Behind every successful branding campaign at Meesho are a team of hard working, creative and passionate individuals trying to make the maximum impact in driving business and marketing goals and making sure small businesses and entrepreneurs can come onboard the Meesho experience and find their way to success. Senior Graphic Designer Subrata Chakraborty is one such trusty member of the Branding team (User Growth) who has constantly risen to new challenges including important pivots in Meesho.
From designing the aesthetic of our monthly video series WeHearYou to taking on the entire design mandate for Meesho Mission Rise Women Entrepreneur Summit as well to its virtual pivot during the pandemic, Subrata has never looked back since his journey began in Meesho. And he is here to share all about his learning and hustle with us today.
I joined Meesho in February 2019, so it has been two years of continuous challenges, multitasking and learning on the job. No day is ever the same at Meesho and I am here to show you how, with my Life@Meesho journey.
As a Senior Graphic Designer, Branding [under the User Growth org], initially I was part of the marketing team at Meesho where I designed collaterals, banners and other business facing marketing material. But in 2019, Branding became a sort of an independent entity, and this is where I would say my true learning began. As the only designer in the team, I took on the challenge of creating a unique aesthetic for designing branding related content. My prior experience of working with Myntra and Wooplr also came handy while working with Meesho.
Making Every Entrepreneur Heard
One of the first projects I dived into headlong was Meesho’s video format newsletter — WeHearYou hosted by CEO and Co Founder Vidit Aatrey and other Meesho leaders. They take our entrepreneur audience through monthly updates on new launches and categories, latest app features and also how we are improving upon our existing services based on reselling feedback — all directed towards making our Meesho entrepreneurs even more successful.
I have played a significant role in creating the entire mood board for WeHearYou, which till today is one of our well loved video formats and is going strong even after a few years of its launch.
Whether it is brainstorming on thematic concepts with the team and lending an art direction and design perspective, for instance we once did a year end New Year resolution theme with a fun sticky notes format or to showcase a big win with celebratory balloons and confetti, I think I have had a hand in improving the aesthetic of this video series and have seen its views improving drastically (between 50–70K video views on YouTube currently).
Mission Rise [Meesho Mission Rise Women Entrepreneur Summit], Meesho’s offline city-wise event that honours its women entrepreneurs and their achievements] is another Meesho property my team and I have been closely associated with, right from its inception.
I used to take care of the entire design mandate for the Mission Rise events pre covid — from creative collaterals and standees to printing media and social media and the promotions and community work surrounding it. And even after we pivoted to an online format during the lockdown, last year in May — to Mission Rise Connect, I continued lending my design support, with our team overnight having to think of new ways of engaging an audience that was now interacting with us virtually.
Apart from these two major Meesho properties that I lent my design expertise to, I also take care of all social media collaterals that you can see on our Instagram and Facebook handles, including creatives for stories as well. While I am working from home in Assam right now, adapting to this new way of online productivity has been hard for a creative team like ours that relied primarily on spontaneous teamwork while shooting and executing videos for branding. Post lockdown, going out and shooting became impossible so overnight we had to improvise new ways of working with available content (now our entrepreneurs were recording videos and sending it to us instead of us shooting them).
We worked with these low resolution, sometimes fuzzy videos (after all there is that much a phone selfie can do), not framed properly footage and a lot of other limitations, but our designs still looked professional and lively — aligned with our entire brand aesthetic. We learnt to work with what we had access to and I would say that the team worked exceptionally and managed to pull off a year’s worth of relevant work, despite several limitations. We chose to keep moving forward keeping the value of Company>Team>Individual.
From Mission Rise to Mission Rise Connect
As I mentioned above, before the pandemic hit India in March 2020, the branding team was busy travelling across the country hosting Mission Rise events in several cities and towns. But when the lockdown happened, we had to pivot overnight and think of how we could capture the same audience and keep their sense of resilience going strong with an online property called Mission Rise Connect. While there was a lull in business, we needed to now keep our entrepreneurs engaged more than ever and hence we introduced several interactive formats, awards and entertainment segments and even medical and health advice for our users in this virtual Mission Rise format. From offline to online, we had to switch the overall design as well and now create a look that would now seamlessly capture the imagination of the entire country and culture through our web format.
I am particularly proud of executing a very important Meesho campaign during this time in April — the #SabkiSuraksha Campaign where I created the designs for the web pages as well as other collaterals. Meesho had pledged as part of this campaign, to buy the first 100, 000 cloth masks made by Meesho entrepreneurs at the rate of Rs 10 per mask. These were then collected by Meesho and handed over to NGOs that then distributed it to anganwadi and municipal and other critical one ground staff.
The most interesting part of working with Meesho is that everyday there is a new challenge, but a challenge that you want to take on rather than shrink back from. I love the fact that in branding I get to be creative as well make something original that does not resemble a typical marketing banner. The intent of these collaterals is to have an impact (as good design should have) and genuinely help our entrepreneurs learn to make their businesses a success.
In my area of work I think the value of Speed over Perfection matters the most since I am also the design person for the entire team. I have to be perfect while designing but also move with speed — quick turnarounds and less no of reiterations. Keeping this value in mind while working helps me create quality, but with speed.
Born and brought up in Assam, I graduated in Bangalore and pursued an art and animation course soon after to hone my professional skills. My wife Sushmita Chakraborty is also a Meeshoite, so I get to call her a colleague.
Some of my most emotional and proudest moments have been working on the Mission Rise events and WeHearYou — both very impact driven properties created at Meesho to reach out to our entrepreneurs directly. I have travelled for quite a few Mission Rise events as well including ones at Guwahati and Agartala and there meeting some of these spirited entrepreneurs, hearing their life stories and seeing some of the impact of my branding work has been life changing. I have found my true design calling with the Branding work I do at Meesho.
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