Branding Agency in Mumbai
Identity Makers builds brand names, packaging and complete identity systems for Mumbai businesses. We work with the city's D2C, FMCG, media, hospitality and consumer brands — briefing sessions, brand workshops and presentations happen in person, with strategy and execution run by the same senior team from start to finish. We have been doing this since 2014.
By Gunjan Chordiya, founder — naming and identity programmes for Cipla, TVS, NTPC, CavinKare, Mitsubishi, GAIL and Raymond. Published .
Since 2014
Mumbai brands are heard before they are seen
Look at what the city's most durable brands actually own. Not a logo. A word.
Parle-G is named after Vile Parle, the suburb where the factory stood in 1929. A biscuit company took its identity from a railway station and made it national. Nobody could have designed that; it came from being specific about where you were from, at a time when everyone else was trying to sound British.
Fevicol does not own an adhesive category — it owns a verb. Pidilite built a Mumbai brand so verbally dominant that Indians ask for Fevicol the way Americans ask for a Band-Aid. The name is short, hard-consonant, and impossible to mishear across a noisy hardware shop counter. That is a naming decision, made decades before the advertising that made it famous.
Asian Paints gave a commodity category a character — Gattu, drawn by R.K. Laxman in 1954 — and then had the discipline to keep him for decades. Most companies would have modernised him away. The restraint is the strategy.
The pattern across all three: the verbal asset came first and outlived every visual refresh. In a city where your brand is encountered in traffic, on a hoarding at 60kmph, in a shop where the shopkeeper repeats your name back to a customer — the name is doing more work than the logo ever will.
These are analyses of brands we have not worked on. They are here because they explain how this market rewards brands, and that understanding is what we bring to a brief.
The problem nobody warns Mumbai founders about
Mumbai is India's densest concentration of registered trademarks. Every consumer category has been contested here for a century.
The practical consequence is brutal and it arrives late: the name is almost always already taken. We have watched founders spend two months on a name, build an investor deck around it, print samples, and lose it at clearance in a class they did not think to check.
So we invert the sequence. Trademark class screening, linguistic checking across Marathi, Hindi and English, and domain clearance happen before any name reaches you — not after you have chosen one. In most cities this is good practice. In Mumbai it is the entire discipline. Most candidate names die here, quietly, before you ever see them. That is the work you are paying for.
Our own Mumbai work: Raymond
We designed the packaging strategy for Raymond Home's SS 26–27 pillow collection — a Mumbai institution and one of the most recognised names in Indian textiles.
The brief was structural before it was graphic: categorising SKUs into Essential, Wellness & Lifestyle, and Tech-Comfort ranges, then finding materials that made each tier legible on a shelf without fracturing one brand. Laminated vacuumised pouches for some, printed non-woven zipper bags for others — different formats, one identity, no ambiguity about which range a customer is holding.
Working with a brand that has spent decades building "The Complete Man" teaches you the constraint that matters most in Mumbai: you are never designing from zero. You are designing into equity that already exists, and your job is to not break it.
What Mumbai categories actually demand
D2C and consumer. The country's deepest D2C cluster, selling through a 400-pixel product tile. Packaging that looks considered in a presentation deck disappears at thumbnail size. We design for the thumbnail first, then scale up — the reverse of how most studios work.
FMCG. Shelf is a knife fight. Your pack is one of forty facings, seen from a metre and a half away, in bad light, for under three seconds. Distinctiveness at distance beats detail every time.
Media, entertainment and creators. Identity judged by people who build brands professionally. Generic work is spotted instantly, and the reputational cost of shipping it is higher here than anywhere.
Financial and professional services. Trust categories where the identity carries regulatory weight and personality is a liability, not an asset.
Hospitality and F&B. The category where a distinctive, sayable name is worth the most — because it is spoken, recommended and searched far more than it is read.
What we do
Brand Naming
Strategic naming with trademark class screening, Marathi/Hindi/English linguistic checks and domain clearance before presentation.
Logo and Brand Identity
Identity systems built from positioning, with guidelines that survive real use.
Brand Collateral and Social Creatives
One identity, consistent everywhere.
How we work with Mumbai businesses
We actively serve clients across Mumbai. Briefings, brand workshops and presentation meetings happen in person; the same senior team carries the project through.
We take a deliberately limited number of projects each month. The people who scope your brief are the people who execute it — you will not be handed to a junior team after the pitch. Over more than a decade our work has spanned Cipla, TVS, NTPC, CavinKare, Mitsubishi, GAIL, Cosmo Films, Raymond, the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, the Indian Embassy in Brussels and Rotary.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with businesses across Mumbai?
Yes. We work with clients throughout Mumbai and the MMR, with in-person briefings, brand workshops and presentations, and continuous collaboration through the project.
How much does a branding agency cost in Mumbai?
Individual assets — a brand name, a logo, or a package design — start at ₹12,000 + GST each. Full identity engagements start at ₹24,000, with ₹40,000 the tier most growing brands choose and ₹90,000 for an end-to-end identity system covering naming, identity, guidelines and collateral.
Why do so many brand names fail trademark clearance in Mumbai?
Because Mumbai has India's densest trademark register and most consumer categories have been contested for decades. A name can be free in one class and blocked in the class you actually trade in. We screen classes and domains before presenting names, so you never fall in love with a name you cannot own.
Can you design packaging for D2C brands selling on marketplaces?
Yes. We design for two viewing conditions at once — a physical shelf at a metre and a half, and a product tile 400 pixels wide. A pack that only works in one of those is a pack that fails.
Do you work with Marathi or Hindi brand names?
Yes. Linguistic checking across Marathi, Hindi and English is standard in our naming process. A name that tests well in English and stumbles when spoken in Marathi is a name that will struggle in this city.
Have you worked with Mumbai brands before?
Yes — including packaging design for Raymond Home's SS 26–27 pillow collection, covering SKU architecture across their Essential, Wellness & Lifestyle and Tech-Comfort ranges.
Identity Makers
Ramdwara Marg, Bhilwara, Rajasthan 311001, India
gunjan@identitymakers.co | +91 797 668 0456