The answer to that bottle-neck lay in the glass jar of ghee that mum so carefully refilled in the pantry. As you know, our Indian kitchens use jars to keep ghee, pickles, jams and even olives and mayonnaise, happily table-spooning out small quantities whenever required. And while the proverbial tedhi ungli is occasionally employed, there is no known behaviour of us Indians emptying out a full jar’s contents to cook with.

Before we even thought of zomatoing pizza and pondering the universe, we said hey, pizza bases and pasta have been selling in India like IPL tickets, long before the IPL even began. So how come sauces for pizza & pasta never took off here? Their sale is still fractional compared to pizza bases or pasta!

The value connotations of things in a glass jar, and the usage behaviours around it, was one major reason for the low adoption of pizza & pasta sauce in the Indian market. So for the client’s pilot, we recommended they use pouches to sell the sauces, even though they had already procured glass jars. They agreed and so, evidently, did Indian homes - the pouches outsold the jars 5:1. Proving that successful businesses are built around local behaviour and not global norms.

It’s what we mean by Human Centric Design – where before briefs are slotted into packaging, digital or branding silos, they’re decoded through the lense of consumer behaviour and culture. It’s not merely about challenging advertising norms, it’s more about a user adaptive approach to keep businesses ahead of the curve by maximising emerging opportunities.

But that’s just one of the things we enjoy doing. We are DY Works. And the more you know us, you realise we’re all about designing change. Because status quo is often but a frog in the well.