Hi. I’m Louella. I help build brands that travel. Across markets, cultures and time.
I’m a creative leader with over two decades of building brands that endure.
My work spans Volkswagen, Vodafone, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, Jeep, Nissan, P&G and Tata Motors, across Ogilvy, DDB, TBWA and Grey, where I led brand mandates nationally and select international markets, building teams, and shaping brand systems that travelled across media.
I’ve always been drawn to brands that carry meaning - brands that don’t just exist in the market but move through culture.
Today, I work independently through The Freewheeling Project — consulting with agencies and brands, writing and directing films, and creating original formats at the intersection of culture, craft and commerce. This includes Aangan Luxury, my handcrafted textile atelier created to quietly shift how Indian craft is seen, felt and valued globally.
My work has been recognised at Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, New York Festivals, and most major creative awards in India.
I care deeply about building environments where ideas feel empowered, people feel trusted, and the work becomes what it’s meant to be. Creating the conditions where people do the best work of their lives - consistently.
Brands
Vodafone
Volkswagen
Samsung
P&G
Jeep
Johnson & Johnson
Unilever
Marico Industries
Nissan
Bank of India
Tata Motors
Recognition
Cannes Lions
D&AD
The One Show
New York Festivals
Spikes Asia
Kyoorius
Effies
Goafest
Brand Equity 30 under 30
The World Innovation Cup
Selected Projects
Volkswagen
I led the creative for Volkswagen India for two years, across multiple campaigns and formats. One of my favourite projects from that period was this series of 15 seconder films, created with unusually tight guardrails, with a compressed timeline and a tight budget. Made in close partnership with the client team, the films reflect how clarity, speed, and craft can come together under constraint.
Volkswagen
Another one of my favourite films, chosen because it captures something I value deeply; the ability to turn a product feature into a genuinely human moment.
This film takes a simple aspect of the car’s seat lever feature and expresses it through a cheeky, relatable slice of everyday behaviour — globally understood, quietly effective.
Indian Air Force
Won the Indian Air Force account in a national pitch and lead the end-to-end creative and strategic rollout of the recruitment campaign across India.
This is one of the films of a multi media ad campaign that ran nationally. The assignment involved extensive on-ground immersion, close collaboration with senior Air Force leadership, and presentations to panels of exacting senior officers.
Working on a brief of national significance was both a professional honour and a defining leadership experience.
The Hinglish Project
A big part of my role is being able to spot the seed of an idea, nurturing it and taking it through to the finish line.
The Hinglish Project began with a simple scribble embedding Hindi phonetics onto the English alphabet to make it more accessible to those unfamiliar with the language. It felt like a natural fit for the Indian Tourism Board.
I helped shape the concept, secured backing and took it through to Cannes Lions, where it won Gold. It was deeply rewarding to see it come together with the team and find the recognition it deserved
Hero MotoCorp
Conceived and directed a strategic global brand narrative film for Hero MotoCorp, released on Earth Day, celebrating the planet as the ultimate hero and reinforcing the brand’s commitment to sustainable mobility.
Working with curated visuals from around the world, the film distilled a universal idea with global resonance, aligning seamlessly with Hero MotoCorp’s international footprint. The film was released globally, widely celebrated, and performed strongly for the brand. Produced by Onions Creative Media.
Tata Safari
I led the creative on the Tata Motors account for over seven years, shaping the creative across Tata Safari and Tata Sumo.
My campaign ‘Reclaim your life’, was a defining campaign from that period—built on a simple but powerful human truth, and a clear understanding of what the brand could stand for.
The campaign won awards every year for creativity and effectiveness, and has endured over time, continuing to run today and becoming a part of how Tata Safari is remembered. It has been recognised across major award shows, featured in Ads of the World, and remains one of Ogilvy’s iconic campaigns—reflected in the fact that a conference room at Ogilvy is named after it.
White Desert Expeditions
Conceived, directed, and produced a brand film for White Desert Expeditions, a global luxury travel company specialising in highly curated, high-end experiences in rare and otherwise inaccessible locations worldwide.
The film translates place into a refined, cinematic language aligned with world-class destination hospitality and discreet luxury travel.
Jeep
My Jeep Story is a global storytelling platform for Jeep, built around the real lives of genuine owners across cultures and geographies. Rooted in authenticity, the format documents individuals in their own homes, environments, and everyday routines, preserving natural accents and lived context. Rather than staged narratives, each film reveals how Jeep integrates organically into daily life, culture, and identity.
Under the Freewheeling project, I directed a film within this global ‘My Jeep Story’ format, as part of a body of work created for global brands across markets and cultures.
CaratLane by Tanishq
The World’s First Personalised Ring Box
A personal favourite.
Conceived as the world’s first personalised ring box, this idea reimagined proposal packaging as something as precious as the solitaire itself. Instead of a single, generic box, each proposal unfolded through a sequence of sculptural forms crafted from the brand’s signature facets — revealing the couple’s story step by step.
To create it, the proposer filled in a short brief outlining key moments and turning points in the relationship. Using this roadmap, the box was custom-written and designed for that specific couple, with each facet corresponding to a chapter in their shared journey. The result was a fully personalised packaging system — one unique box for every solitaire, designed to be kept for life and arguably as precious as the ring itself.
Awarded at Cannes Lions and The One Show.
Intertwined— Documentary Series
Intertwined was created around a simple idea: two people, living in different parts of the world, with nothing in common except their profession. Each film places them side by side — different geographies, languages, cultures, and lives — and lets the similarities reveal themselves quietly. The same ambitions, the same anxieties, the same pride in work, the same longing for connection.
Created in collaboration with Rafique Shaikh from Freakazoid Films, Intertwined came from a need to counter the constant narrative of division. It was imagined as a series of hope — a reminder that beneath the noise, labels, and borders, we are far more alike than we admit. At the end of the day, the human race is not fragmented.
It is intertwined.
Eating Europe
Eating Europe is one of Europe’s most widely reviewed and highly regarded culinary tour companies, having already taken 600,000 travellers on immersive food experiences across more than 20 cities, deep into local markets, neighbourhood eateries, and culinary institutions.
This film was conceptualised for Eating Europe’s flagship city, Rome — Caput Mundi — where their food tour has been rated as one of the 30 best experiences to do in the world. I conceptualised, directed, and produced the film as a celebration of how Rome marks everyone who travels through it, and how food, place, and shared experience become lasting memory.