Haley Fraser: I’d love to start with an introduction to who you are, what you’ve been up to, and how you got to where you are?
Chi Thukral: I did my undergrad in India, and we only have three years of school there. I got my degree in Mass Communication & Media. When I wasn’t in classes, I worked full time with filmmakers all across the country. I would be traveling and learning how to make films because my real passion has always been making films and making content. So, I did go to school, but not for filmmaking. I learned a lot about filmmaking on the job.
At the end of my undergrad, I got into a Paris film school with a full scholarship. But my parents did not let me go. At the time, I was 19, and I had not grasped the reality of being a filmmaker: having to line up projects, not having a stable flow of income, not seeing people you cared about for long periods of time. So I started to research what schools I could apply to. I knew I liked advertising and marketing, and I could still be creative and work with filmmakers. I found a course at Emerson College called Global Marketing Communications & Advertising and decided to apply. A couple months later, I got an email saying that I got in – here’s the fun part, my parents had NO IDEA but with my persuasive PPT presentation I managed to convince them to help me take out a loan to study abroad.
So that’s how I ended up in grad school in Boston. From there, I was recruited by an experiential marketing company in LA where I was able to work with set directors, art directors, and filmmakers on large scale marketing campaigns. I spent two years in LA and had a blast, but I wanted cold weather, so I decided to move to New York. I requested my friends to let me stay on their couches until I finally found an agency I liked. The agency was small to medium in size but I loved what they did and I was curious what it would be like to work at a full digital agency because it would be a stark contrast to my experience in LA..
Unfortunately, my visa situation was complicated because I was an expat and the renewal process was very hard. Instead of renewing my visa, they let me go to India and work with their team on a global project so that once the situation died down in the US, I could come back. That was the whole plan. I came to India in 2019, worked over here for six months with their Indian branch until I finished my project. About the time the project ended, the pandemic hit. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t going back to the US for a while…I had to find something new.
Yanko Design was something that I knew about through a family friend. I approached the CEO, and I wrote emails to him with plans until he finally gave in and was like, “Fine, fine, we’ll bring you on board.” I didn’t just badger him, I gave him ideas homeowner database as to what I could do to make things better, how I would do things differently, and what new ventures I wanted to start. One of them was their sustainability wing. So Yanko Design is where I’m currently at. They are a global design publication company so they cover everything from architecture to tech. It’s a very big platform for designers, especially student designers. I introduced the sustainable vertical there because sustainable designs are scattered and you have to source them from so many random places – my goal was to create the same place for sustainability as we had created for product design, so designers could seek out sustainable design inspiration, resources and facts more easily.
Every day, my mornings consist of picking a sustainable design that makes sense and that I can do research on, and put it out in the magazine. The remaining half of my day goes into working on Instagram. We now have almost 1.1 million followers on our Instagram page, which is great because when I started a year ago, we were at 500k. I don’t even know how I made that jump, but it was mostly from keeping my head down and making sure that I found things that people liked. And I’m very bullish on data analytics, I would go in and see what was working and what was not working and change my strategies based on it. I also rely heavily on audience feedback so when you couple that with data it’s a very clear picture. We doubled our audience in a year and I am glad that I was able to bring the love for design to more non-design folk like myself. I’m still writing for their sustainable column, taking care of Instagram and overseeing all the content marketing. That is where I am right now.