Brief:
Orient Global is a private investment company owned by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Chandler. His mission is to create ethical and self sustaining businesses that help develop the human capital and creativity of low-income consumers in the developing world. At the beginning of 2009 he asked My Agency to create a brand for a chain of new low-cost private schools to be launched in India. With an enriched curriculum, improved infrastructure and innovations to the existing system such as teacher training and computer laboratories, the private schools would offer low-income parents a quality education for their children for just $5 a month.
Solution:
The brand My Agency created had to appeal to often-illiterate parents and also be credible to Richard Chandler’s peers at the United Nations and Davos. Our brief was to create a brand that came from the east, not from the west, as is often the convention in private education in the developing world. Our solution Rumi, is named after the 13th Century Persian poet who travelled the Silk Road from east to west bringing eastern thinking to different cultures. Rumi believed in the evolutionary growth of the human spirit and universality, values at the core of Orient Global. The simple visual identity of a mother elephant and calf was inspired by Orient Global’s own logo.
Results:
The identity had to be simple to implement, and went from inception to the side of our first school in just two weeks. Since we completed the work, Rumi has expanded rapidly, bringing high quality, private education to thousands of Indian children. Following this work we were also commissioned by Orient Global to create brands for a private healthcare offering and the global art fund Freedom to Create whose mission is to improve lives on the front lines of the developing world, harnessing the unique powers and properties of the arts to help address the root causes of poverty, conflict and diseases such as AIDS.
Orient Global & Rumi identities
Orient Global Annual Report on the launch of Rumi Schools of Excellence.
The identity had to be simple enough for local Indian sign painters to implement by hand.
