We have developed such a precise visual language for authenticity that authenticity itself has started looking like a template.
I can now identify an “authentic” brand in approximately four seconds.
There will be linen. There will be a ceramic cup with a slightly wonky rim. There will be hands. Always hands.
Hands weaving. Hands kneading. Hands dyeing. Hands touching soil with the emotional intensity usually reserved for long-lost relatives.
Nobody attached to the hands will be visible.
Faces complicate art direction.
The photograph will be slightly grainy because apparently pixels are corporate.
The palette will contain bone, oat, clay, moss, rust and at least three shades of brown that cannot legally be called brown.
They will be called earth, cacao, raw umber and perhaps monsoon soil.
The font will be a serif.
Or an extremely expensive sans serif pretending it has never heard of money.
Somewhere, an artisan will be looking thoughtfully out of frame.
Nobody knows what they’re looking at.
Possibly the creative director.
And the copy will say:
Rooted. Considered. Intentional. Slow. Conscious. Born from the land.
Never: Manufactured in an industrial unit outside Gurgaon with excellent quality control.
Welcome to contemporary authenticity.
It has a moodboard now.
And apparently beige has never lied.
We didn’t kill authenticity. We hired a creative director for it.
For a long time, brands wanted to look expensive.
Then consumers became suspicious of things that looked expensive.
So expensive brands started trying to look poor.
Gloss disappeared. Packaging became matte. Chrome became wood. Wood became reclaimed wood. Reclaimed wood became wood with a previous life. Offices became ateliers. Factories became workshops. Employees became collectives. Customers became communities. Products became objects. Shops became spaces. And shops selling six candles and a chair became cultural destinations.
Founders began being photographed barefoot. Preferably sitting on the floor. Nothing says “I have just raised $4 million” quite like no shoes.
Perfect photography became imperfect photography, although, importantly, professionally imperfect photography requiring a photographer, stylist, producer, creative director, lighting assistant and approximately 117 selects to find the photograph that looked most accidental.
Luxury stopped shouting. Then luxury whispered. Then everybody whispered. Then everybody whispered in the same font.
We have now become extraordinarily sophisticated at designing things to look as though nobody designed them.
Which, ironically, requires an enormous design budget.
Authenticity has become remarkably easy to art-direct.
To be fair, most brands aren’t necessarily lying.
The artisan may genuinely be an artisan. The founder may genuinely care. The cotton may genuinely be organic. The ceramic may genuinely be hand-thrown.
The problem is that we’ve developed such efficient visual shorthand for goodness that eventually the shorthand began doing the moral work.
Natural material = responsible.
Imperfection = handmade.
Handmade = ethical.
Muted palette = thoughtful.
Thoughtful = good.
Beige = Gandhi.
And suddenly you don’t actually need to demonstrate a philosophy.
You need to photograph one.
Once a value develops recognisable visual codes, those codes can be purchased.
You can hire the photographer. Commission the typography. Order the handmade paper. Find the correct plaster wall. Add grain in post.
Congratulations. Your brand now has values. The artisan has become the new luxury logo.
This is where things become particularly interesting in India.
We have extraordinary craft traditions. We also have an extraordinary ability to turn them into carousels.
You know the photograph. An elderly artisan. Beautifully weathered hands.
A loom. Sunlight entering from precisely the correct direction.
A wall with the precise amount of decay required to signify heritage without suggesting a structural problem.
The caption tells us the technique has been practised for 400 years.
The brand discovered it in February.
By April, it is reviving it. By June, it is reimagining it. By September, there is a ₹38,000 jacket. There will be words about preservation.
There will definitely be empowerment. Possibly giving back. Occasionally our artisans, which is a phrase worth sitting with for a moment.
And I always want to ask:
What’s their name? What do they earn? Who owns the design? Who owns the IP? Who decided the price? Are they credited on the product? If this becomes the bestseller, do they participate in that success? Do they have any say in what gets made next? Or did we borrow their face because the campaign needed soul?
There is something profoundly strange about turning someone’s lifetime of knowledge into somebody else’s content strategy.
Putting an artisan on a hangtag does not automatically constitute cultural preservation.
Sometimes it is just a very beautiful hangtag.
Storytelling has also become a victim of storytelling.
Apparently every object now has a story.
This cushion has a story. This candle has a story. This spoon has been on a journey. The soap is healing generational trauma. A ₹4,800 notebook is reconnecting us with ancestral wisdom. A candle is an olfactory exploration of belonging. Ma’am. It smells like sandalwood. And that is perfectly fine. I love sandalwood. Can things occasionally just be good? We have stretched the word storytelling so far that it now appears to mean:
There is copy.
A photograph plus three paragraphs isn’t necessarily a story. A QR code isn’t a story. A founder saying, “I’ve always wanted to create something meaningful” isn’t a story.
That sentence has probably launched 14,000 brands.
A real story should change something.
The product. The experience. The price. The behaviour. The relationship between maker and buyer. The way somebody understands what they’re holding.
If I remove the hangtag and your entire story disappears with it, I have unfortunate news.
The story was the hangtag.
Authenticity is what your brand is willing to make inconvenient.
This is where I think the actual distinction lies. Beliefs are annoying. Real beliefs interfere with business.
If you genuinely believe craftspeople should be paid fairly, your margins might suffer.
If you genuinely believe in slow production, your timelines might become inconvenient.
If you genuinely believe in local manufacturing, scaling may become harder.
If you genuinely care about inclusivity, your size architecture becomes more complicated.
And if you genuinely care about sustainability, you may occasionally have to utter the most terrifying sentence in contemporary retail:
We shouldn’t make this.
Terrible sentence in a merchandise meeting. Excellent sentence for credibility.
Because values that never inconvenience you have an uncanny resemblance to marketing.
Authenticity should leave a small bruise somewhere on the P&L.
Otherwise everyone would be authentic.
Sustainability, meanwhile, has hired a copywriter.
Conscious. Mindful. Responsible. Planet-positive. Considered. Low-impact. Earth-friendly. My personal favourite remains: Inspired by nature.
Petroleum is technically inspired by several million years of nature, but you rarely see that on a hangtag.
The genius of these words is that they sound specific while promising remarkably little.
“Made using 83% post-consumer recycled plastic collected within 200 kilometres of our manufacturing facility” can be investigated.
“Consciously crafted” cannot.
Consciously by whom? Crafted how? Compared to what? Were the unconscious products cheaper?
Specificity is dangerous because somebody can check. Which is precisely why specificity creates trust.
Perhaps the next luxury isn’t mystery. Perhaps it’s receipts.
There is no Pantone shade for integrity.
I wish there were. Imagine the efficiency.
“Can we make the brand 20% more ethical?”
“Absolutely. PMS 7499 C.” Unfortunately, authenticity lives in deeply unphotogenic places.
Contracts. Invoices. Margins. Minimum-order quantities. Payment cycles. Waste. Wages. Returns. Lead times. Supplier relationships.
The Excel sheet nobody has ever described as sensory.
A company can have fluorescent orange packaging and behave ethically.
Another can wrap everything in handmade recycled paper, tie it with jute string, print a poem about Mother Earth in soy ink and then negotiate a craftsperson down by ₹80.
Guess which one is more authentic.
This is why aesthetics can never be evidence of ethics. And good taste is not a moral position.
Although Instagram has made a heroic attempt to convince us otherwise.
Perhaps authentic brands need to stop looking so authentic.
I would genuinely love to see a sustainable brand that looks like it has never met a dried flower.
A craft brand with neon packaging.
An Indian luxury brand that doesn’t immediately reach for sandstone, miniature paintings, mango trees, marigolds or the word parampara.
A wellness brand without a beige woman doing yoga somewhere near a mountain.
A coffee company that doesn’t require a farmer to hold beans for the camera.
A skincare founder who simply says:
I hired an excellent cosmetic chemist.
No grandmother. No ancient recipe discovered in a trunk. No childhood afternoon grinding haldi in the ancestral kitchen.
Just science. I’d buy two.
A hotel that says: The sheets are fantastic, the shower pressure is excellent and breakfast ends at 11.
Five stars.
Because the problem isn’t that any of these visual languages are inherently wrong.
The problem is that they have become completely predictable.
We have become so visually literate that even rebellion now has brand guidelines.
Indian brands have another problem: we have discovered Indianness.
Specifically, a very particular Indianness.
There will be marigolds. There will be mangoes. There will be a tiger. There may be a matchbox.
There will almost certainly be something that looks vaguely like a vintage Indian railway graphic.
A Devanagari character may appear somewhere despite the brand communicating entirely in English.
There will be a photograph from an archive. A mithai box will become a design reference. Somebody will say India, but contemporary. Somebody else will say global, but rooted.
Everyone will nod.
And another moodboard will be born. None of these things are inherently problematic. The problem begins when culture becomes a visual asset library.
India is not a colour palette.
Craft isn’t a texture.
Heritage isn’t a font.
And “rooted” is not a strategy.
There are 1.4 billion people here.
Surely we can find more than one way of looking Indian.
The next frontier of authenticity is specificity.
Don’t tell me something is handmade.
Tell me who made it.
Don’t tell me you support craftspeople.
Tell me how the money moves.
Don’t tell me the collection is inspired by Rajasthan.
Rajasthan is 342,239 square kilometres.
Please narrow it down.
Don’t tell me your brand celebrates Indian heritage.
Which India?
Whose heritage?
Which century?
Which community?
Which technique?
Which contradiction?
Don’t tell me something is sustainable.
Tell me what isn’t.
Imagine opening a website and reading:
We tried to make this product entirely sustainable. We failed at the zip. We’re working on it.
I trust you already.
Or:
We could make 10,000 of these. We make 600 because beyond that we’d have to change the process.
Interesting.
Or: This costs more because we refused to negotiate our maker below this price.
Now your pricing has become your brand story.
You didn’t need a sepia photograph. Because perfection is advertising.
Specific imperfection feels remarkably like truth.
Maybe brands need fingerprints again.
Not literal fingerprints.
Please.
Do not leave this article and put a fingerprint on the packaging.
I mean peculiarities.
Things that refuse to fit neatly into a strategy deck.
A strange obsession.
A ritual.
A refusal.
A material nobody else bothered learning about.
A supplier relationship that has lasted twenty years.
A product you continue making despite someone from finance periodically appearing to ask why.
A rule that costs you money.
A decision that makes absolutely no sense to a consultant.
Something McKinsey cannot turn into a 2x2 by Tuesday.
These things are difficult to replicate.
Typography isn’t.
Photography isn’t.
Packaging isn’t.
Even tone of voice isn’t.
Give the same Pinterest board to twelve agencies and twelve brands will eventually emerge looking like extremely tasteful cousins attending the same destination wedding.
But conviction is harder to copy.
There is a very simple test.
Strip everything away.
Remove the logo. Remove the packaging. Remove Instagram. Remove the founder story. Remove the artisan portrait. Remove the serif. Remove the handmade paper.
God forbid, remove the beige.
What remains?
Can I recognise your philosophy from the object? Can I recognise your values from your pricing? Can I recognise your ethics from your contracts? Can I recognise your culture from the way you treat suppliers? Can I recognise your worldview from something you refused to make?
If yes, you probably have a brand.
If no, you may have excellent branding. And those are two very different achievements.
We spent the last decade teaching brands how to look human. We gave them imperfection. We gave them texture. We gave them founders. We gave them workshops. We gave them grain. We gave them handmade paper. We gave them ceramics.
We gave them people staring pensively into the middle distance. We gave them linen. Dear God. We gave them so much linen.
Perhaps the next decade is about something considerably less photogenic: behaviour.
Because authenticity was never supposed to be a visual language.
It was supposed to be the uncomfortable gap between what you say and what you’re actually willing to do.
And if your authenticity can be downloaded from Pinterest, handed to an agency and delivered back to you as a 94-page brand guideline, perhaps it isn’t authenticity. Perhaps it’s just beige with a strategy deck.