Ditching his engineering days to fan his love for curating experiences, Jai Sharma founded Envelop, an experiential marketing firm that specialises in larger-than-life installations and brand personalisation. With this creative vision and expertise in storytelling, Envelop is looking to revolutionise traditional marketing, one experience at a time.
Excerpts from the interview with Jai Sharma, Founder Of Envelop
T+L India: What are some experiences signature to Envelop and what are the challenges you face while bringing them to life?
Jai Sharma: Dinner Show—a collision of Broadway with casual dining—is Envelop’s copyrighted love child! It combines a restaurant meal with a staged play or musical. It requires the management of a live theatre, a restaurant and a bar, where guests watch, listen, eat, drink, and breathe the story.
However, with live entertainment, you have little control. Getting the client to agree with the idea is challenging. People don’t understand [its] commercial value, high costs, and technicalities but they tend to fancy [similar experiences] abroad. Secondly, Indians don’t give performance arts and artists their due respect. With Dinner Show, we aim to change this. Wild Party is another Envelop signature. We do bizarre the best—be it YOLO, Pop Party, or Wild Disco. Using multimedia is the biggest challenge for such experiences. A bizarre set-up isn’t about pulling random stuff together in a place. It is also about narrating a story through an experience that marries contrasting materials harmoniously, keeping their energies alive while achieving visual balance.
T+L India: How do you strike a balance between your creative freedom and the client’s vision?
Jai Sharma: By being rigid and educating the client in a language they can understand. My business personality is to harness the power of visualisation and understanding of human psychology.
T+L India: How do you think experiential marketing will transform in the coming years?
Jai Sharma: [It is] the future in India. Post the pandemic, everyone understands the importance of physical connections and experiential marketing is all about that. In its truest form, [it] is narrating a brand story through a physical experience by involving the five senses. Technology has become the flagbearer of marketing activations. In the coming years, we will experiment with all these elements, but circle back to the importance of human installations, performing arts, and listening to the story through a human instead of watching it virtually. It will become more and more boutique [as opposed to] traditional marketing. It will be very design oriented, and details will matter. It will be all about storytelling and narration.
TAB Selects
Favourite theme to execute: Disco! It is all about how we can contemporise the retro disco for
today’s palate.
Favourite party destination: Dubai, owing to the distance. If I have time on my hands, then New York City
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Written By
Bayar Jain
Senior Content ManagerEquipped with a degree in Sociology (Honours) from the University of Delhi and a postgraduate diploma in English Journalism and Mass Communication from Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai, Bayar enjoys sharing stories of people, places, and different cultures. When not typing her travel tales, you can catch the hobbyist photographer capturing ..Read More
