• Women Entrepreneur

“Design sense makes business sense,” believes Sonia Manchanda, Co-founder and Director, Idiom Design and Consulting Ltd. With a multi-disciplinary approach to design and clients across sectors, she has demonstrated that design must come in the beginning, along with capital. “Design the enterprise’s soul first and not the pretty labels on the products,” she says.

When the ‘designpreneur,’ as she calls herself, graduated from National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad in 1992 as a graphic designer with a specialization in films, she was determined that the qualification wasn’t going to be just an ‘art’ thing. “I was sure I wasn’t going to just design annual reports and logos,” she recalls. It had to be more, and for Manchanda, it meant applying design in unusual ways.

As the daughter of now retired major generals from the army, life not only gave her an opportunity to study and travel across India, but she received the conditioning not many are fortunate to experience, probably the defining force behind her dynamic personality. “My parents balanced work-life and worked for the nation; the value of enterprise was very much there in our family,” she points.

These traits were noticeable during her NID days. From organizing college festivals to running a city magazine called City Life, Manchanda understood what it took to start and run things. “My role was to meet people running small enterprises along with the ad guys on the pretext of a feature in the magazine. In the process, I had to get them to advertise as well,” she laughs.

Post graduation, Manchanda saw herself progress as a freelancer with a basket of diverse projects; from designing quizzes with famous quizmaster Siddharth Basu to sets for TV and films, working with veterans of the industry. Her stint in the advertising industry (1992 onwards) with Contract, New Delhi, for two years and later Mudra in Bengaluru, where she moved post marriage to Girish Raj (ex-VP McCann Erickson and now co-founder at Idiom), helped hone her mind to the value of ideas on the creative side. “I was always bridging space between copy writers, art directors and filmmakers and I continue to do that even today,” she points out. Despite her efforts, Manchanda wasn’t impressed with people’s commitment to their respective roles.

At this juncture, (1995), she met Bharat Bala, the man who made Vande Mataram, and who gave her a chance to design an eco-friendly office for him and from that her company Esign was born, run from a garage by three-four people with a focus on the environment and society. It grew organically, doubled in size every year, but Manchanda wasn’t satisfied. From then on, solely through word-of-mouth, Manchanda saw herself engrossed in projects starting with Bangalore Forward, India’s first Public Private Partnership (PPP), which was practically run out of her office, involving many Bengaluru luminaries as well as then Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna. “For three years, besides designing the elements of the movement, we worked with the city’s stakeholders to solve their problems and to engage the public by design,” she mentions.

Almost simultaneously, she had Manipal Group and Future Group as clients. The former’s businesses in health and education were running as fragmented parts, almost competing with each other, while the latter was only three Pantaloon stores down in the country. When Manchanda delved into Manipal Groups’ history, she learnt it was started by a man inspired by life. The path was clear, she decided to get back to its core, integrate the institutions with design and build a common identity for the group.

“Typically, design looks inwards, we were looking outward, open to learning and adapting from environment, and giving back as much,” she notes. The year 2005 was a defining year as her entrepreneurial journey took new form. Esign was working with Tessaract, run by Jacob Mathew, her senior of eight years from NID, on the Future Group account. Somewhere down the line, she noticed a missing link in articulation. Employees at Future Group did not understand what each brand/company stood for nor were they able to understand the founder’s vision. “Why doesn’t design think big?” asked Kishore Biyani, Founder and Group CEO, Future Group.

Luckily enough, Mathew and Manchanda saw eye to eye on the issue. They brought their commonalities together in the form of Idiom that year, as a design enterprise, with an investment of Rs.3 crore and Biyani as mentor-cum-investor. It developed as a model to help transform the ideas of entrepreneurs into successful new businesses with cultural relevance, inclusive prosperity and an in-built ability for rapid scale-up.

In six years, Idiom has worked with over 100 businesses at a success rate of over 80 percent. This means, eight out of 10 projects have managed to raise capital for scale-up and generated operating profits within nine months of prototyping. Idiom clocked in revenues of Rs.15 crore-Rs.18 crore in FY2010-’11, and the firm is a stakeholder to many of its clients.

The 41-year-old lives with her five dogs and has a three-year old daughter, Navami and a native home-stay in Hennur. Manchanda’s organization has grown from 35 to 200 designers with the same vision of creating enterprise and value for the country. How did she design her own success stream? With three basic mantras: Invest in the long-term with the right set of people, take risks, and demonstrate value. “Just do good work, think big and the rest will happen on its own,” she smiles optimistically.

Sonia’s Success Saga
• Designed the Future Group identity: ‘Soney ki chidiya’
• Was on the workshop committee for a seminal conference on ethnography in Japan
• Was the principal designer of a design and look program for Commonwealth Games 2010
• Launched Dream:in 2011, a four-day conclave on nation-building, with a focus on innovation and inclusive growth
• Featured among the 30 most powerful women in India by a reputed Indian magazine in 2006
• Launched Spread in 2007, a design education movement with workshops & classroom sessions to teach design and business students design practice and thinking

©Entrepreneur April 2011

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design, diom Design and Consulting, Sonia Manchanda