We are a design strategy and services company that has a mix of people from design, architecture, engineering and arts background along with people with business education background thereby marrying business strategy, design thinking and design implementation for our clients.
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| Jacob Mathew |
Idiom currently can handle all needs of a business or institution from strategy to branding and communication, to architecture, interior design, product design, packaging design encompassing what we call Business Design. The first company that I co-founded Tessaract Design in 1985 with three other college-mates from NID Ahmedabad did what in retrospect we could call the Business of Design. In 2005 Tessaract merged with Esign a branding and graphic design firm, to form Idiom Design and Consulting Ltd. What we now practice is the Design of Business.
At Tessaract we were a fresh start-up. A partnership of four college mates with two of us still in our final year and two with a couple of years experience each. We turned out to be torchbearers for an entire generation of design entrepreneurs. Design was very new when we started out in 1985, the biggest hurdle in the market being the lack of awareness about design and the impact it could have on business. A lot of time was spent educating our clients about design whenever we could get their ear. It also meant a lot of time spent in office lobbies waiting for appointments on cold calls and doing spec work that would demonstrate before and after a design job.
A few successes enabled us to then showcase projects to clients. As there were very few independent design offices in the country, there were no benchmarks or significant demonstrations of successful work till then. As the first few projects were retail, we built a reputation for retail design and retail design continues to be a significant part of our portfolio. An important learning from the time was that if we could not find the people with the skills we needed we could train them they had an attitude to learn.
In the initial years we could not find manufacturers who were willing to make what we designed, so we set up a factory initially operating it ourselves and then training unemployed youth (from the inner- city-village we had located ourselves in) to make furniture using a combination of wood and steel.
We could not afford to hire trained engineers or ITI graduates so we had two retired army mechanics who trained our young workforce alongside us. We also collaborated with other young professionals like architects and engineers to make up for what we did not know. Today the factory is an independent profitable unit.
| Snapshot |
| Name: Jacob Mathew, Co-Founder Age: 49 Education: PEP in Product Design from NID Experience in business: 25 years as a design entrepreneur Leadership Style: Collaborative Big Learning: Power of holistic multidisciplinary teams |
| Factsheet |
| Name: (Business) Idiom Design and Consulting Domain: Business Design Set up in: Tessaract Design 1985, Esign 1995, Idiom Design and Consulting 2005 Employees: 100 plus Turnover: Confidential Headquarters: Bangalore Website:www.idiom.co.in |
| Business Model |
| Consulting and implementing solutions in the areas of: Business design & strategy Branding and Communication Design Experience Design Design for Social Change New Product Development |
The single most critical area was integrating the people from two different firms to work as one especially when they are from different disciplines. The integration of multi disciplinary teams is perhaps the largest challenge and the most rewarding as well.
A multidisciplinary team that starts firing together is wonderful, productive, effective and fun to work in. The other big problem is:finding the right people from the people educated in our massive but flawed education system.
In April 2005 we were a team of 35 people, by 2007 we were 265 people with a fairly high rate of attrition. On studying the attrition we found that 90 per cent of the people leaving us had worked less than 90 days with us which pointed to a flawed hiring process. We tightened up our hiring process. Today anybody who joins us goes through at least four rounds of interviews with peers, juniors and seniors before we take a decision. Our numbers have now stabilized to a little over a 100 people who work more effectively, with our turnover with a 100 people being higher that with 265!!!
Flexible time, self-regulation, intrapreneurship and such concepts were experimented with.
Today we approach our solutions from a cultural perspective. We study consumer behavior through what could best be described as design ethnography to arrive at key insights that then drive the brief and the solution.
Understanding behavior and culture and using design to transform it to a desired state is key to our success today. Keeping an ear to the ground and the countless conversations we have with extremely dynamic and astute businessmen alerts us to possibilities. We were at the crest of retail design when organized retail started to take off in the country, today we work in many other sectors like healthcare, education, hospitality and social entrepreneurship. Our luckiest breaks are our meetings with extraordinary people with vision and conviction in their enterprises.
The company was founded on the premise that we would have to move on and the next generation of leaders have to be nurtured from within the organization. Leadership training and coaching are very much part of the agenda.
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