We redirect every time.
The first question in brand design: what does this brand need to do in the market, and who does it need to outmaneuver? Everything else follows from there. Design has to support sales. That's the premise. At Haiku Design House, our specialist South Asian branding agency, we've built a three-part process around that principle:
2 of our brands are in Sephora, and we have deep insights on how to succeed at retail scale and beyond:
Before any visual decisions, we spend time and resources mapping what your industry demands, what your competitors execute well, and, more usefully, where they've left gaps.
Most agencies skip this. They move into concepts and mood boards on vibes alone with surface level SWOTS and a B-school strategy. A design-led research phase is crucial because it picks up design trends and patterns in the industry that point to what succeed and what doesn’t.
South Asian founders in categories like food, wellness, hospitality, and fashion are often sitting on crucial differentiation that most brands have to manufacture from scratch. A 5,000-year lineage of craft and visual language gives you vocabulary most competitors can't deliver, but only if you know how to position it, and where the white space actually is.
The creative brief then comes from the research, not the other way around.
All our clients have the chance to review market-level renders at branding stage:
No founder should make a decision about their brand without first seeing it in situ: on shelves, in hand, in their customer's actual life. A color palette on a slide deck tells you nothing about how your product reads (without the shiny DTC box and insert) by itself in retail shelves, or on a phone screen at 9pm when someone's scrolling.
The Haiku Blueprint maps how a brand strategy holds across the full lifecycle: launch, fundraising, scaling, and the years beyond that. Visual choices that work beautifully now and also hold their own after several rounds of investor feedback.
Sephora Accelerate’s internal team’s glowing feedback of Haiku’s work, powered by The Haiku Blueprin
For a lot of South Asian founders, an expertise built around India is important, as this gives their brand an added edge above what American-led agencies can do. We’re all tired of reading the label “authentic” slapped onto every cultured brand. The biggest problem this label suffers from is that it's a SHOW not TELL word. That discretion comes out of lived experience. We run as a small but powerfully talented team: strategists, writers, marketers, and creative directors with 40 combined years of experience in hyper-relevant niches.
A NOTE: Why we stay small
Specialization doesn't scale easily.
We take on limited clients at any given time because the Haiku Blueprint requires depth and real insight. South Asian and immigrant founders deserve a creative partner who knows the market, understands the cultural context, and takes the time to get the brand right before it goes into the world.
“Haiku took what was in my brain and translated it into a beautiful brand. It's like magic.”
- Nadia Hussein
Founder, Parkhouse Inn.
Is your brand working as hard as your product? If you're not sure, it probably isn't. And that's a solvable problem. Fill out our form and book a one-on-one call to find out where you stand.