Yana Puri, a third-year business and design student, spent a semester working for Landor, the branding firm behind Levi’s and FedEx.
There may be no better place for a design student to get a start than at Landor, the international branding powerhouse that created iconic images like the FedEx logo and the red housemark on Levi’s jeans.
Yana Puri, a third-year business and design student at Northeastern University, recently kicked off her design career through a co-op with Landor, which gave her the chance to work on design projects for clients like Coca-Cola and Nestle.
Puri’s role at Landor was focused on special projects for growth and marketing with the new business development and growth team in Landor’s studio in Mumbai, India.
“I expressed to the company president (Lulu Raghavan) that I wanted to do everything,” Puri said. “I wanted to learn a little bit of everything being a design and business student. So she said I would be perfect for growth so I could do more business developing and marketing.”
Puri focused on new initiatives. She worked with the new business development and growth team on projects, including Coca-Cola and Nestle. Her team would be the one building out the scope of projects and coming up with proposals and pitches to hand over to the design and client services teams.
Puri’s day-to-day tasks varied. One day, she’d be helping build a rebranding pitch for a telecommunications company in Indonesia. The next day, she might be helping make booklets of case studies for clients.
Since she was working out of Landor’s Mumbai office, Puri got to work with people from all over Asia. When the global officers of the agency came to visit, she helped manage invitations and the guest list for an event the agency threw for them.
Much of her time was spent going through case studies of past work with clients and coming up with proposals and presentation pitches for these new initiatives. She also got to work on the marketing side, helping with event planning and publicity initiatives.
“The role was whatever I wanted to make it to be,” she said. “It was a great experience just learning how a bigger design agency works. … It was very interesting (learning) how branding has evolved.”
Puri also got crucial experience working with people from around the globe. Something as simple as email format or the average response time to a work message can vary from place to place, she said.
“I really enjoyed the amount of perspectives,” she said. “That’s beneficial, especially if you want to be more experienced in your own industry (and learn) how other countries achieve a certain product using different methods. … It was really fun to learn all those little everyday things.”
Puri said she found her colleagues in India took work very seriously, often working long hours if needed. But in the same vein, that made it easier for her to befriend her colleagues.
“(Work) is just more a part of their lives,” she said. “In the same way, co-workers are more friends than … in the United States. Everyone’s very friendly, very welcoming. It just feels like you’re going to work with friends because you’re with them for so long.”
Puri said she enjoyed the experience of working in Mumbai.
“India is becoming a very big design hub,” she said. “That made work more interesting because there’s a lot of untapped potential in terms of design media. (There’s) a huge entertainment industry there … and there were many young, driven and hardworking people in one room. It was fun. It was refreshing. Mumbai really is the place for people to consider for internships and co-ops.”
In addition to learning more about people around the world, Puri said she learned more about the inner workings of brand design.
“I went into it thinking it was just about a logo or colors or superficial things,” she said. “But after realizing there’s a whole methodology and philosophy behind all the choices that go into brand voice and management, I realized I wanted to continue at Landor in some way. I would love to continue down this path of brand design and consulting.”