Hi. I’m Louella. I work at the intersection of brands, culture and business growth.
I’m a creative leader with over two decades of experience building brands that don’t just sell, but 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 national and regional mandates, built teams, and shaped brand systems that travelled across markets and media.
Today, I operate independently through The Freewheeling Project — consulting with agencies and brands, directing documentary and commercial films, and creating IP-driven platforms 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 in the world.
I’ve been fortunate to win at Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Spikes Asia, Effies… and most major creative awards in India.
But that’s the professional side.
I’m also pretty good at seeing the funny side of things, genuinely listening to radically different points of view, fighting fair, holding a note in a difficult song, striking interesting conversations with absolute strangers, rescuing and rehabilitating furry people, standing up for what I believe in, and hosting intimate music concerts where strangers arrive as guests and leave as friends.
Why is this in here? Because I believe you hire a person, before you hire the professional. And a suitcase full of awards doesn’t mean a thing without aligned energy. In fact, without it, you don’t have anything.
Brands
Vodafone
Volkswagen
Samsung
Jeep
Johnson & Johnson
Unilever
Marico Industries
SBI Life
Nissan
P&G
Bank of India
Tata Motors
Recognition
Cannes Lions
D&AD
Clio
New York Festival
One Show
Spikes Asia
Kyoorius
Effies
Goafest
Brand Equity 30 under 30
World Innovation Cup
Selected Projects
Volkswagen
I led the Volkswagen India creative mandate for two years, spanning 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 budget of approximately USD 15,000, two days to crack the idea, and ten days end-to-end to deliver, the challenge was to distil brand, humour, and precision into seconds. The resulting films were loved across the country and became a reference within Volkswagen for how clarity, speed, and craft can come together under constraint.
Volkswagen
While it’s tempting to lead with large, glossy brand films on VW, I’ve chosen this one 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 highly competitive national pitch and went on to 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 across the country. 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.
Hero MotoCorp
Conceived, directed, and produced 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 under the Freewheeling Project.
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.