ChhattisKala: umbrella brand creation, identity, imagery system and packaging for a state rural livelihoods mission

Chhattisgarh has thousands of producers. Tribal artisans, farmers, and women’s self-help groups making soap, incense, pulses, flours, sweets, spices and rice, much of it to a standard any market would take.

What none of them had was a name a buyer outside the state would recognise. A product sold under a district label reaches a district.

The quality was never the constraint. The identity was.

Umbrella brands do not fail at the logo

State brands fail because of scale rather than design. Thousands of producers, hundreds of products, dozens of districts, and no central marketing team holding any of it together.

An umbrella brand does not fail because the logo is wrong. It fails because nobody downstream knows how to use it.

The people in this brand have always been invisible in the final product. Somebody grew the rice, somebody pressed the oil, somebody rolled the agarbatti, and the market met none of them.

So we wrote the manifesto before anything was drawn, and it said what the brand is actually for. We are the voice of the unseen hands.

The manifesto came before the mark

In public sector work the words travel further than the design, because they are what a district officer repeats in a room we will never be in.

Getting the story, the values and the stakeholder map settled first is what lets an identity be adopted rather than issued.

The platform
We are the voice of the unseen hands.

The mark is made of the things it represents. Community figures, a landscape and plant motif, and a tribal-inspired outer arch holding them together.

Nothing in it is borrowed from the conventions of government communication, because the brand had to compete on a marketplace listing rather than on a notice board.

Sunrise orange, gerua red

The palette runs on sunrise orange and gerua red against off-white, warm colours that belong to the state rather than to a category.

Across pulses and flours, soaps, agarbatti and sweets, the system lets a toor dal pack and a tulsi soap sit in the same family without either one looking like it borrowed the other’s design.

A state brand that works only in English has already excluded most of the people making the products and many of the people buying them.

So Devanagari was built as a primary script rather than added as a translation, with both logos drawn properly rather than one set in

whatever typeface was available.

Devanagari is not an afterthought

District communication and national communication carry equal weight, which matters more than it sounds.

A self-help group in a village and a buyer on a marketplace are looking at the same brand, and neither version should feel like the secondary one.

The hardest problem in an umbrella brand is the thousandth photograph. Hundreds of people across dozens of districts will shoot products, makers and places, and none of them will have a brief.

So we built an imagery system of four categories, with rules simple enough to be followed by somebody with a phone and no training.

Four categories, one look

Consistency in this kind of brand cannot depend on approval, because there is nobody to approve it.

It has to be designed so that the easiest thing to do is also the correct thing to do. That is the difference between a guideline and a system.

The brand was launched in 2025 by Union Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai. Launched by the state, listed on ONDC

Chhattiskala products are now trading on Amazon India and ONDC-linked storefronts including Mystore and DigiHaat.

Ragi millet cookies made by the Mavali Mata self-help group. Pure tikhur powder, the traditional arrowroot starch, from the Jeevan Jyoti Mahila Cluster Sangthan. GI-tagged Vishnu Bhog rice, cold-pressed mustard oil, turmeric, coriander and seedless tamarind. The unseen hands now have a name on the pack, and a national shelf to put it on.

We left Bihan with a brand that districts can run without us, a manifesto its own people repeat, and one name under which a village enterprise reaches a national marketplace.