The Knots Studio

  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...

  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...

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...