ABOUT MAYA:
Packaging Design - for an incense stick launch from one of India's largest FMCG houses, told through the Ramayana.
Jyothy Labs - the ₹2,700+ crore FMCG house behind Ujala, Maxo, Margo, Exo, Pril, Henko - was launching a new range under their incense brand, Maya.
Nine fragrances, each inspired by a chapter of Lord Ram's life. Divya Swayamvar. Manohar Van. Setu Dhara. Sita Mohana. Swarna Kasturi. Yudharas Sangram. Nine stories. One Diwali window.
Devotional without dated. Premium without foreign. Two formats - e-commerce and general trade - without splitting the brand in half. Print-ready in three weeks.
The Category Problem
Religious-category packaging in India usually goes one of two ways. Loud, busy, mandir-shop maximalist. Or sanitised minimalism that strips out the soul.
Maya needed neither. It needed packaging that felt like a story - rich enough to honour the source material, refined enough to sit on a Nykaa listing, distinctive enough to hold its own on a kirana shelf.
AI-First Work
One launch, two formats.
For e-commerce, a tall cylindrical pack - nine slice-shaped pie boxes nested into a single cylinder, each carrying one fragrance. Premium, giftable, made to be photographed.
For general trade - where shelf stacking is non-negotiable - a separate cuboid mono-carton with four fragrances. Same visual world, different geometry, fully stackable.
Nine illustrations. One visual universe. A stag at a riverbank for Swarna Kasturi. A garland for Divya Swayamvar. A stone bridge for Setu Dhara.
Watercolour textures, gold ornamental borders, jewel-tone backgrounds - distinct per fragrance, unified across the range.
The trick: generative AI for early visual exploration and base composition, hand-illustration for refinement, character work, and the details machines still can't do well. The two weren't sequential - they were braided. AI allowed for speed. The artists gave us soul and finish. Neither could have done it alone.
A richer visual range than a pure-illustration timeline would have allowed, in a quarter of the time, with no compromise on craft.
9 FRAGRANCES, 9 DIVINE CHAPTERS
