July, 2026.- There is a deep-seated belief that to be taken seriously on a global stage, you have to look like you could have been made anywhere. Shruti Singhi, Founder & Creative Director of Mother Tongue Design, has encountered this across numerous conversations with Indian brands: if they show up as “too India,” they will be seen as regional and not global. What they do not realize is that in trying to erase the thing that makes them specific, they are also erasing the thing that makes them incredibly interesting.
In this interview, Singhi discusses why cultural specificity is not a handicap for Indian brands going global—it is their only sustainable advantage. If you look at some of the most resonant brands in the world, it feels like they come from somewhere. Patagonia is deeply Californian. Forest Essentials is intensely Indian in its sensibility. For Singhi, that specificity is a raw material to work with. Heritage is not static; it evolves the moment you live with it, use it, push it.
Singhi also describes how Mother Tongue maps cultural coordinates before any visual or strategic direction begins. For Vahdam, the cultural cue that shifted everything was modern nostalgia—the tension between the ancient and the now. Rather than stripping that away, they leaned into it. The brands that will matter over the next decade are the ones willing to experiment with what they have inherited instead of just archiving it.
1. Cultural Specificity as a Sustainable Advantage: You’ve argued that cultural specificity is not a handicap for Indian brands going global—it’s their only sustainable advantage. Why do so many Indian brands still try to look “globally generic” instead of embracing what makes them distinct?
I think it has more to do with brands in general, not just Indian brands. There’s a deep-seated belief that to be taken seriously on a global stage you have to look like you could have been made anywhere. What we’ve picked up on across numerous conversations is that if brands show up as ‘too India’, they’ll be seen as regional and not global and by way of that not scalable. What they don’t realise is that in trying to erase the thing that makes them specific they’re also erasing the thing that makes them incredibly interesting.
If you look at some of the most resonant brands in the world, it feels like they come from somewhere. Patagonia is deeply Californian. Forest Essentials is intensely Indian in its sensibility. For us at Mother Tongue Design, that specificity is a raw material to work with. Heritage isn’t static; it evolves the moment you live with it, use it, push it. The brands that will matter over the next decade are the ones willing to experiment with what they’ve inherited instead of just archiving it.
2. Mapping Cultural Coordinates Before Visual Direction: You map the cultural coordinates of a category before any visual or strategic direction begins. What specific cultural cue did you discover for Vahdam that changed the entire brand direction?
With Vahdam, the brief was about positioning Indian spices for a global market which would be competing on shelf with established global brands, being exported and taken seriously. So you’d expect the obvious move which would be to clean it up and make it feel premium through restraint. But we wanted a different approach, which was connecting with the diaspora and new customers who needed to believe in the credibility of spice that comes from India.
When we went deep into the research (studying culinary behaviours, global spice narratives, how spices actually live in kitchens and memory) what we kept encountering was nostalgia and identity. Spices in Indian homes carry intergenerational memory. The taste of a particular tadka (tempering) is your grandmother’s Sunday lunch, the specific way your family makes chai (tea), a flavour you’d recognise blind from three rooms away.
The cultural cue that shifted everything was this idea of modern nostalgia and this tension between the ancient and the now. Indian spices aren’t just ingredients, they’re a form of time travel. So rather than stripping that away we leaned into it. The strategy was to balance modern minimalism with intent-driven storytelling for a brand that could transport a global audience in that feeling without losing communicative precision.
3. Lived Experience as Design Research: MTD builds brands from lived experience—food, travel, music, craft, material culture. How do you research lived experience differently than a traditional agency that would start with a competitive audit or consumer segmentation?
Our process always begins from the inside out. Before we think about markets or categories, we try to understand how something exists in the world and by this we mean, how it is used, how it moves through the rhythms of a day, a season, and ultimately, a life.
With P•TAL, we looked beyond studying the homeware aisle or mapping competitors. We began with the Thatheras, the artisans whose hands have shaped brass and bronze for generations. We absorbed ourselves in their craft, the cadence of their work, rituals of cooking and the significance of objects made entirely by hand.
For us, it was more about what the truth was that already existed here. Because the strongest brands emerge by uncovering a truth that has always been present and giving it a language people can recognise and value.
4. Forest Essentials: Ayurvedic Craft in Luxury Retail: Forest Essentials is rooted in Ayurvedic craft, built to hold in luxury retail globally. What’s the hardest part of translating a wellness tradition that’s deeply local into a global luxury language without exoticizing it?
The exoticisation trap is real and subtle and it happens when you present a tradition as if it belongs only to its origin, as something ancient and distant rather than alive and relevant. What we were trying to do with Forest Essentials, starting in 2011, was something different. We wanted to reframe Ayurveda from nostalgia to sophistication and the key was anchoring everything in ritual, potency, the sensorial experience of the ingredients themselves and then presenting that as a luxury practice. Ayurveda is grounded, tactile and deeply intelligent and so we leaned into that.
The packaging actually became one of the strongest differentiators; the materials, details and structure, everything had to feel indulgent, luxurious, deeply personal and also timeless. The positioning was that Forest Essentials is a custodian of Ayurveda, not just selling skincare but offering rituals of luxury. When you lead with custodianship rather than exoticism, the heritage carries weight and communicates certainty and authority, signalling a brand that knows exactly where it comes from.
5. P•TAL: Reframing Heritage for a Contemporary Audience: P•TAL is a material so old it predates most design categories, but you reframed it as a contemporary object worth owning. What did you have to unlearn from traditional design thinking to make an ancient craft feel modern?
The thing I had to unlearn first was the assumption that contemporary means new – that making something feel modern requires updating its visual language or giving it a fresh coat of minimalism so it can sit comfortably in a design-forward world.
I learned that curiosity isn’t created by adding more, rather it’s created through tension. The most compelling designs hold something back. With P•TAL, the product already carried the weight of tradition, so we simplified the narrative and let the product create intrigue.
You’re right, the material predates most design categories. The craft itself (Thathera metalwork) is one of the oldest living craft traditions on the planet. If you try to modernise it through aesthetics alone, you hollow it out. You get a brass bowl that looks cool on Instagram but has lost the actual weight of what it is.
What we had to do instead was find contemporary relevance already living inside the tradition. The ritual of cooking in brass and bronze isn’t old-fashioned, it’s a countercultural act in a world of non-stick and disposable. The handmade quality is exactly the thing a generation of consumers is hungry for, the thing they can’t find in anything mass-produced. For us, it was about figuring out how to reveal what was already here.
The second unlearning was around who the audience is. You have to resist the assumption that someone who didn’t grow up with the object needs it explained to them at the surface level. What they actually need is to feel its resonance and understand why it matters emotionally and practically in their life right now. A young buyer in a Mumbai apartment and a customer in New York are both responding to the same thing, i.e. the feeling of holding something made intentionally.
6. What’s Getting Lost in the Race to Look Global: What’s the most valuable design capability that Indian brands are losing as they try to look globally generic? And which international brand do you think has successfully embraced cultural specificity that Indian brands should study?
What’s getting lost is the capacity to hold complexity. In India, we’ve always had to work with layered meaning and density whether it’s colour, patterns or textiles. And it’s not a limitation, it’s more of a muscle built over centuries. And I think the most valuable thing being lost is that muscle. When Indian brands pursue globalised neutrality, they’re trading away the very complexity that makes them stand out.
The real opportunity for Indian brands goes beyond preserving craft as heritage which is admired from a distance. At Mother Tongue, we believe in experimenting with it enough that it earns its place in how people actually live today.
The brands worth paying attention to are rarely the loudest. Take Aesop for example; its value lies beyond its visual language. What makes it enduring is the clarity of its philosophy. Every touchpoint feels intentional because it is anchored in a coherent worldview. The brand travels effortlessly across cultures not because it tries to belong everywhere but because it knows exactly who it is.
That is increasingly how brands should create value today. Consumers are no longer just buying products, they are choosing identities. The brands that stay with people the most are the ones that articulate a clear point of view, express it consistently and build a world others want to be part of.
