Ask Yourself: Are You Doing the Same Thing You Were Doing Six Months Ago?

A conversation with Labdhi Kothari, formerly Marketing Consultant at Payal Singhal Design House, who always wanted to be a fashion designer. When she kept hearing that she would only end up a tailor, one thing became clear: she would work in fashion, whatever it took. She chose marketing, and with no NIFT background and only finance companies recruiting at her college, she cold-emailed her way in and began as an intern at Gini and Jony even before she had graduated. It wasn’t fashion exactly, but she knew retail was the best place to learn, and it was a start. Today she builds marketing strategy across retail and luxury fashion, and she is ready to step back into retail with a sharper eye than when she began.

She wanted to study art and get into fashion. Her family steered her towards commerce because she was good at accounts. She took a BMS degree as a one-year delay tactic, to buy herself time before committing to a stream. Marketing found her in that extra year, and it stuck.

She cold-emailed her way into the retail industry when no recruiters came to her campus. She landed retail experience first, then luxury, working her way into the industry through nothing but cold emails and persistence, and building her marketing career from the ground up across two very different ends of Indian fashion.

Balancing Me as a Person Everywhere

Who is Labdhi right now, across the different lives you are living?

Labdhi describes herself, first of all, as an over-thinker. She overanalyses everything, and she is the first to admit that it can be a weakness. But it has a flip side she has learned to rely on: she sees trouble early. She is usually the one quietly fixing what might go wrong before anyone has noticed it, which is why a problem around her rarely becomes a crisis. Outside work, she is a simple person who is easy to be around and attentive to the people she loves and works with.

At work, she is the kind of marketer you can hand something to and stop worrying about. She brings ideas that feel fresh, then checks them against reality before they leave her desk. She takes ownership of the outcome and of the details around it, and her word is reliable, which the people around her know.

She traces it back to sixteen, when she started carrying responsibility for her whole family and her choices had to take into account the people they would affect. That shaped her into someone careful and attentive, and it earned her something valuable in return: trust. Whatever she decides, her family accepts it. “If Labdhi says it, that’s it,” and she finds the same at work.

Know What Success Looks Like Before You Start

A lot of your work sits at the intersection of creativity and commerce. How do you personally balance what feels creatively exciting with what the numbers say is working?

For her, creativity and performance have never felt separate. She always starts with what she is trying to achieve commercially, and then asks what is the most unexpected, most human, most beautiful way to get there. The constraint of the business goal makes creativity sharper, not smaller. The moment creativity starts to feel dull is when she is executing without knowing what success looks like. So she defines that first, every time, before she starts building anything. She anchors everything to what is true to the brand, to the audience and to the moment.

From there, she looks at the audience. She pays attention to what people are doing, and just as importantly, to what they are not doing, and she asks why. Sometimes the gap is a risk nobody wants to take, and that is exactly where the opportunity is. She takes that risk deliberately, with a clear hypothesis and a way to measure it. Creativity is what draws in people who understand the brand and relate to it, who will become its future buyers, so she studies their taste closely.

Numbers matter, and she reads them carefully, because they can mislead you. A number tells you what happened. It does not always tell you why, or whether it was worth it. They also have to be read for who is behind them. A campaign can show strong engagement and still be the wrong result if the people engaging are not the people the brand wants. She looks at who is responding, and the quality of the DMs and conversations, not only the count. In marketing, quality matters more than volume, because the success of the next campaign builds on the one before it. Each campaign shapes the audience a brand attracts, and that audience becomes the base for what the brand grows into. So the right audience and the right targeting decide what kind of brand is being built.

Afterwards, she uses the result to understand why it worked, not just whether it did.

Brand building does not pay off immediately, it compounds. The work that looks unremarkable today is often the foundation for something significant later, once the market is ready for it. People who only react to the numbers stay one step behind the people who trust what the numbers cannot yet show, and test it carefully.

“The constraint of the business goal actually makes creativity sharper, not smaller. The moment creativity feels dull is when I am executing without knowing the way.”

Is there a version of yourself from five or ten years ago that you feel particularly grateful for?

She is grateful to the younger version of herself who set a goal and held on to it. She always wanted to be a fashion designer. The route to designing didn’t open up for her, and she doesn’t hold that against anyone, because the path she took instead has turned out to be the best thing she’s done. What mattered was that the ambition stayed, even when the road changed.

She understood commerce well, so her professors suggested she do CA. But her parents knew her, and her brother especially did. He knew she belonged in a creative field and not in that one. Being good at something isn’t the same as wanting to build a life around it, and they saw that before she could say it herself.

During vacations she ran summer camps for kids, and the person she worked for there told her she was suited for marketing, because of her persona. That one observation gave her a name for what she’d been doing naturally. She knew then that she would work in fashion whichever way in it took, and she chose marketing as that route.

She wasn’t from NIFT, and the companies that recruited at her college were mostly finance firms, so she didn’t wait for an opportunity to arrive. She cold-emailed brands until Gini and Jony took her on as an intern, even before she had graduated. It wasn’t fashion in the strictest sense, but she knew retail is the best place to learn how marketing really works, so she treated it as a start and not a compromise.

“Sometimes you don’t know. You need a push. You need someone from outside to show you the eye, what exactly is you. And once you realise it, there is no going back.”

If You Doubt Yourself, You Already Know Something Is Off

What is something people often misunderstand about confidence?

Confidence, she says, is most often misunderstood as the absence of doubt. To the person who has it, it feels like being good at something and being able to act without being stalled. She is an over-thinker herself, and she has learned that confidence and careful thought are not opposites. She thinks it through, and then she commits.

To the people around you, who have watched you grow and seen your mistakes alongside your wins, confidence reads differently. People tend to remember mistakes longer than achievements, and they will sometimes bring them up in moments of conflict. Whether that is fair depends on one thing: whether you learned from it. If you did, the reminder is not a fair judgement of who you are now. If you did not, and you are repeating the same error, they have every right to call it out, and the friction is fair too.

Real confidence comes from within, from knowing that what you are doing is right for you and being able to explain why. “Confidence comes from knowing the things you’re doing are right for you.” Doubt, in her view, is not a flaw but information. It points to something specific worth examining, and the confident response is to look into it, not to ignore it.

“If you’re doubting yourself, that means you yourself know that you’re wrong somewhere. That’s why you’re doubting yourself. Confidence comes from knowing the things you’re doing are right for you.”

This reframes self-doubt as a signal rather than a flaw. Not something to suppress, but something worth investigating. If the doubt is there, it is pointing at something specific, and ignoring it does not make it go away. It just delays the conversation you are eventually going to need to have with yourself.

Cold Emails, Retail First, Then Luxury

What kind of work gives you the deepest sense of meaning or excitement, the kind that reminds you why you entered marketing in the first place?

Years ago, during that extra year of college, she took up tuitions and genuinely wondered if teaching was her calling. The place she worked at sold health and fitness products, a category she had zero personal interest in. But a mentor there, someone she describes as like a brother to her, who has since passed away, noticed something specific in how she talked to people.

He told her: you see things differently. A typical salesperson sees what a buyer needs to make a purchase. She saw what a person actually needed, the human need underneath the transaction. That distinction, he said, was marketing, not sales, and she should stop resisting it.

After completing her BMS, no fashion brands recruited from her college, so she cold-emailed her way in. That is how Gini & Jony happened. That is how Payal Singhal happened. She wanted retail experience first and got it. She wanted luxury experience next and got that too. The journey, she says, has turned out exactly the way she wanted it to, so far.

The mentor who saw her clearly is no longer here to see how it turned out. That detail, mentioned briefly and without dwelling, gives the whole career arc more weight. She built exactly what he told her she was capable of, after he was no longer around to watch her do it.

Progress Is Visible. Growth Is Internal.

What is something people rarely talk about when discussing growth and career progression?

Growth is subjective, but most people confuse it with progress, and the two are very different things. Progress is linear: a better title, a better salary, a bigger team. It is visible, measurable, easy to explain at a dinner party. You can point to a number and say you grew the business by some percentage this month.

Growth is something else entirely. It is the expansion of how you think, not just what you are called. She has had moments in her career that looked like clear progression on paper, and yet she was not learning anything. It felt hollow on the inside, even while it looked impressive from the outside.

Her diagnostic question, the one she asks herself constantly: what was I doing six months ago? If the answer is the same thing she is doing now, in the same way, then nothing has actually grown, regardless of what the title or the paycheck says.

“Progress is linear, visible, measurable. Growth is the expansion of how you think, not just what you are called.”

This distinction, between progress that looks good on paper and growth that actually changes how you think, is one of the sharper things said in this series. It gives anyone a concrete diagnostic to run on their own career, rather than a vague feeling of being stuck they cannot quite name.

Success Is When the Outside Matches the Inside

If success could no longer be measured through titles, income, recognition, and achievement, what should it mean to you?

She spent a long time defining success externally: the brand she worked for, the numbers she could point to, the recognition that came from visible work. Those things matter, she says, and she will not pretend they do not. But a few years in, the measure shifted.

Now she measures success by how much ownership she feels over her own work. Is she replying to messages at 10 PM because the work genuinely matters to her, or is she the kind of employee who goes home at 7 PM and shuts everything off, because that boundary also matters? Both versions are valid. The point is whether the choice is hers.

Success, today, feels like waking up and knowing exactly why she is doing what she is doing. Full ownership of a decision, a campaign, a career move. Knowing that what she built was actually hers, not simply what was asked of her. If she had to put it simply: success is when the life she is living on the outside matches the person she is becoming on the inside. Everything else is noise that comes and goes.

“Success is when the life I am living on the outside matches the person I am becoming on the inside. Everything else is just noise that comes and goes.”

This is the cleanest articulation in this series of internal versus external success metrics. Not a rejection of external markers, she is careful to say they matter, but a reordering of what gets to be the final measure. The title is real. The feeling of ownership underneath it is what she now treats as the actual scoreboard.

A Note From Decoding Draupadi

What stayed with us is the question she asks herself, repeatedly, almost like a discipline: what was I doing six months ago? It is deceptively simple, and it cuts through a lot of career anxiety that usually gets dressed up in more complicated language.

She also named something most people only feel but rarely say plainly: that progress and growth can look identical from the outside and feel completely different on the inside. One can be hollow while appearing successful. The other can be uncomfortable, even invisible to everyone watching, while actually changing you. She has lived both, and she can tell the difference now.

If this felt like someone you know, share it with her.

Success is when the life you are living on the outside matches who you are becoming on the inside. Everything else is noise. Full conversation at @decodingdraupadi.

More from the Brand Manager Series: Isha Patwardhan on building brands across fashion, financial services and insurance, and Niharika Bhatnagar on swapping “am I good enough” for “am I doing my best”.

Labdhi Kothari was Marketing Manager at Payal Singhal Design House. This interview was conducted as part of the Decoding Draupadi Brand Manager Series.