The challenge was to make Vodafone’s calendar stand out and emotionally connect with people at a time of the year when every brand comes out with New Year calendars.

Our objective was to go beyond a regular paper-printed calendar and explore innovations that tie in with the festivities and customs associated with the start of every Bengali New Year.

Since it is customary to wear new clothes on the first day of the Bengali New Year, we decided to design a calendar that could be worn. Traditional red-bordered handloom sarees, now on the verge of extinction, were chosen as our medium. With modern women either ignoring sarees or shifting to fancier ones made by power looms, we commissioned a diminishing breed of skilled handloom weavers at Burdwan’s Dhatrigram village to create actual sarees as calendars. In six yards, the entire year’s dates were sewn in as the design. When folded twelve times, each fold of the saree displayed one month.

Every single customer or retailer who received one of these ‘saree-calendars’ loved the idea. With mentions on social and earned media, enquiries about procuring more of these limited-edition creations kept pouring in at Vodafone offices well into the year.

Most importantly, we successfully managed to bring traditional handloom sarees and the plight of their few talented makers back into focus. With women stepping out wearing these calendars in the New Year, the hitherto boring hand-woven, red-bordered cotton saree became cool for once.