I started BigBrandTheory twenty-five years ago with sixty thousand rupees, one computer, and the conviction that brand work in India was being mistaken for decoration. The first office had a borrowed table and a fan that turned on its own schedule. The first client paid in three instalments. None of that part of the story matters. What matters is the sentence we kept landing on, project after project — that the businesses doing the best work were the ones who could say, in one breath, what they were for. And the ones struggling were the ones who couldn't.
That sentence became a principle. Clarity creates momentum. Not as a tagline — I'm too old to fall for taglines — but as a working hypothesis that I've now had the privilege of testing against more than a hundred brands. Capital-markets institutions trying to talk to retail without sounding like they were issuing a notice. Manufacturing groups trying to talk to capital without sounding like they were issuing a press release. Technology companies trying to talk to anybody at all. Real estate developers learning that the thing they sold wasn't square footage. State governments trying to talk to citizens as if citizens were owed an answer.
The pattern, across all of it, was the same. The work that mattered was almost never the new logo. It was the conversation, three weeks in, where a founder or a CEO finally said the true sentence out loud — and we caught it, and we made the company live by it.
The BBT studio, Mumbai. The shelves on the right hold every brand book the firm has produced since 2001.
A consultancy, not a vendor.
BigBrandTheory is now considered one of India's most trusted brand consultancies — but the word I'd defend hardest there is consultancy. We are not an agency in the way most people use the term. We don't pitch creative; we pitch a way of seeing the business. We sit on the wrong side of the table on purpose — closer to the CFO than the CMO — because the questions that move brands forward are usually the questions the finance team is already asking, just in a different language. What's our actual margin story? Who is the customer we keep accidentally selling to? Why are we losing on price when we're not even priced highest?
Twenty-five years of those conversations is, I now realise, what I've actually been doing for a living. The output happens to be brand systems — names, narratives, identity work, category architecture — but the input is structured listening.
A turn toward the hills.
A few years ago I started a second project I had been thinking about for longer than I want to admit. The Pahadi Story is a Himalayan honey brand, but the honey is the easy part. The real project is a small, slow supply chain in the hills of Uttarakhand — working with beekeepers in Almora, Bageshwar and Kumaon, paying them properly, protecting forage land, and making the case to Indian consumers that a jar of single-origin honey is not a luxury but a vote.
The bees, it turns out, are the most patient business teachers I've ever met. They will not be hurried. They will not be optimised. They respond to weather, trust, and time — three things modern business is determined to ignore. I am learning, slowly, from them.
Bageshwar district, spring 2025. The hive on the left produced 2.4 kilograms that month — a good year.
A house with one job.
The third project is the smallest and, in a way, the most personal. Sukoon Villa is a glass house I'm building in Almora — a small structure on a ridge with a view of the snow-line, designed for one purpose: a quiet room to think in. I'll write there. I'll host the occasional founder retreat there. I'll probably make more bad tea there than anyone should be allowed to. But the building's brief is simple — let the mountain do the talking.
What's next.
I'm spending more of my time, now, on the things that compound slowly. Writing — four essays a month, on what twenty-five years of brand work actually taught me, in plain language. Speaking — keynotes, founder offsites, boardroom sessions, IIM classrooms. Mentoring founders one-to-one when the timing is right. And, increasingly, backing early-stage founders with small, patient cheques and the kind of help that comes from having done the work before.
The clients, the honey, the glass house, the essays — they look like four different things. They are not. They are one principle applied with different patience.
Pravin