Posts

The Diwali Budget Cut That Is Costing You Far More Than You Realise.

Image
  By Aarthy Balachandran | Founder, The Knots Studio I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a CFO. Not the kind of conversation you might expect from someone who runs a corporate gifting company. This was not a sales conversation. It was an honest one. The kind that only happens when two people decide to stop being polite about something that actually matters. He had been referred to me by an HR head I had worked with for two years. She had sent him a message saying simply that he should speak to me before making any decisions about the Diwali gifting budget for that year. He called me with the directness that CFOs tend to bring to conversations about spending. "Aarthy, I need to understand why we are spending this much on Diwali gifts. My team wants to do something premium. Finance wants to cut the budget by thirty percent. Help me understand what we are actually getting for this money." I appreciated the question. Because it was the right question. A...
Post a Comment
Read more

Diwali Is Less Than 100 Days Away. Some HR Teams Are Relaxed. Others Will Panic in October. Here Is the Difference.

Image
  By Aarthy Balachandran | Founder, The Knots Studio I want to start with a scene that I know every HR head and Admin leader in India has lived through at least once. It is the third week of October. Diwali is just over two weeks away. The office is already decorated. The festive playlist is running in the background. And somewhere between a performance review meeting and a compliance deadline, someone sends you a message that makes your stomach drop just a little. "Have we sorted the Diwali gifts yet?" You already know the answer. And you already know what the next seventy-two hours are going to look like. The frantic calls to vendors who are either fully booked or quoting delivery timelines that simply do not work. The compromises on quality because the products you actually wanted are out of stock. The packaging that is not quite right but will have to do because there is simply no time left to get it right. The gifts that go out on time, technically, but without...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eleven Annual Days. Eleven Generic Gifts. And Then Someone Finally Got It Right.

Image
By Aarthy Balachandran | Founder, The Knots Studio I want to tell you about a conversation I almost did not have. It was a Tuesday morning, about six weeks before their company's Annual Day celebration, and an HR head from a well-established manufacturing company in Bengaluru had reached out to us for a quote on gifting for approximately three hundred and fifty employees. Annual Day, for those who have organised one, is not a small matter in Indian corporate culture. It is the moment when an organisation steps back from the relentless pace of the working year and says, collectively and publicly, thank you for everything this year has meant. The speeches, the awards, the performances, the dinner, and the gift that every employee takes home at the end of the evening. That gift is the last impression of the entire event. It is what travels home with every person in the room. It is what sits on their kitchen counter or their work desk or their bedroom table in the days and week...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Phone Call That Tested Everything We Stand For. And What Happened When We Answered It.

Image
  By Aarthy Balachandran | Founder, The Knots Studio I want to tell you about a Thursday afternoon that I will not forget for a long time. I was in the middle of coordinating a delivery for a client when my phone rang. I almost did not pick it up. I am glad I did. The person on the other end introduced herself as a Senior Manager handling third party partner initiatives at one of the largest global organizations operating in India. Her voice was professional, measured, and entirely clear about what she needed. Gifting kits for partner appreciation. Trophies. Professional grade certificates. Premium quality throughout. Delivery within a timeline that made me pause for just a moment before I responded. And the brand standards of her organization, which anyone who has worked with a large global company will immediately understand, were non-negotiable. I took a quiet breath. Not because I was uncertain about whether we could do this. But because I know what this kind of req...
Post a Comment
Read more

Every Customer Is Looking for a Vendor They Never Have to Chase. Here Is How We Became That.

Image
  By Aarthy Balachandran | Founder, The Knots Studio Let me tell you about a conversation I had with an HR head about six months into our working relationship. We were on a call to discuss an upcoming festival gifting requirement and somewhere in the middle of it she said something that stopped me completely. "You know what I love most about working with you Aarthy? I never have to follow up. You just show up." She said it casually, almost as an aside, and moved on to the brief. But I held onto that sentence for a long time afterward. Because I realized she was not complimenting something extraordinary. She was describing something that should be completely ordinary in any professional service relationship but had become so rare in her experience that it felt remarkable. She never had to follow up. We just showed up. That should not be a differentiator. But it is. And understanding why it is such a differentiator, and what it takes to actually deliver on it cons...
Post a Comment
Read more