I am a strategist who helps founders and organisations understand what they're really solving before they decide what to do about it.Over 15 years, I've worked as a founder and alongside founding teams across consumer businesses, design, culture and social impact. Moving between these worlds has trained me to see across the boundaries that organisations naturally create - between brand and product, customer and business, strategy and execution.That's useful because business problems rarely arrive neatly labelled.A request for a new identity can turn out to be a positioning problem. A communication problem can reveal a product problem. A team struggling to prioritise may actually be working from different assumptions about what matters.I use design as a diagnostic tool: connecting signals, testing assumptions and reframing the question until the real decision becomes clearer.My work starts before investing in a solution, with making sure we're solving the right problem.
Publications, Presentations And Fellowships
NGFP Fellow 2020
School of International Futures UK
Who's Cooking our Futures?
Journal of Future Studies
The Future of Festivals
Atelier Chiang Mai - The Festival Academy
The Curiosity Habit
Arthshila Ahmedabad
Time Capsule
BBC Futures & School of International Futures UK
Unbox Fellow 2014
Arts & Humanities Research Council, British Council
I Stood up: Social Design in Practice
Scientific Research Journal
ADN Satellite - Asian Dramaturgy
Asian Dramaturgs' Network - Centre42
Offsites: Following Curiosities
Delhi Dallying
Roads to Resilience
Humanitarian Foresight Anthology
Thesis: Re-Imagining Planning
School of Planning & Architecture Delhi
Dissertation: Experience of Space
School of Planning & Architecture Delhi
I'm an alumna of the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. I also volunteer my time with Handknit India, a women-led social enterprise working across 25 craft clusters in India; NND Trust, supporting quality education for the under-privileged especially girls; and with Aman Movement, named after Aman Satya Kachroo, a 19yr medical student who passed away as a result of violent ragging in 2009, and has since developed into a not-for-profit research facility to develop technology-led solutions for improved management of social sector government programmes in India.
Contact: hello@virkein.com
©2026
VIRKEIN DHAR
All Rights Reserved.
My Expertise
I work on problems that haven't yet resolved into a design brief worth committing resources to.
For when the business has evolved faster than the brand:
→ Brand Strategy
Establish what the brand needs to mean before investing in how it looks, sounds or communicates.
For when too many things feel important at once.
→ Decision Triage for Founders
Find the decisions that actually deserve attention before another quarter of resources gets committed.
My Approach
I think about design less as a set of finished things and more as a way of making decisions. Most people meet it at its most visible surface - the polish of spaces, products, services and experiences. Something that is beautiful, aesthetic and desirable.Used as a lens on a business, design becomes diagnostic - where is a symptom showing up, is it persistent or one-off, what does it ripple into, what's driving it upstream? The symptoms are usually unglamorous like a drop in engagement, a vague sense that the team’s lost alignment, an internal doc that never gets opened, a narrative that doesn’t seem to stick. In isolation these can seem easy to ignore. But when mapped together, these scattered signals often point to a deeper misalignment. When symptoms get connected, re-framed, and turned into the right questions, things begin to shift.My work starts there - not arriving with answers, but knowing where to look, what to ask, and when to bring in the right expertise.
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not
beautiful, I know it is wrong.” - Buckminster Fuller
Excerpts from My Work
PARADISE SCHOOL
Strategy Lead
Education | Goa · 2026
Making a founder's conviction survive change
In collaboration with Thought Over Design
Ten years after being built on an untested thesis, and at a change of administration, the school wanted its
conviction articulated. I worked with the incoming director, the founder and the teachers to surface what
the decade had taught them. I went deep into Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) approach, which the school was founded on, to understand how it had evolved from a classroom method into the principle by which the whole institution is run — then examined that against what parents now expect a school to prepare a child for. Two findings shaped the positioning. One: the conviction lived in the founder's judgement, not in any document — a decade of decisions, each individually defensible, that collectively had no name beyond the original inspiration. Two: said plainly to a fee-paying parent, even one already looking for something unconventional, SOLE read as risk, because self-organised sounds like unsupervised. So, the brief was not about messaging but a succession problem. How does a conviction outlive the person who held it? Positioning turned out to be the mechanism. "We trust children to learn" turned a method into a promise - one the school can be held to and seen keeping, through its space, systems, teachers and students.
Watch the film
OZI
Strategy Lead
Baby & Kids | India · 2025
Positioning a vertical player in quick commerce
In collaboration with Irregulars Studio
A positioning that would make a vertical kids' platform legible in a crowded quick-commerce market. Ran parent interviews, social listening across baby and kids’ recommendation platforms, customer forums, and a competitive analysis covering both the horizontal players and the category incumbents. Speed as a core proposition belonged to the horizontals, assortment to the incumbent, and neither was operationally winnable for this brand. But parents weren't describing impatience. They were describing uncertainty. The question changed from how we deliver fastest to what's scarce once fast delivery is table stakes - confidence in the decision, and trust in the platform.I positioned the brand on curation and judgement, held delivery speed as hygiene rather than claim, and argued against making speed the only communications anchor which may be defensible for the short term, indefensible the moment a horizontal player matched it in the category.
Identity Design by Irregulars Studio
10CLUB
Chief Design Officer (Brand & Category Strategy)
Home & Living | India · 2023–25
Building one brand out of a roll-up
With Bhavna Suresh (Founder)
10club had acquired a portfolio of consumer brands and needed to pivot away from the roll-up model. The question arrived as an identity brief but I treated it as a diagnostic question, not a naming one. Audits across acquired categories along with marketplace review mining and search data, showed the acquired names carried marketplace ranking, not brand equity. That killed the house-of-brands plan and set the direction toward one new brand.Category audits and competition benchmarking in home décor, furnishing, kitchen and dining led to a product design and selection strategy with a focus on quality and value for money for Middle Indian homes. Customer interviews shifted the brand from a helpful presence in the home to a trusted equal - reshaping the messaging and giving rise to Ten, the brand mascot, and an accessible brand voice. A shared visual language led by colour and elevated everyday frames, brought coherence to a broad product range across multiple categories.
Beyond brand strategy and product design, I led customer experience and adoption of emerging-tech to streamline cross-functional workflows.
Identity Design by PlanB/Owlworx
UNDP - INCLUSIVE IMAGINARIES
Project Director
Strategic Foresight | APAC · 2021-22
Designing a community engagement framework and toolkit for policy and program development
For Unit for Strategy, Policy and Partnerships at UNDP Regional Bureau for the Asia and Pacific Headquarters in New York
The pilot program for Inclusive Imaginaries was developed to include the following:- creating an Inclusive Imaginaries framework and toolkit to support country office staff in building links between the role of imagination as designed by the constituents most impacted by development trajectories, and programme/policy design intended for them. Training select representatives from country offices in the region as Imagination Facilitators in designing more equitable, participatory approaches for research and policy design using the Inclusive Imaginaries tools. The Inclusive Imaginaries Toolkit was developed in consultation with representatives from the UNDP Accelerator Labs and Youth Co-Labs in 6 country offices - Malaysia, Philippines, Fiji, Nepal, Laos, Samoa. 12 representatives were trained as Imagination Facilitators in identifying what flourishing might look like in our futures in Asia and the Pacific, if imagined through democratization and participation.
Download the Report & Toolkit
STUMBLE
Strategy and Curation
Culture Community Platform | India · 2022-23
A gathering to build better creative futures
In collaboration with Kommune
The starting point for Stumble was a conversation with Roshan Abbas, imagined as gathering that brought together creators, brand makers and creative evangelists. It envisioned to become an incubator for creative entrepreneurs to discover new ideas, people and connections. It was shaped around the idea that creativity isn’t a straight path. Instead, it was about the in-between moments - the doubts, experiments, the unexpected conversations that sparked something new.
The gathering has since evolved into a digital community anchored within Kommune with a focus on exploring and discovering India's evolving consumer culture and the creator economy.
More at stumble.community
Identity Design by The Brewhouse
ODDBIRD THEATRE
Founding Team - Strategy, Design & Programs
Performing Arts | India · 2016-2020
The city's first curated black box theatre
With Shambhavi Singh & Akhil Wable
OddBird was Delhi’s first curated performing arts venue designed as an intimate black box theatre where audiences can engage deeply with the performing arts. The space was repurposed from an industrial warehouse.What was meant to be a short term collaboration, unexpectedly morphed into a founding team that was tightly knit together through shared ideologies. The founding team imagined Oddbird as a community space where collaborators - programmers, artists, and the audience, come together for a shared experience in an intimate setting.While the space was compelled to closure for a few years from 2020, today Oddbird is back in action and still runs independently with a curated program of theatre, music, dance and storytelling; alongside the nonprofit OddBird Foundation, which supports the development of new work.
RAJBAGH SILK FACTORY
Systems Design & Strategy Expert
Industrial Revitalisation | Srinagar · 2020-21
Rebuilding the Silk Manufacturing in Kashmir
For CRCI India with andBLACK Design Studio
Research and strategy for re-development of the Govt. Silk Factory, Rajbagh, Srinagar, conducted for a conservation and adaptive re-use project - part of the World Bank supported Jhelum Tawi Flood Recovery Program for Jammu and Kashmir Industries Ltd.A multi-stakeholder mapping and assessment across silk industry, craft, culture, agriculture and livelihoods domains in Jammu and Kashmir was carried out, to strategise and design an intervention program at the site.Through field studies and stakeholder consultations, a complex inter-dependent Silk value chain was identified, assessment of gaps and impacts documented, and subsequently an integrated systemic approach for regeneration of the Silk Industry was proposed.View the report
ELRHA HUMANITARIAN INNOVATION FUND
Research & Strategic Analysis Lead
Social Impact | India · 2021-22
Recommendations for building capabilities of global humanitarian innovation managers
In collaboration with Quicksand Design Studio
ELRHA is a leading global charity finding solutions to complex humanitarian problems through research and innovation, headquartered in London. Aligning with Elrha's commitment to Delivering Transformative Innovation in the Humanitarian System, we partnered with Quicksand to conduct program and scoping analysis on building skills and capabilities of innovation managers across global programs supported by ELRHA.Primary research was done through interviews, historical impact reporting analysis from various country programs, towards recommending actions that focused on - enhancing innovation practices to shift from a focus on tools to competencies; adopting non-linearity and plurality in processes; inducing systemic change and interaction between systems; and acting towards inclusion and participation that is cognisant of inherent power and governance structures in their humanitarian innovation programs.
REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORT IN ASIA & THE PACIFIC
Futurist & Storyteller
Strategic Foresight | APAC-India · 2021-22
Exploratory future narratives to make insights accessible and locally legible in India
For Asian Development Bank (ADB) Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department
ADB’s commissioned ARUP for a foresight study on the transport sector, utilizing futures, and foresight techniques and design thinking to help understand and navigate complexities in Asia and the Pacific. As a pilot, three Futurists (Fiji, Malaysia, India) were recruited to review, engage with the contents of the study and interpret it to form future narratives that brought the content to life from diverse, human perspectives to make the insights accessible and contextually relevant for communities and decision makers in the transport sector in India. Representing the realities within the Indian context of a lower-middle income country, a fictional persona and narrative was developed projected in the year 2030. It considered trends around developing sustainable and proactive urban mobility plans can help rapidly growing cities with inclusive urban planning that accommodates the needs of marginalised groups, women and children; and focus on universal access, new digital platforms for formal and informal service integration, mass public transit, and electric mobility solutions as a promising mechanism for improving access and affordability.
Watch video story
MAPPING PERFORMING ARTS INFRASTRUCTURE IN DELHI
Researcher & Analyst
Dance and Theatre | New Delhi · 2011-12
Revitalising Spaces for Performance and Education
For Gati Dance Forum supported by Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi
Working with Gati Dance Forum, a resource organisation and arts initiative in India, a scoping study was carried out to map, document, assess and the existing built infrastructure for performances in the city of New Delhi. The objectives of the study were to create a landscape map to inform re-development initiatives, study existing operational models to assess gaps in knowledge of inclusive practices and unintended impacts of the same. Through desk research, extensive field studies and interviews, a framework for qualitative assessment of operational models, and a minimum standards index for re-design was created. These were subsequently disseminated through focus group discussions with users over a year, towards the aim of incorporating a future-focussed infrastructure support program. The dissemination and discussions led to recognising the absence of a concerted community that could lead ecosystem development, and hence resulted in the program being transformed into a community-building effort.
Creative Producer, Curator & Artist
"I make what I believe should exist in the world"
UNBOX FESTIVAL
Curation, Program Development & Experience Design
Community Platform | India · 2011-16
Explorations to reimagine India's plural futures
In collaboration with Quicksand Design Studio
Unbox Festival is a flagship gathering of the Unbox Cultural Futures. The festival celebrates interdisciplinary collaborations with the gathering being the central manifest fro inspiration, dialogue and hand-on action. It brings together creatives, academics and development professionals that are keen to push the boundaries of their practices. Incepted in 2011, the three day festival has had five editions over the years in Delhi and Bangalore.
Unbox Cultural Futures is a community platform that invites curiosity to reimagine inclusive and pluralistic futures in India - through explorations in art, design, technology, culture and social change. It encompasses inter-disciplinary labs, engaging public platforms, research initiatives, immersive installations and compelling publications.
The initiative is anchored by Quicksand, a design research and innovation practice that connects private sector innovation with underserved communities in global emerging markets.
SPACE10 DELHI
Curatorial Lead
Design Research | India · 2019-20
The first global learning outpost for IKEA's former design and research lab SPACE10
SPACE10 is a design and research lab based in Copenhagen. Delhi was their first satellite space and learning outpost, set up with a mission to gain new knowledge and diversify their perspectives - by gathering designers, technologists, artists, architects, academics and entrepreneurs under one roof to explore how design and emerging technologies can create a better everyday life for people and the planet. We developed a strategic programme and facilitated partnerships for SPACE10 Delhi.
Photography by Sheena Dabholkar & Athul Prasad
IGNITE FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE
Festival Director & Curator
International Dance Biennial | India · 2010-16
Platforming South Asian Contemporary Dance
With Gati Dance Forum
IGNITE Festival of Contemporary Dance was a platform developed in response to the glaring absence of infrastructure and avenues for independent contemporary dance in India. The first of its kind international biennial, it brought to the fore contemporary dance practices rooted in India and South Asia. Incepted in 2010, the multi-day festival has had four editions over the years in Delhi and Jaipur, with participation of over 300 artists from 15 countries.IGNITE was an initiative of Gati Dance Forum, a community driven platform to engage with and support the independent dance ecosystem in India. Its programs encompassed artist residencies, flagship festival, conferences and facilitating support for emerging dancers and choreographers in India and South Asia.
TABLE RADICA - HABIB
Creative Producer and Designer
Immersive Lecture-Performance | India · 2019-20
An immersive experience of memoirs with food, found documents and music.
A Table . 30 Guests . Taster’s Menu . A Radical Life.A radical cultivates taste - taste as discernment, taste as presence and taste as a performative act. If we form ourselves by the books we feed on, the friendships we savour, the camaraderie we let simmer, and the journeys we relish, a radical life has a beginning in what is consumed. Audience is invited to gather around a table, and become visitors, friends, and witnesses of a radical life. All sorts of stimuli are brought to the table to touch, to see, to hold, to savour. It presents the life, loves, and food of Habib Tanvir, an iconic Urdu & Hindi playwright, a director, poet and actor of the modern theatre in India, a man of the world. The experience shares his encounters with love, questions on theatre, his relationship with the homeland, and turmoils of making choices that lead Habib to be remembered as a radical life. The show has been performed in Delhi, Goa and Ahmedabad.
Performed by Amitesh Grover
Written by: Sarah Mariam
Gastronomy by: Bela Gulab Juhi Champa Chameli
Light Design by: Tech Quartet
Photography by: Radhika Agarwal
My personal artistic practice is rooted in presence. I’ve always been drawn to the little things - the ones that slip by unless you stop to look. A dot, a dash, a line, a scribble. Alone, they’re just marks, small and quiet. But together, they grow into something more - a moment, a feeling, a life. For me, drawing is about finding calm in the middle of chaos. Each small mark becomes a conversation with the body and breath, the space it occupies not just as container but material itself - building into a life that’s curious, careful, and alive.
VATAPI
Artists: Vishal K Dar & Virkein Dhar
Sculpture| Delhi · 2020
A site specific field of light, sculpture and sound
With Black Box Okhla Residency 2019-20
If he has no traveller
To offer mystical meat
Pleasing him for the moment to be
Then for all his days
He is no demon
He is lost within
He is no more.Vatapi re-imagines perspective outside of cartesian geometry and the ways in which we view our physical world.Inspired by the thicket of a black box and the transformative qualities of light, 12 people enter the field every 30 minutes to experience a site-specific field of sculpture, sound and oscillation. Vatapi is presented as an ongoing exploration of the artists’ engagement with light and sight, condition and duration, myth and technology. Two beams of light, one tracing an elliptical orbit and the other piercing through a pulsating circle, entwine in a rhythmic beating of echoes through a time-coded set of conditions. The stillness of non-space evaporates with the embedded soundscape of the Earth’s magnetosphere.
CHANNEL DAYS
Marking each of the days of training in Dover, in the run up to my swim across the English Channel. I documented 20 swim training sessions over a period of 4 weeks. While the spatial context of each session was the same - Dover Harbour Training Area or Deal Beach, the work drew from visual memory, mapped swim route, weather, water temperature and time spent in the water each day.
A POEM A DAY
An audio-graphic jugalbandi (duet) to reflect on and archive our days during the COVID 19 pandemic. Initiated at the beginning of the lockdown in India, each day an audio poem was selected and read by Sudhanva Deshpande, and an artwork was created by Virkein Dhar as a response. The poems are read in English, Hindi and Urdu, and no poet is repeated in the selection.
"We began this journey on the 28 March 2020, not knowing that we would be doing this for as long as we did. The intention was not to curate the best poems or to make the best artworks, rather to respond to each day as it came, as it felt. The 226 poems you hear and the 226 artworks that you see are both responses, in words and in drawings, of all that we found around us and some that remained hidden."
DANCE
An independent, collaborative contemporary dance practice between 2007 and 2014.
Virkein - Open Water Swimmer
English Channel Crossing | 23 July 2026 | 12:16:00
Swimlife Veera Tide Relay Team (4)
Founders and Leaders have the most context and the best views in the company, but often the worst blind spots.The decision you're debating isn't always the decision you're actually making.I help leaders understand what they are really deciding - by surfacing the real choice through the noise.I don't parachute in with advice, I give give a clearer basis on which to decide by making the consequences and trade-offs visible.
A Quarterly Decision Triage for Founders and Leaders
Brand is the cumulative expression of a company’s choices.
It is not shaped by visual identity alone, but by every decision made about its product, experience, communication, and what it consistently chooses to value.I help translate founder's instinct into a defensible brand promise, clarify the brand before investing in how it looks and sounds, and build the systems for it to remain consistent.
Brand Strategy for Consumer Companies and Platforms
Find the decisions that actually deserve your attention before another quarter of resources gets committed.
A Quarterly Decision Triage for Founders and Leaders
THE PROBLEM
The decision you're debating isn't always the decision you're actually making.Early-stage companies rarely suffer from a shortage of good ideas. The problem is that product bets, brand initiatives, hires, customer problems, growth opportunities and investor asks are all competing for the same finite quarter.From inside the business, each can make a reasonable case for being important.The founder is left with a harder set of questions:What actually needs my attention right now?
What happens if we delay this by a quarter?
What are we saying no to by saying yes to this?
What evidence would change our mind?
MY OFFER - QUARTERLY DECISION TRIAGE
An independent read on the decisions competing for your next quarter, before resources are committed.I look across brand, product, customers and the business to connect signals that are easy to miss when you're inside the company. The purpose isn't to add another opinion to the room. It is to make the real choices, trade-offs, assumptions and consequences visible enough for leadership to make a deliberate decision.
Full Picture View
Bring the priorities, pressures and open decisions sitting across functions into one shared view.
Decision Diagnosis
Separate symptoms from causes. Identify what is actually being decided, which assumptions it depends on, what information is missing, and where apparently separate issues may be connected.
Recommendation
A written synthesis of what I see, the trade-offs involved, and what I believe should be pushed, pivoted, paused or killed - with the reasoning made explicit.
Pressure Test
A leadership working session to test those recommendations against customer evidence, business goals, constraints and plausible future scenarios before action follows.
Why this needs an outsider?
Everyone inside a company is working for the business.
But everyone also owns something - A function. A target. A plan they proposed. A team they hired. A decision they've already defended.I don't.That allows me to ask questions that are harder to ask from inside:
Do we need to do this at all?
Are we continuing because it is working, or because we've already invested in it?
What consequence aren't we accounting for?My only incentive is to give you an independent read on what serves the business, including when that means challenging the founder's own assumptions.
HOW THIS WORKS
Triage runs quarterly rather than as a conventional strategy project. Each cycle creates a deliberate point before the next quarter to look across the business, identify what actually deserves attention and make the trade-offs explicit.You don't need to commit to a retainer upfront.
Start with one quarter.If the independent read proves useful, it can become a recurring rhythm. This becomes more valuable as I understand the company's decisions, patterns and outcomes over time.Bring me the decisions competing for your next quarter.
WHY ME?
I've spent 15 years moving between roles and systems - as a founder, inside founding teams and across brand, product, design, culture and social impact.That range matters here.Most business problems don't respect organisational boundaries. A brand decision can create a product consequence. A growth target can create a customer-experience problem.My work has trained me to look across those boundaries, connect signals that specialists can reasonably miss, and distinguish the stated problem from the one underneath it.
Happy to walk through what a first quarter could look like.
Establish what the brand needs to mean before investing in how it looks, sounds or communicates.
Brand Strategy for Consumer Companies and Platforms
THE PROBLEM
When early stage brands reach a point where the product is moving faster than the brand around it, the founder’s original instinct becomes harder to translate across teams.
And often, there aren’t clear answers to some fundamental questions:
Who are we really building this for?
What can we credibly own that competitors cannot?
What should remain consistent as the business grows?
WHAT I DO
I define the strategic decisions underneath the brand before they become identity, communication or experience.My work starts with evidence rather than adjectives - customer conversations, behaviour, category dynamics, competition, existing data and business ambition.From there, I identify what the brand can meaningfully and defensibly occupy and translate that into something creative teams can actually build from.Depending on the question, that can include:
Customer & Category Diagnosis
Define who the brand is for, what it promises, what makes that promise credible and what the brand can own.
Brand Positioning
Understand what customers actually value, where competitors are converging and which internal assumptions need testing.
Minimum Viable Brand (MVB)
Decide what needs to exist now and what can wait, so an early-stage company doesn't overbuild its brand before it has earned the need for it.
Creative Partner Selection
Identify the kind of creative partner the problem actually requires, then assess potential partners for capability, thinking and working fit, not portfolio aesthetics alone.
Voice & Messaging
Translate the position into a distinctive way of speaking that can remain coherent across customer touchpoints.
Creative Direction
Turn strategy into a precise brief: what creative work needs to accomplish, what must remain consistent and where there is room to experiment.
WHY ME?
I don't assume the brief is the problem.I've spent 15 years moving between strategy and making, as part of founding teams and alongside creative agencies.That means I understand both sides of the equation - the business decisions a brand needs to support and the creative decisions someone will eventually have to make from them.So when a brief arrives as we need a new identity, we need better messaging or we need to reposition, I don't start there.I look upstream.At the customer, category, product, competition and business ambition, and test whether the stated brand problem is actually the one worth solving.Sometimes that leads to a new identity.
Sometimes it changes the brief entirely.Either way, you know what you're asking creative work to solve before you pay someone to solve it.
HOW IT WORKS
I don't sell a fixed brand-strategy package.The engagement is scoped around the decision the business needs to make.That might mean establishing a position before a rebrand, diagnosing why an existing proposition isn't landing, defining a minimum viable brand before launch, or creating enough strategic clarity for an internal or external creative team to execute confidently.You leave with more than a strategy deck.
You leave knowing:Who matters.
What you can own.
What you're choosing and not.
What creative work should now do.Tell me what you think the brand problem is.
Or reach out at hello@virkein.com
It was so good to meet you at DesignUp 😊
You scanned the question.
So I suppose it bothered you enough.Good.I work with founders and design teams on the decisions that happen before you get to the brief - finding the problem underneath the one being stated before time and money get committed to it.If there's a problem in your business that isn't resolving neatly into a brief, tell me what you think it is.