Why I’m Not a Brand, but a Practice
- Rue
- Aug 27
- 4 min read
There is a particular pressure that comes with trying to explain creative work on the internet. (I would know, Ive been at it since I was 16)
You are expected to have a niche.
A visual identity.
A consistent offering.
A recognisable product.
A clearly defined audience.
A brand.
I understand why.
A brand is easier to package. Easier to explain. Easier to sell.
But I have never really wanted to package myself that way.
I am not interested in becoming one thing that can be recognised immediately and consumed easily.
I am interested in having a practice.
A practice is allowed to change
My work doesn’t always look the same.
Sometimes I am making clothes.
Sometimes I am working with textiles.
Sometimes I’m doing graphic design.
Sometimes I’m teaching someone how to sew.
Sometimes I’m making something for an event.
Sometimes I’m sitting in the Atelier surrounded by unfinished things.
Sometimes I’m writing.
Sometimes I’m filming.
Sometimes I start something without knowing what it is going to become.
These things might look unrelated if you are trying to organise them as a list of services.
They make much more sense if you understand them as parts of a practice.
A practice is not a fixed output.
It is a way of working.
A way of thinking.
A set of questions that keep coming back in different forms.
I don’t want everything I make to look like it came from the same brand
I think there is something strange about the expectation that an artist should make everything recognisably theirs.
Of course, there are things that recur in my work.
Materials.
Textures.
Clothing.
Images.
Certain kinds of humour.
Making things by hand.
Taking things apart.
Putting them back together differently.
Teaching.
Learning.
Playing.
Refusing to make things quite as sensible as they are supposed to be.
But I don’t need every project to have the same colour palette or the same logo or the same visual language to know that it came from me.
The continuity is not always in what the thing looks like.
Sometimes it is in how I approached making it.
The Atelier is part of the practice
The Atelier isn’t just a place where I produce things.
It is where things happen.
People come in.
Things get made.
Things get repaired.
Ideas get tested.
Workshops happen.
Projects begin.
Projects fail.
Sometimes we make something useful.
Sometimes we make something completely unnecessary.
Both are allowed.
I like having a physical space where making can remain messy and unfinished.
Because a practice needs somewhere to experiment.
Teaching is part of the practice too
I don’t see teaching as something separate from being an artist.
Teaching changes the way I understand what I make.
Someone asks a question I hadn’t considered.
Someone finds a completely different solution.
Someone struggles with something I thought was obvious.
Someone makes something I wouldn’t have thought to make.
And I learn from all of it.
The relationship goes both ways.
That’s why I keep coming back to workshops and making with other people.
I’m not simply transferring a skill.
I’m participating in an ecosystem of making.
And neither is documentation
I’ve been documenting my work for a long time.
Before I knew what I was building, I was already photographing things, writing about them, making videos, putting things on the internet.
I had a blog about clothes when I was sixteen.
Later came YouTube.
Then other forms of writing and documentation.
Looking back, I don’t think these were separate from the practice.
They were ways of figuring out what I was doing.
Sometimes you understand what you made by writing about it.
Sometimes you understand what you think by trying to explain it to someone else.
Sometimes you make something because you want to photograph it.
Sometimes you photograph something because you have realised you made something worth remembering.
The making and the documenting keep feeding each other.
So what is Ruchi.design?
It’s not a shop.
It’s not a portfolio in the traditional sense.
It’s not a catalogue of services.
And it isn’t meant to contain one perfectly coherent brand.
It is a place to see the practice.
The things I’ve made.
The things I’ve designed.
The things I’ve taught.
The spaces I’ve built.
The people I’ve worked with.
The things I’ve written.
The experiments that went somewhere.
The experiments that didn’t.
The things I’m still figuring out.
There may be other businesses that come out of this practice.
There may be projects that become their own identities.
There may be things I stop doing entirely.
That’s okay.
The practice can contain them without needing to become them.
I think that’s the point A brand asks:
What are you?
A practice lets me keep asking:
What am I making?
What am I learning?
What am I interested in now?
What happens if I try this?
I don’t want to reduce the answer to a single category just because categories make websites easier to organise.
I want to make a body of work that is recognisably mine without having to be the same thing twice.
So this website is not an attempt to turn everything I do into one neat identity.
It is a record of the things that happen when I keep making.
This is my practice.
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