INT: Tell us a bit about how you met and what made you believe you wanted to work together?
Pranav Guglani (PG): We started dating right before Neha left college (Pearl Academy); she was my senior. We had a lot of similar likes and dislikes. There were times when we used to get creeped out by how similar our sensibilities and reactions were, not just in design or fashion, but even as people.
Neha Singh (NS): Yeah, it was just an experiment for us initially to work together. But every day, we realised we were a great team. It’s one thing to be romantically compatible, but even at work, it just felt very natural for us and an extension of our personalities. We would critique each other and help each other get the best version of what we were building together.
INT: Did the visual language of Cord develop alongside the creations or afterwards?
NS: The answer is somewhere in between. The overarching theme was always nostalgia. We knew that this was always going to be the ethos, the core essence of the brand. It was always going to be something that evokes emotion: something that makes you feel a little warm on the inside. We wanted it to be emotive and nostalgic in a lot of ways.
PG: And that emotion could come through a painting, through a print, details, a classic shape of a bag, or anything that reminds you of old times. Whatever ‘old times’ means, maybe just a comfortable sort of feeling in your heart. Sometimes it’s not easy to connect it to a particular memory, but it makes you feel familiar, right? That feeling, that familiarity, is what we wanted to capture. Also, we wanted to be authentic to what we do, and not follow trends. It was always about timeless and functional designs.
NS: So the story and visual language were really important for us, right from the beginning. We would randomly go to different streets and try to capture products we had just created. Sometimes we’d make our friends wear whatever we had made, meet them at a nice location and just do a photoshoot with them. I used to have a camera back then, and we just did everything ourselves.
I remember learning Photoshop to make frames and graphics, and somehow our graphics always stood out. At that point, it was still quite new in India to do graphics that way. We even made packaging out of rubber sheets that we used in our bags at the time. Now, when we look back, I wonder how we even thought of something like that back then. But sometimes having fewer resources makes you think differently.