Oon Studio is a brand strategy and design practice that helps brands understand themselves before they express themselves. We unearth what a brand carries, unravel what it means, connect the truths that make it distinct, and give that meaning form through strategy, DNA, behaviour, language, identity and the expressions through which it meets the world. Our work is built from the inside out, so a brand can grow, travel and still remain recognisably itself.
Oon literally translates to wool in Hindi. It is a word our founder, Vydika Rao, first heard from her Nainamma, whose knitting became one of her earliest encounters with making, memory and storytelling. Over time, the word came to hold more than its literal meaning: warmth, connection, inherited feeling and belonging. Much like thread holds separate things together without making them identical, Oon brings together the many truths within a brand and gives them a form people can recognise, live with and remember.
Grey, for us, is not uncertainty. We stand for the space between absolutes, where contradiction, context and nuance can coexist. We stay there long enough to understand what others may rush to simplify, because that is often where a brand’s most distinct truth begins to reveal itself.
TEAM
We are a small group of designers, writers, thinkers and makers who care deeply about the things we put into the world. We ask too many questions, notice small things, stay with ideas longer than we probably should, and believe good work usually comes from many hands rather than one heroic mind.
We take the work seriously, but not always ourselves. There is room here for instinct, doubt, disagreement, humour, growing pains and the occasional mess. We are patient with the process, generous with each other, and very quick to celebrate when something finally begins to feel like itself.
ALUMNI
Some stayed for years. Some came in as interns, collaborators or passing hands, leaving behind a mark before growing into bigger dreams and moving on. They carried parts of Oon with them, and we like to think some part of them stayed here too.
Then there are the other creatures in our history: endless tea and coffee, Shifu, the trees outside, the creeper that flowers every year just in time to make the studio look better, and one generous ridge gourd plant that fed us for a while before quietly fading away as we disappeared into deadlines. Oon has been shaped by the people, plants, animals, habits and accidents that lived alongside the work.
• Saranya Settipalli
• Samhitta
• Shreya Ayyar
• Bhakti Biyani
• Aditi Sethi
• Akanksha Divi
• Kruthika Wudali
• Jyoti Prakash
• Shriyadita Narayanan
• Naomika D
• Girija Sravani
• Akhil KT
• Beerakai Plant
• Tree that gave us allergies
• Tara Settipalli
• Madhavi A
• Hamdi
• Prem
“ We shall not cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
-T.S. Eliot