Mayuri Nikumbh Returns To Elephant As Chief Design Officer
Elephant has appointed Mayuri Nikumbh as chief design officer, the independent design and brand consultancy strengthening its leadership after launching its Asia Pacific hub in Singapore last year.
- Will lead Elephant’s creative offerings across verticals, deepening client engagements and scaling its presence in India and global markets
- Over 20 years in strategic brand solutions for global and Indian clients
- Has worked with Bacardi, Coca-Cola, ICICI Bank, Nestle, Paper Boat, PepsiCo, PayU, Reliance Group, Tata Group and Zydus
- Recently set up the India arm of global design consultancy Conran Design Group
- Elephant was founded in 1989 and has over 70 strategists, researchers and designers across several cities including Singapore
Why Mayuri Nikumbh Is Coming Back
Ashwini Deshpande, co-founder and director at Elephant, said she is genuinely happy to welcome Nikumbh back, this time with greater reach and responsibility to lead the brand and communication design team and enhance the consultancy’s entire solution basket.
Nikumbh called it a full circle moment, saying she returns with a broader lens and a bigger ambition, and that as technology rapidly transforms the creative industry, authenticity in both narrative and craft matters more than ever.
Return hires get written up as sentiment, and the sentiment is usually real. What makes this one commercially interesting is what she did in between: standing up a global consultancy’s India office is precisely the experience an Indian firm needs when it is trying to run the same play in reverse out of Singapore.
The Singapore Context
The appointment follows the launch of Elephant’s Asia Pacific hub in Singapore last year, and the mandate explicitly covers scaling across global markets.
Indian design consultancies exporting into Southeast Asia face a credibility question before a capability one. Having someone who has already built a foreign brand’s presence in a new market is a more direct answer to that than another award.
The Client List Tells You The Brief
Her work spans Bacardi, Coca-Cola, ICICI Bank, Nestle, Paper Boat, PepsiCo, PayU, Reliance Group, Tata Group and Zydus, and Elephant says the appointment strengthens its capabilities across FMCG and consumer brands while deepening its work transforming corporate and institutional brands.
That list runs from fast-moving packaged goods to banks and pharmaceutical groups, which are opposite problems. Packaging design is judged in a second on a shelf; institutional identity is judged over years by people who never consciously look at it.
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