Founder’s Background
The founders of PixelPhrase Creative Studio, Uma Iyer and Astha Bhatnagar are a writer-designer duo with decades of experience who think, ideate, breath, brew, write, design, and promote brands. Uma and Astha first worked together in 2005 as part of the Ad Sales team at Rediff. Whizzing deadlines and crazy schedules forged a bond, cracking ideas and celebrating sales targets further strengthened it, love for food sealed the friendship.
Life and its various side trips apart, they remained in touch and grabbed every opportunity to work with each other. One cold winter morning in January 2021 the two got into a discussion about the lack of opportunities for women once they took career breaks. Most women who try to make a comeback into the professional space, especially after extended maternity breaks, face a lot of discrimination. From being questioned about their professionalism to being offered significant pay cuts, they get it all.
“It’s almost like the women went for a full-frontal lobotomy instead of taking a break to raise their children.” The discussion turned into a vision and PixelPhrase Creative Studio was born.
The Concept
The motto of PixelPhrase is to offer any woman the chance to rewrite her ambition, to rebrand herself, and to re-emerge like the mythical phoenix.
PixelPhrase is what they call the ‘safe place’, They believe in holding space for each other. Starting in the middle of the pandemic, they have grown from 2 to an 8-member team plus a network of freelance consultants – all women, all fabulous in their own rights.
The Secret Behind their Success
With a collective experience of over 4 decades in the industry, across various mediums, For them, their work is their pride. They have worked for brands like Chevrolet, Nestle, Naukri.com, ISB, Yash Technologies, Excitel, CallHealth, Tula’s Academy, and many more.
They attribute their success to the following three things-
- Strategy: They put time and effort into understanding the requirements of their clients. From content to hashtags, social media to marketing, their strategies are well thought through and hit the mark, case in point, one of their first clients has gone from 80k views a week to 47 lakh views a week in a span of 3 months.
- Active listening: They believe the most important thing they can do, is listen. Understanding that the products their clients put forth are like babies to them and no one knows the brand better than them has helped the business tremendously. “Our job is to translate their vision into impactful ideas, our concepts are simply a reflection of their wishes and ideas”, is what the founders had to say.
- Pure joy: The most important aspect to PixelPhrase is the fact that all the members love their work. Building brands and watching them grow to incredible heights is a source of pure joy. It gives them a massive kick to see an idea take root and fly. Every project is an opportunity that brings in new learning and insights.
Finding a Balance
At PixelPhrase, they have handled tough clients, worked through deadlines, managed teething and entrance exam woes, and juggled with creative blocks and house-help strikes. And also planned strategies, birthdays, and dinner without breaking a sweat.
They are armed with creativity, a sense of humour, experience, and friendship.
They nurture and value each other, behave as a unit and look forward to welcoming more women to join us to build fantastic brands and also watch them thrive. Together, they believe, they can achieve great heights.
