Today we’d like to introduce you to Hemanth Purushothaman, Creative Director at Grapdes.
Hi Hemanth, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
On our travels after finishing high school, a couple of friends and I realized that smaller businesses in India did not value branding as much as their global counterparts. Or maybe smaller businesses did not have the right kind of exposure to the value of brand systems and did not recognize the benefits of a design-led approach in their business and marketing. To offer a solution for this problem statement, my now business partners and I started Grapdes in January 2018 while still in our senior years of college.
The intention was to try our hand at starting a company that could work exclusively with small to medium-scale businesses in their quest for growth and success. Our value addition to this process was to create branding systems that use design thinking to create experiences for the customers of our clients. As a small team of three people working remotely across two timezones, we were fortunate to have found the support of the right client partners to allow us to finish our first year of operations with a growing clientele and a positive balance sheet.
Over three and a half years later today, I lead our agency’s creative efforts as Director and am extremely proud to be a part of a talented and dynamic team of people working together to have helped build over 60 (and counting) brands and businesses across industries and sectors that create impact the world over.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have hardly ever heard of a business journey without challenges. So of course, as we began ours we came across a few.
The most key of them was the ability to inspire trust as we began Grapdes. Since we were really young and with no real business or work experience to show for, it did take a lot to convince clients to trust us with their projects. But once we showcased our quality and standard of work, being able to get the right compensation for that work was a key pain point as even as a small remote-working team, we had bills to pay, and sometimes we could barely make those payment deadlines.
As we continue to grow as a consulting agency today, we want to become more efficient as an organization by being able to hire the right talent to be able to deliver on the promises we make to our clients. It is possibly one of the toughest challenges we will face in the coming few years — to find, mentor, and retain the people best suited for our service deliverables and agency culture as we want to be able to work with people who love to lead, strategize, create, and most importantly, have fun while they are at it.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Grapdes is an award-winning and remote-working consulting agency specializing in brand design, website design, and digital marketing.
With these service verticals, we collaborate with our client partners on their businesses to help create, maintain and establish their brand presence both offline and online by implementing some key branding principles in a very cost-efficient and impactful manner. In less than four years, we have become the preferred agency for over 60 clients brands and this is a testament to our ability to deliver on our contracts time and again.
We are location and sector agnostic, and love to work with all kinds of businesses that are looking to start or grow; where we could help them with our advisory in their business and brand strategy, delivery of brand and collateral design, and execution on various offline and digital platforms including social media, web, etc.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
I wouldn’t really feel comfortable giving advice, but I certainly would have felt better knowing that there is nothing more valuable than patience and a cool head when one is starting a business.
There have been numerous times when we could pull through as a team because we were patient with the circumstance to find solutions to the problems instead of rushing to conclusions. I really feel like things are looking to fall in place for us because we persevered and held on to those things which we were sure of in our guts.
Contact Info:
- Email: hello@grapdes.com
- Website: https://www.grapdes.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearegrapdes
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearegrapdes
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/wearegrapdes
Image Credits
Grapdes Partners Private Limited, India
