Let’s Create Impactful Stories Together
From their Andheri West base, Orange Elephant Studios is quietly building the most interesting creative portfolio in Indian branded storytelling — one authentic story at a time.
June 8, 2026
Somewhere in Andheri West,Mumbai, in a building that doesn't announce itself the way most creativeagencies do, Orange Elephant Studios operates with a quiet intensity that hasbecome something of a signature. Founded by producer Purvi Khan and director-writerAfroz Khan, the studio has spent the better part of a decade refusing to choosebetween commercial viability and creative ambition — insisting, sometimesagainst the weight of industry convention, that the two are not just compatiblebut mutually reinforcing. The results ofthat insistence are now visible across an unusually eclectic portfolio:advertising work that has cleared multi-million-view benchmarks, brandedcontent that has earned international festival recognition, a short film thatscreened at institutional venues across Mumbai, and India's first verticalmicro-fiction web series. What unites these projects is harder to articulatethan the projects themselves. It is something closer to a sensibility — aninsistence on emotional truth as the beginning, middle, and end ofstorytelling, regardless of format, platform, or brief.
The comparison to A24 — theAmerican independent studio that has made a cultural identity out ofprioritising the auteur's vision within a commercial context — has followedOrange Elephant since the early days of their public profile. It's a comparisonthe studio wears with measured pride, understanding both its flattery and itsweight. A24's central innovation wasn'taesthetic. It was structural: the decision to treat film as acatalogue-building enterprise rather than a project-by-project gamble, to cultivatelong-term relationships with filmmakers whose distinctive voices wouldeventually constitute a recognisable brand identity. Orange Elephant'strajectory — from advertising to short films to branded content to vertical webseries, always in the company of specific recurring collaborators — mirrorsthat structural logic in the Indian digital context. The difference is scale and medium. A24operates in theatrical cinema. Orange Elephant operates primarily in thedigital and mobile space. But the underlying conviction — that quality anddistinctiveness are sustainable competitive advantages, not luxury margins — isidentical.
Reading Orange Elephant'sbody of work as a single document, rather than as a collection of individualprojects, is instructive. 'Rat in the Kitchen', their debut short film starringMantra Mugdh and Aishwarya Desai, established the studio's willingness toembrace formal constraint as creative opportunity. The film played the festivalcircuit with enough success to confirm that their instincts translated acrossaudiences. 'Unmatched', their verticalmicro-fiction series launched in 2025, extended those instincts into anentirely new format — one they didn't just adopt but effectively invented forthe Indian market. The horror micro-film 'How Do You Live?', featuring MuktiMohan, demonstrated range: the same commitment to craft and emotional precisionapplied to a different genre, different stakes, different formal requirements.And then 'Suit Yourself', the AJIO branded series, showed what happens whenthat accumulated expertise meets a brand brave enough to let story lead. Each project teaches forward. Nothing aboutthe Orange Elephant catalogue reads like a detour.
The studio's approach tobrand relationships is worth examining as a distinct model. Most productionhouses treat brands as clients — as commissioning entities whose preferencesshape creative decisions from the outside in. Orange Elephant appears to treatbrands as creative partners: entities with genuine storytelling ambitions whocan be guided towards work that serves both the story and the commercial brief,when those interests are understood properly. This distinction is visible in how 'Suit Yourself' was constructed. TheAJIO brand doesn't dominate the narrative. It inhabits it. Clothes appear asnatural extensions of character psychology, not as product shots in dramaticclothing. That level of organic integration doesn't happen by accident. It happenswhen the production house has the credibility and the relationship to make thecase for story-first — and the track record to back that case up.
Orange Elephant's 2025announcement of a seven-show vertical web series slate — developedsimultaneously, genre-diverse, each featuring a known face — was less a contentannouncement than an infrastructure declaration. The studio wasn't just makingseven shows. It was establishing the production methodology, the creativelanguage, and the distribution logic for a format that was still, at the time,nascent in the Indian market. Thatinvestment is now yielding visible returns. The knowledge base developed across'Unmatched' and its siblings has made Orange Elephant arguably the most fluentstudio in India in the specific discipline of vertical micro-fiction — thewriting, the directing, the editing rhythm, the cliffhanger architecture. WhenAJIO came looking for someone to build their Instagram-first micro-drama, thechoice of Orange Elephant wasn't a discovery. It was a recognition.
The broader significance ofOrange Elephant's work extends beyond the Indian market. Asia's branded contentlandscape is evolving at speed, with markets from South Korea to Thailand toIndonesia developing their own models for native digital storytelling. India'smicro-fiction ecosystem, still young but rapidly maturing, is developing inconversation with global trends — the K-drama influence, the Chinesemicro-fiction app explosion, the general migration of audience attention tomobile-first formats. Orange Elephantsits at an interesting intersection in that conversation. They are notimitating what works elsewhere and applying it wholesale to the Indian context.They are developing, from first principles, what vertical storytelling lookslike when it emerges from Mumbai, from Indian emotional and cultural textures,from the specific dynamics of an audience that is simultaneously deeply localand globally fluent. That distinction is, increasingly, what the Asian marketmost rewards.
Orange Elephant Studios is,at its core, a studio that has decided storytelling is not a means to an endbut an end in itself — and that commitment, consistently expressed acrosswildly different formats and contexts, is precisely what makes their commercialwork so effective. Brands that trust the story tend to get more than they askedfor. And Orange Elephant has built its entire identity around creating theconditions for that trust. In a market still learning what premium digitalproduction looks like, they are setting the terms of the definition.
