About

Built for challengers. Backed by over eight decades of experience.

The Shaping Company builds brand and go-to-market strategy for challenger brands. Whether you’re a new brand fighting for attention or an established one that’s stopped growing, we find your spot and help you grow into it. Our team brings over eight decades of combined experience across brands and agencies.

The experience behind it

Ashish Sharma

Founder

“I build brands people want. Then make them hard to resist.”

Ashish has spent two decades in storytelling and marketing — first as a content specialist, then running brands, and leading an agency — helping challengers grow in one of the fastest, most crowded and most price-conscious markets in the world.

3: marketing functions built from zero
Orbit: He built it: our in-house AI audience intelligence tool, which reads what your customers really say

Where he’s led marketing

Micromax: The homegrown brand that dethroned Samsung in India and broke into the world’s top 10 phone makers.
Revolt Motors: India’s first AI-enabled motorcycle — and the first automobile brand in India to sell on subscription and take bookings on Amazon.
Obi Worldphone: Founded by John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi. Ashish built its India marketing under his mentorship.
Dynasty Gaming & Media: Led marketing for India. Got people to pay for gaming in a country that expects it to be free — and won each new subscriber for less than the industry usually spends.

Ajay Sharma

Advisor

“A strategy is only as good as its route to the customer.”

Most brand strategies stop at the story. Ajay has spent 42 years building brands and categories. He set up HTC in India from a single room, built Micromax’s smartphone business into India’s No. 2 brand, and went on to run Obi Worldphone and Panasonic’s mobile business. Every plan we write has to pass his test: will this actually work?

What that means for you: a strategy built for the real market, not just for a slide.

42: years in sales, across India, Europe and the US
No. 2: Micromax smartphones in India, second only to Samsung
3 months: to take HTC from a single room to a national distribution network
2×: Panasonic’s mobile volumes, doubled in eight months

Member of the board of advisors to Pure Technology Inc (US), Advisor to Techarc, Independent Director to SS Retail.

Quoted in Rest Of World, International Business Times, Harvard Business Review, Asia Times, TechCrunch, The Ken

Ajay on LinkedIn →

Why that matters for your brand

We learned it in one of the hardest markets there is. Here’s what it teaches.

India isn’t one market. Every state is a new country.

The dialect changes every hundred kilometres. A few hundred more, and so do the food, the festivals and the way people spend. Launching across it teaches you to read a new market fast — not just a new industry.

Get noticed with less.

The leader outspends you ten to one. Clarity has to do what money can’t.

Earn every sale.

Price-conscious customers make you prove your value fast. That keeps the promise honest.

Move at market speed.

Categories change in months, not years. You learn to decide on the evidence you have.

Make it easy to buy.

A great story is wasted if buying is hard. You learn to plan the whole path, from first look to final payment.

Those lessons travel. What doesn’t travel is local culture — so wherever you are, we read your market in what your customers actually say, and bring in local voices when the idea depends on them.

Like what we’ve done?

Let’s do it for your brand. Thirty minutes, no deck — tell us where you are, and where you want to be.

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