to change the way your wardrobe designs your lifestyle. Beyond aesthetic, drapes and folds in sheer grace, defines the architecture of their garments.
In global identities that we forge so easily, our individuality is often left stranded. And subtle art is never fanatic; it aims to merge, to blend the traditional into a worldview that attracts a wider audience.
Vaishali S Studio is making a humble attempt to give voice to old local stories in a world where everything is freshly trending. In this endeavor, each feather-light thread becomes heavier, not as a burden but as a memory, Khunn, becoming a requiem for tomorrow.
]]>From a team that fits sweet n’ low in a teaspoon, Ploti, as a concept has a distinctive quality that makes you want to stay and explore. The vibe you get here is tranquil in the weaves that thread us together, genuine in the bricks that have built us a home. Exuding soothing, clean energy, we try to blend simple humanity into an adaptable brand impression.
A fashion & architecture communications agency, we aim to bring this same delicate balance to our clients. Our unwavering belief in organic growth and giving a soft feel to hard edges, makes us value honest work and loyalty above all.
Ploti, beyond a brand, is a connection forged in absurd originality and nestled in coffee-flavored warmth.
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Shwaas Ploti as a concept took birth through our belief in keeping this humanity behind any process alive and thriving. Keeping the trend to a minimum, and maintaining a sustainably rooted attitude, we, beyond a brand wish to form a community that believes in staying true to grounded principles.
Through this project, we endeavor to guide the labels that are mind crafting the inherent Indian lifestyle, holding their hand and together, bringing forth the unique qualities their designs hold.
When Rutuja Kamble, founder of Ploti, first began thinking of creating this medium for promoting sustainable fashion labels, she held a firm line of principle: organic interaction. We cannot hope to build a community surrounding nature and be concerned with investing in longer lives by not being true to ourselves. She decided to start a new project that would exercise the same philosophy.
There is a delicate balance between humans and nature. The key element in giving voice to today’s sustainable fashion struggle is the strategic research that goes behind understanding textiles, dying processes, and zero waste collections. The labels that staunchly practice this are shaping a mindset towards slow fashion.
Inculcating a sensibility in our business model, we hope to be the teaspoon of sugar in a cup of brewed tea, for our essence is to add to the existing niche of a person and help them grow as they help us with their painstakingly developed qualities. With an unwavering stand on organic growth, we want to share an interactive empathy with both, our employees and our clients.
Dedicating ourselves solely to sustainable brands, we want to make their design ideology an open experience for the layman through creative direction.
Deriving from the spark of connection behind any design concept, we strategically extract the thought behind anything. It’s raw and untouched nature works like sandpaper for our abrasive imagination to expand on our client’s philosophy.
Through connecting the Shwaas community, we endeavor to shed light on the honeycomb of layers in the creation, fabrication, and presentation of new-age responsible fashion.
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