MAM
OPEN wins for luxury packaging design at the Dieline awards ’21
Mumbai: Open Strategy and Design, the Mumbai-based independent brand design consultancy, is the only Indian design agency to win at the prestigious Dieline Packaging Awards 2021, a global award platform to recognise the best in packaging design from around the world. Their work for Unsaid Library, a precious gifting brand based in Europe, won the award in the Luxury category.
The idea of Unsaid Library is a precious jewellery gifting brand, like no other. Tapping into a deep understanding of human relationships, Open Strategy and Design led the task of designing the brand and its experience to help people express what is often left unsaid. Packaging therefore was vital to delivering on this ambition. It had to be designed for the site of the magic. The pack had to make the gift feel personal, not something bought off-the-shelf.
Open Strategy and Design creative head Ashutosh Karkhanis said, “Our gifts are beautiful time-travel machines. With the packaging we wanted to design the moment of reveal in a manner that emotionally moved the receiver. The unboxing was designed as an experience for the gift to come alive layer by layer, with an emotionally charged personal message leading the way. This win at the Dieline award is thrilling, even more so, because we won for creating a deep experience in a category that tends to obsess with craft.”
Walking Tree CEO – the Mumbai-based group behind the brand- Ankit Mehta said, “We imagined Unsaid as a chronicler of human relationships, bound by the art of gifting. We have worked closely with Open to develop the brand over the last couple of years, and to see the work find both commercial and critical global acclaim is very gratifying.”
Awards were judged across five categories—creativity, marketability, innovation, execution, and on-pack branding, ultimately going through two rounds of rigorous critique and appraisal. Founded in the year 2007, the Dieline Awards felicitate the best consumer product packaging and design globally, thereby raising awareness around the enormous value of packaging design and branding. In 2021, Dieline awards received nearly 1,600 entries, the maximum number of entries ever received. The jurors included the who’s who from the global design world, including luminaries like Design Matters’ host Debbie Millman, Design Army co-founder and CCO Pum Lefebure, A Plastic Planet’s Sian Sutherland, amongst others.
MAM
‘You packed my parachute’: Avinash Kaul’s farewell salutes Network18’s unsung thousands
The outgoing chief’s LinkedIn post skips the boardroom tributes and goes straight to the security guards, drivers and office boys who kept the machine running
MUMBAI: Most farewell posts by senior media executives follow a familiar script: gratitude to leadership, a nod to the team, a hint of what lies ahead. Avinash Kaul’s is not that post.
Writing on LinkedIn on his last day at Network18 Media & Investments, where he spent nearly 12 years rising to chief executive, Kaul bypassed the boardroom entirely and directed his most heartfelt words at the people furthest from it: the security guard who greeted him before the building was fully awake, the fleet staff who drove him to airports at ungodly hours, the office assistants, the housekeeping teams, and the administrators who, as he put it, “held ten thousand invisible threads so the rest of us could look organised.”
“You packed my parachute,” he wrote. “Every day. Without fanfare, recognition, or ever asking for it.”
It was a striking note from a man who leaves behind a considerable operational record. Kaul joined Network18 managing three channels and exits with responsibility for 20, alongside a publishing business, a growing connected television footprint, and what he says is the highest revenue and highest channel share in the group’s history. He was quick to deflect the credit. “Not because of me. Because of 4,000 people who showed up, every day, in every department, across the country.”
To content teams across India, he issued a reminder that carries some weight given the pressures Indian news media currently faces. “Keep being custodians of trust for 700 million people. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.”
To colleagues in revenue and ratings who found him relentless and hard to satisfy, he was unapologetic but generous. “There was never a single moment of ill intent in my heart. Everything I pushed you towards came from one belief – that you were stronger than you knew, and I was not willing to let you settle for less than your real capability.” Those who believed him, he said, flew. Those who did not taught him to be a better communicator. He was grateful to both.
On what comes next, he offered a hint wrapped in metaphor. Something is being built, he said, prepared for “the way you pack a bag before a long climb. Not out of restlessness. Out of readiness.”
In a media landscape that rarely pauses to acknowledge the people who keep the lights on, it was, at the very least, a different kind of goodbye.
