FISH IT OUT! The Licious napkin box I built around 3 words

In 2016, I joined Licious as its Lead Content Writer. It was a meat delivery startup in Bengaluru then (it became a unicorn in 2021), with a small office on Cambridge Road, near Indiranagar.

We had a little egg sandwich place downstairs that served decent snacks. Our designers and I frequently explored the fun food places in and around there during our lunch breaks.

My job was to churn out app notifications, newsletters, blog posts, product descriptions for all the fresh and prepared meats they sold, and ad copy for print and digital.

I was literally their one-man content team.

But every now and then, they had the budget to do something different. This time, they wanted to give their customers and partners something unique, something that would make their brand linger.

Books, calendars, keychains, caps, T-shirts, pens — these were the classic go-to’s for brand marketing then. Which we also did.

But I wanted to do something different. Something that was on brand. And if it was functional, even better.

What does anyone buying meat or food always need? Paper napkins (serviettes, if you’re British), of course. I came up with an idea to design a paper napkin box around their brand.

The part I’m proudest of is the three-word copy I built this box around.

FISH IT OUT!

That’s it. I gave my idea to the designers, and they did the rest of the work.

I was playing with words. My blog posts for Licious around then had titles like “Game of Bones” and “Sauce Wars.” One of the newspaper ads I wrote had a “Fresh off the hook” badge on it, so the line fit right in.

We gave the boxes to anyone whose order went over a certain amount and to our partners and vendors.

It was a hit with our customers. I remember Abhay Hanjura, one of our co-founders, praising me for it.

I don’t have images from that era to show now. So I asked ChatGPT to recreate this idea from memory. Here’s what it made.

I’m proud of this work.

With AI taking over more and more of our creative workflows, I’ve been asking myself whether I still have the chops to do something like this. Noting such wins down is the only way to keep myself sane and confident. Hence this post.

The work we did then laid the groundwork for our own agency — Elebird. Two of the designers from Licious and I joined hands with Rajiv, who had a background in marketing, sales, and PR, to birth this venture.

We did so much creative work there, for dozens of clients, in our short time together from 2016 to 2019.

Surprisingly, many of them were in the food industry too, like MTR Foods, timios, and FishChain. I’ll recap some of that work here soon.

If you got one of these boxes, or worked at Licious back then, and still have a photo of it, please share it with me so I can add it here.