The agency years: eight years of selling, shipping and keeping 25+ brands

Nandini: a box that had to sell at an airport

The Karnataka Milk Federation wanted premium combo packs of its sweets for two places where packaging does all the talking: the Café Moo counters at Bangalore's Terminal 2, and export. Thirteen designs, one visual system — Karnataka's monuments in line-art, one colour per sweet, a Kannada wordmark that reads from across a concourse.

1 · Packaging system

Thirteen boxes that look like one family

Mysore Pak, Milk Peda, Cashew Burfi, Dharwad Peda, combos — each got its own palette on a shared structure, so the shelf reads as Nandini first and the flavour second.

On the shelf at BIAL T2

Not a mockup — the photo above is the airport counter.

Government gift boxes

The same system was picked for Govt. of Karnataka gifts distributed at central meetings in Delhi.

2 · The paperwork

A public-sector client, won and delivered on paper

KMF is a cooperative federation — quotation, MD approval, a formal work order, bills against photo proofs. Selling to it is as much of the job as designing for it.

Quotation → approval → work order

Four months from first quote to signed order. The design took less time than the procurement did — and I learned to price for that.

Namma Power Run: a marathon we grew 30% a year

A tribute run held every March on Dr. Puneeth Rajkumar's birthday, organised with Ashwini Puneeth Rajkumar's team. We owned the brand, the content and the digital push — and came back three years in a row, each time fixing what hadn't worked the year before.

3 · Growth, measured

4,000 on the ground, 1.5 million online — without an ad budget

Celebrity callout reels, a registration funnel that didn't leak, and content timed to the two weeks that matter. The insights tab is the receipt.

business.facebook.com · insights · reach

~30% growth, three editions

Registrations up year on year — the only marketing metric a run director actually cares about.

4,000+ runners each edition

Which means logistics: bibs, timing, sponsors, permissions. We were in those meetings too.

They brought our vision to life — 4,000 people on the ground, 1.5 million reached online. They just get it. Ashwini Puneeth Rajkumar · Namma Power Run

Renault Goa: a dealership, end to end

Pristine Automotive's Renault dealership in Goa handed us the whole surface — social creatives, outdoor hoardings, exchange carnivals, launch posts — with one condition: stay inside Renault's global brand standards while selling to a very local audience.

4 · Retained account

Global guidelines, local offers, weekly cadence

A retainer that ran on rhythm: a content calendar, offer creatives turned around in a day, and outdoor campaigns for every festival window.

Social + outdoor + print

One team for the whole funnel, so the hoarding and the reel said the same thing.

Kept, not won once

Retention was the business model — the account renewed because the dealership's phones rang.

The business underneath the work

The portfolio is the visible half. The other half was running a company with my own money on the line: pricing packages so a ₹15K logo job didn't eat a week, retainers so cash flow survived a slow month, and hiring designers faster than I lost them to bigger studios.

The people-and-payroll half of this story — the teams, the vendors, the proof it still runs today — now has its own file: the back office →

What it taught me

Every function of a startup, learned by being the only person in it. Sales, delivery, pricing, retention, hiring, collections — for eight years, with no one to hand any of it to.

This is the part of my CV that isn't a product screenshot. The next seat is exactly this job with better tools: find what's stuck, own it end to end, keep the client — whoever I'm building for — coming back.

When the market turned on agencies, this is also what I took into GetMyCreative AI, and what survived it into ELTH and comeoffline.