Laptoppings

Rejected ad designs find their way onto winning office bags.

Raghu Bhat has a life mission: to rid the world of ugliness. He’s started with laptop bags — “big, bulky, shapeless like the majority of men and women who carry them”. Fungus Designs, which Bhat set up six months ago, offers laptop bags with funky graphics — mugs of Jimi Hendrix or Che Guevara, cute messages such as ‘Vertigo’ written upside down, and so on — jazzing up the drab black.

A chemical engineer from Benaras Hindu University, Bhat, 37, does not have formal training in design or aesthetics, except what his 14-year-long and thriving career in advertising and films has given him. Bhat was senior vice president and executive creative director at Contract Advertising, before he left to co-found Scarecrow Communications earlier this year, almost the same time as he founded Fungus. He’s won numerous awards for his campaigns, among them the memorable “Kam insurance lene ki bimari” commercial starring Irrfan Khan for Aegon Religare. Hostel/Holi, his public service film for the Eye Bank Association of India, won an award at Cannes, the global mecca for advertising creatives.

It was at Cannes, says Bhat, that the idea for Fungus really bore fruit. “As a creative professional, I had found that the best ideas of graphic designers or art directors never saw the light of day because the client rejected them,” says Bhat. “I floated the idea of making use of these designs to a few of the artists I met at Cannes and I was surprised to find that they were most receptive. They weren’t possessive about their designs at all.”

Which is how Bhat got people like Buenos Aires-based Maria Lovine and Istvan Vasil, a 22-year-old from Oradea, Romania, contributing designs for laptop bags. Closer home, his contributors are a trio of young, avant-garde artists and designers — Prasad Raghavan, Sushil Chintak and Abraham George.

Fungus now retails these bags through its website and a few carefully chosen stores — “I can’t sell at a store whose sense of aesthetics does not match mine, can I?” says Bhat — such as Taxxi & Vitamin K in Khar, Mumbai (part run by his wife Prachi Rashmi) and Bliss, a fashion and décor store in Versova.

There’s more to Fungus than designer laptop bags: the startup’s business model is, uniquely, geared toward compensating artists fairly. “We give as much as 35-40 per cent of our profits to our artists.” It’s unprecedented, claims Bhat; even the artists are surprised. “When $35 was credited to the Paypal account of Lovine in Argentina, she couldn’t believe it. No one had believed that someone sitting in India would be able to do this. Now she has been talking to her friends, who are getting in touch with me.”

As with the laptop bags, Bhatt knows that he’s only scratching the surface. After all, surface ornamentation cannot alter a flawed design, which “destroys the basic harmony of the human figure standing erect” and “makes everyone look stodgy”. Bhat is coming to that. “I am open to new shapes, incorporating the principles of fractals in the design, incorporating eco-friendly materials.”

And what about things other than laptop bags? Yes, shoes and mobile covers are ugly too, Bhat has found.