Genie

To grow Genie up with its customer, I had to know exactly how she changed — and where the brand lost her.

Cohort insight came from a commissioned qualitative study — nine in-depth interviews across ages seven to fifteen — supported by ongoing consumer immersion across markets, online and in person, to stay close to how the brand's customer was actually shifting. We didn't ask what bag she wanted. We looked at what she already carried, what she watched, who she copied, and who decided the purchase.

The arc that came back wasn't gentle. At seven, she lives in a fantasy world — Frozen, unicorns — and Mum makes the call. By ten or eleven she's the same girl, louder and more expressive, but now she chooses and Mum approves. Then, at fourteen, the break: she rejects "school bag" outright. She wants the function of one and the look of a fashion bag, and she knows exactly what's on trend because she's watching it all day.

That break was where Genie was leaking customers. She'd carried the brand since she was little, and by the time she stopped wanting to look little, a gap had opened between what Genie made and who she'd become. Closing that gap became the most important thing the range had to do.

The decision from the previous section — build on Korean taste, leave Korean fandom alone — sounds clean on a slide. The market it had to land in wasn't clean at all.

By the time I briefed this range, Korean-style backpacks were already on Amazon at a fraction of Genie's price point — listed by sellers buying directly from Chinese suppliers, often unbranded, riding the same aesthetic. A Genie bag with a muted palette and a Korean feel was going to retail at a multiple of those, and the consumer it was for could see both options on the same screen. The aesthetic alone wasn't going to defend the price.

So the brief I set myself was harder than "design a Korean backpack." It was: make a backpack that reads as a different proposition, not a more expensive version of one she'd already seen. Anything less and I'd ship a bag that looked like a premium-priced copy of something already cheaper — the worst commercial position a design can be in.

Which meant the Korean call couldn't sit on a single variable. A new fabric on a familiar silhouette would have read as a finish change on a known shape. A new silhouette in the existing palette would have looked like the same brand in different clothes. Each lever, moved on its own, lost. They had to move together.

In a category where the cheap version already existed, distinctiveness was compound — and that was the design problem. That logic — move four levers together because moving one isn't enough — is what made College Korea Genie's, not a more expensive copy of what Amazon was already selling. The Korean signal didn't decide what the product looked like. The market the signal was landing in did.

Luggage was one of the first things I did at Genie — before I rebuilt the backpack range, before the Korean call, before the operating system. The brand had committed to a luggage launch, and the brief came in as two ladders. Hard luggage ran three price points: Palm at value entry, Sprout and Rose (both at the same price point) through the mid-tier, Glam at the top. Soft luggage ran three: Lily at entry, Bahamas in the middle, Hazel at premium. The question was the same in both — what Genie's design language looked like in a category it had never been in.

I analysed the brand on arrival and made the translation call: take what made Genie Genie — its visual sensibility, its feminine-led identity, its print-led design language — and carry it into luggage. The forms came in collaboration with another designer; my work was the design direction, the CMF, and the brand-coherence call across the four ranges. Among India's branded luggage players, we were the first to put deliberate feminine prints on shelf.

The brand didn't have the budget or timeline to do formal consumer research before launch. So we did the next-best thing: we shipped what we believed in and used the market itself as the research instrument. Some of the printed ranges sold exceptionally — proof that the brand's identity travelled. But the niche turned out to be smaller than we'd hoped, and the volumes didn't scale to where we needed them.

So we calibrated. Heavy prints made way for ombres, glitter films, texture plays — the same brand sensibility, said more quietly. The brand could still be read as Genie at twenty paces; the addressable market widened. That recalibration carried through Scarlette, Diana, the later Palm work in 2026.

Design and Development Manager, Safari Industries · 2021 — February 2026. Sole design owner of Genie from 2021.