When Ananya Tantia’s design studio built Rough Paper’s website, they ran into an unusual problem. Feedback came back in three hours. Not a thumbs-up or a holding reply, but detailed, actionable feedback. Ananya’s team at 9133 Design Studio had to ask the folks at Rough Paper more than once to please take at least 24 hours.
In an industry where feedback itself is the thing one has to chase most clients for, Ananya, who has collaborated with Rough Paper on about fifteen projects over five years, says she and her team should have known better. They are “incredibly efficient”.
There are two of them at Rough Paper, a remote-first brand strategy and copywriting studio that takes on at most three to four projects at any given time. And there will always be just two – Divya Ramesh and Deepak Gopalakrishnan. No employees. No intention of hiring any. When a project they were working on required more than two people could handle, they turned down the work. Deepak called the client and said, “I would be more comfortable disappointing you now than frustrating you later.”
the paths that wandered
Divya studied law because her parents said to. She had no idea what she wanted. The only skill she could identify was writing, so she left law and meandered her way into advertising.
She cycled through agencies, through social media projects, and content production, bringing it all together for cultural events. It all felt ephemeral; there one week, forgotten the next. At each stop, she pulled at whatever thread held her attention longest: storytelling that went deeper than a campaign cycle. Strategy that required sitting with a business long enough to understand it. It’s what set the tone for her – holding on to the things that moved her; staying with the signal, filtering out the noise.
Deepak, who is called Chuck everywhere except on his passport, took a louder, more chaotic route. In the second year of a Chemical engineering degree he had no passion for, a copy of A&M magazine fell into his hands. It was the first time he read about advertising as a process for solving business problems, not just people shooting something. “That started the obsession,” he says. A single-minded focus on one B-school, MICA, which he got into on his second try.
From there, the path stopped cooperating. Lehmann Brothers collapsed and took his mainline advertising plans with it. Digital happened by accident, at a time when nobody had learned digital formally because there was nothing formal to learn. He started out in digital at Ogilvy, then at Leo Burnett, and finally ended up at OML, an event company. He guest lectured at top business schools in his mid-twenties and took on the occasional freelance project. Each step taught him something. Several taught him what he never wanted to do again. The journey, he says, was haphazard, but he wouldn’t change a thing.
Divya and Chuck overlapped at OML but never actually worked together. She came in as he was leaving. They knew the same people. At music festivals, it was always “hey, hey, hey”, a catch-up in a crowd.
Before Rough Paper had a name, it was Chuck freelancing solo from 2019 to 2021. He took on a bunch of different projects, learning which questions to ask before saying yes, and which jobs to walk away from. Then Divya came aboard. The two of them discovered something that surprised neither of them: they think in remarkably similar ways despite having never worked together. When a brief arrives, both have an inkling of what the other will come up with before either has started.
The difference is in how they get there. Divya is vibes first; haphazard ideas that she then structures. Chuck, on the other hand, is structure-first; he builds a framework and then populates it with ideas. The two approaches fit together like a conversation that needs no words. But the thing that binds their working lives most tightly isn’t a shared aesthetic or a complementary skill set. It is a shared instinct for what to refuse.
the shape of less
They could have built a full-service agency: they have the network, the credentials, the client relationships. And they would have done a good job of it. They chose not to. They didn’t even try.
They looked at what running an agency would entail: hiring, managing, distributing attention across teams and clients, and decided the price was inflated. Not financially, but personally. They were clear on what their life should look like: the weekend trips, the working hours, the time for hobbies, and the number of projects they could take on without losing depth. And they built Rough Paper to fit inside that life.
When they get inquiries for work outside their scope – a TV script in a regional language, an organisation-wide project, or a social media retainer, they say no and recommend someone in their network who can do it well. “We don’t want to get into middle management,” Chuck says. “We don’t want to become an agency. And definitely not a social media agency.”
The collaborators they do work with – Studio Ping Pong, 9133 Design Studio, developers, illustrators – all think the way they do. Each partner goes deep in their own craft without trying to expand into someone else’s territory. When a client needs design, web development, or social media execution, Rough Paper connects them with someone they trust and stays close to ensure their strategy survives translation. They deliver the capabilities of a larger agency through a network held together through shared sensibility rather than org charts.
Sometimes that stewardship goes further than the brief requires. Divya and Chuck have watched handovers go wrong – a brand strategy they’d built being mangled by a social media agency the client found on their own. So they started proactively finding partners who would carry the work forward well, and collaborating with them to course-correct without necessarily involving the client. It is extra work that they are not paid for. It is also, in their view, the only way the original thinking survives contact with the world.
Himanshu Chowdhry, founder of Spectal, a youth-oriented live experience agency and their longest-standing client, has worked with other creative professionals over the years. Some did good work. But when feedback arrived that wasn’t to their liking, everything stalled; days of silence, a pretence of busyness. With Divya and Chuck, it never stalls. If they can’t crack it immediately, they get on a call and figure it out.
what the ear catches
The first time Priya Pillai landed on Rough Paper’s website, it was a single page. She doesn’t remember how she found it. What she remembers is the copy – the clarity of the positioning and the promise it made. There was nothing extra. Two and a half years later, when she needed someone to help her articulate what her own organisation was, Chuck was the first person she called.
Both Divya and Chuck show up at every project kickoff, even when only one will lead the work afterwards. The discovery process starts with a conversation. “What a founder says when you make them think out loud and what emerges when they let you poke at their vision to see where it comes from” is where the real brief lives.
From there, they establish a small set of non-negotiables for each project. For one client, it may be a specific language register. For another, it might be that every idea has to survive one test: if this appeared on your feed, would you stop?
They tell of an e-commerce company that came to them wanting to sound like CRED, at a time when every brand in India wanted to sound like CRED. Chuck and Divya wrote back with examples of how the company could do exactly that. Then they made the case for why it shouldn’t. The client’s business was not CRED’s business. The voice didn’t fit. They won the account on the strength of the opinion, not the execution.
The attention required to hear what a client isn’t saying and form a view that contradicts the brief, and also hold that view with enough confidence to stake new business on it; that attention has a cost. The cost is capacity. Every agency in the world claims to listen. Most of them are listening across forty accounts with a team that rotates every quarter. Divya and Chuck listen across three or four, and neither of them ever leaves the conversation.
They’re happy to use AI for grunt work. Chuck calls it “an extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but incompetent and inexperienced intern that you need to guide.” The danger, in their view, is in letting it think for you. A founder might repeat a word four times in a meeting without realising it. AI can transcribe that perfectly. Only a human ear will hear why that word matters and know where to place it in the final copy. “Someone might repeat a word a few times, and we see how to use that strategically in the final output,” Divya says. “That is joining imperfect dots.”
They work mostly with founder-led companies – often pre-launch or within the first five or six years, sometimes older businesses going through a transformation. At the heart of every project is clarity of objective. They’ve learned to ask the right questions. “Are you expecting this new website to bring you new business?” Chuck asked one client. The answer surprised him: “I am expanding rapidly and need to hire new folks. Gen Z candidates visit my website and say, “What an old website you have.” I need to impress them.” That single answer changed everything about what the project required.
Himanshu also talks about their meticulousness. Chuck once sent him an email that made him question what was actually unique about his own idea. When he gives feedback that stops at “I’m not feeling it” – which, by his own admission, happens often – Divya has the patience to sit with that and ask enough questions to find out why.
Priya’s experience was different in texture but the same in vein. When they worked on Wordmatter’s positioning, it came off less like a brief being answered and more like a conversation facilitated between her and her co-founder. They listened so carefully that the final output – copy written in an equation format that distilled the essence of what Wordmatter was trying to say – felt like something the founders had always known but hadn’t been able to name.
“It felt like we were working with people equally invested in our enterprise as we are,” Priya says.
the interesting parts
There is a Chinese proverb, 七分飽, which roughly translates to ‘eat until you’re seven parts full’. Serendipitously, both arrived at this ethos for their work lives in their early thirties. But they recognised it in each other only after Rough Paper existed.
In an industry that measures itself by headcount, billings, and award shortlists, Divya and Chuck’s approach registers as heresy. It is also the load-bearing wall of everything Rough Paper is.
Chuck once watched friends get nominated for 30 under 30 lists: people who worked at big agencies with the budgets to enter awards and the visibility to win them. For a while, it stung. Then it didn’t.
He and Divya live vibrant work lives with time enough for side projects that bring joy.
He runs The 6% Club, a creative coaching programme, and launched a second venture, Unstuck, a life design programme with a friend. He has other creative projects he wants to make time for. She takes on creative writing side quests, overanalyses TV shows and runs for sheer joy.
Divya wants to keep going deeper in the craft, work with people whose values align with their own, and – this is a shared goal they bring up with a grin – land a scuba diving client. They’ve both been diving for thirteen years. It would mean a dive trip they could write off as a business expense. They’re half-joking. They’re also not.
There is no legacy plan. No succession. No employees whose careers depend on them. The trade-off in staying small and intentional is that when it ends, it ends. But the trade-off in the other direction, building something that outlasts you at the expense of the life you’re living now, is one they examined and declined.
What happens if they stop tomorrow? They don’t know. They might start something else entirely. Take their kombucha brewing hobby to the next level, maybe, they say with a shared giggle.
any given tuesday
Chuck talks about something writer and podcaster Amit Varma once said to him: work towards the best average day you can. Not the book launch. Not the award. The average Tuesday. “A day where nothing extraordinary happened, but it was still a nice day.” Both of them have come to organise their lives around that idea. Making time for the things that aren’t Rough Paper but that Rough Paper makes possible. “Rough Paper is not what advertising was to us,” Chuck says, which was an “always-on, zero-respite field bogged down by superficialities that didn’t always feel the right sort of rewarding”.
“You take pieces from everywhere, and that fuels everything else you want.”
A new brief arrives. Before either of them has opened it, both already have an inkling of what the other will say. One of them will lead the project. The other will show up for the kickoff, ask the questions the client hasn’t thought to answer, and then step back. In three months, the work will be done. It will be clearly positioned and carefully worded. The client will either come back or send someone else their way. Most of them do.
And then there will be the rest of the day. The part that is not the work, but that the work was always in service of – an ordinary day. The kind you’d be happy to repeat tomorrow.
