Meher Bhandari — Senior Brand Designer
Mumbai, Maharashtra
Brand designer with ten years building identities and packaging for Indian consumer businesses, four of them running an independent studio. Rebuilt a regional dairy brand across 1,400 SKUs and 9,000 outlets, after which unaided recall in its home market moved from 22% to 47%. Draws Devanagari lettering as readily as Latin.
Experience
Senior Brand Designer, Margosa Consumer Brands · September 2023 – present
Brand team of five inside a foods and personal-care group carrying eleven brands.
- Rebuilt a regional dairy identity across 1,400 SKUs and 9,000 outlets; unaided recall in its home market moved from 22% to 47% over eighteen months.
- Wrote the packaging system of one shelf block, four colour families and a fixed nutrition panel, taking a new SKU from artwork brief to press-ready in five days instead of nineteen.
- Cut artwork rework by ₹34 lakh a year by moving eleven brands onto one master-artwork template and a two-stage approval.
- Runs the quarterly review with the three regional sales heads, which has ended state teams printing their own off-brand point-of-sale material.
Founder and Brand Designer, Kaarigar Studio · April 2019 – August 2023
Independent brand studio of two designers and a rotating set of illustrators and photographers.
- Delivered 31 identity projects for restaurants, direct-to-consumer beauty and two non-profits; twelve clients returned for a second engagement.
- Designed the identity and packaging for a cold-pressed oils brand that went from three stores to 260 in two years.
- Held a fixed-fee model with a two-round revision limit, keeping average project margin above 40% across four years.
Family care, Career break · February 2018 – March 2019
Fourteen months away from full-time work for family care.
- Completed a 90-hour Devanagari lettering course and began the shopfront lettering archive that later became a released typeface.
- Took on two identity projects towards the end of the break; both became founding clients of the studio opened in April 2019.
Brand Designer, Charcoal and Chalk · June 2016 – January 2018
- Designed identities and launch campaigns for nine consumer clients, including a tea brand whose packaging redesign lifted sell-through 26% in modern trade.
- Set up the artwork archive and its naming convention, which ended the recurring problem of superseded logos reaching print.
Projects
- Shopfront Lettering Archive — A catalogue of 620 hand-painted Devanagari and Urdu shop signs from Mumbai and Pune, each letterform redrawn.
Education
- B.F.A. Applied Art · Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art · July 2012 – May 2016
Skills
- Brand: Identity systems, Verbal identity and naming, Brand guidelines, Art direction, Rebrand rollout
- Packaging: Shelf-block design, Structural packaging, Regulatory panels, Master artwork systems, Pre-press and print liaison
- Type and craft: Typography, Devanagari lettering, Illustration commissioning, Photography direction
- Tools: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Figma, Esko ArtPro
