Nishta started the way most side projects start — a vague itch I couldn't scratch through anyone else's product. It became a brand the moment I stopped treating it like a side project.
The boring origin story
I was working as a designer in India in 2023. I kept noticing that the gap between good craft and good commerce in small Indian brands was almost entirely a marketing gap — beautiful products, terrible distribution, no brand language. The people making the things were not the people selling the things, and the people selling the things weren't designers. So the products felt designed and the storefronts felt accidental.
Nishta was my attempt to close that loop on a single product line, end to end. Industrial design discipline on the object. Marketing discipline on the brand. One person, one decision-maker, both halves of the brief.
What changed when I treated it as a real brand
Three concrete things, none of them obvious until I was doing them:
The product brief came before the visual identity. Most founder-designers I know start with a logo. I started with the user, the price ceiling, the manufacturing constraint, and the channel. The visual identity was downstream of all four. The logo was almost an afterthought.
I wrote the launch copy before I finished the prototype. If the copy didn't land, the product wasn't sharp enough. This is a trick I stole from product writers at tech companies — the press release as design tool. It saved me from at least two expensive material decisions that wouldn't have survived a real customer pitch.
The cost of distribution drove the cost of the object. A pretty object you can't afford to ship is a hobby. I worked backwards from the landed cost in three target markets and the margin needed to make ads work. That number determined materials before any aesthetic decision did.
What I'd do differently
I'd ship uglier earlier. I spent too long on the first iteration because I was the only designer in the room and nobody was pushing me to stop polishing. The first hundred customers don't care about the kerning on the wordmark. They care that the thing arrives, works, and is worth what they paid.
I'd also separate the founder identity from the brand identity earlier. For the first nine months Nishta and I were the same brand in my head, and it muddied both. Brands need their own voice — even when they start as one person's project.
Why this matters for what I do now
Nishta is the reason I take marketing roles seriously. If you've ever been the person who has to pay the supplier, write the ads, brief the photographer, and answer the customer support email — all in the same week — you don't talk about marketing as a "function" anymore. You talk about it as the thing that decides whether the product survives.
That perspective is the one I bring to every brand I work on now. It's the perspective most agency marketers never get to have. It's also the only reason I think I'm actually useful in a marketing seat.