Hi, I’m Rini Bankhwal.
I work between worlds.
Marketing strategist with 12 years across Asia, Europe, and a few categories that don't usually share a room.
I started in fashion retail in Delhi, spent my weekends building a small artisan jewelry label called Tribana, and learned the first thing worth knowing about marketing: it isn't a budget. It's a point of view.
Tribana ended up in eleven boutique stores and on the shortlist for a Cherie Blair Foundation incubator. It also taught me the second thing: a point of view doesn't pay rent unless you can build the machine that scales it. So I went looking for the machine. I found it across John Jacobs Eyewear (Lenskart) and Nicobar — the analytical, channel-driven, performance side of the craft, set against the brand-led, founder-shaped work of building omnichannel from a twelve-person team.
Eight years in India, building both halves in parallel.
In 2021, I moved to Paris for an MBA at HEC on a L'Oréal scholarship. Worked on international launches at L'Oréal Paris, then ran corporate strategy in Gothenburg based, Juni — a fintech for digital entrepreneurs that had raised close to $330Mn Series A in 2022.
Came back to Paris and joined the founding team at Temelion in 2025 to lead marketing for a vertical AI platform built for construction engineers. Asia and Europe. Jewellery, eyewear, lifestyle, fintech, AI: both sides of the B2C-to-B2B line.
What travels across all of it is a small set of beliefs: that taste is a strategy, that good marketing is a clear positioning before it's a campaign, and that the brands worth building are the ones brave enough not to flatten themselves into a category.
That's the work I do at Temelion full-time, and for a small handful of founders each quarter who are building something special.
My Approach
Marketing is part craft, part culture, part experimentation and the best work happens when none of those three get sacrificed for the others. Most teams over-index on one. The job is usually to bring the missing ones back.
What follows isn the small set of beliefs that have held up across ten years of building brands, in five categories, on two continents.
01 Position before you promote.
Most marketing problems are positioning problems wearing other costumes. Before I touch channels, copy, or campaigns, I want to know: who are we, for whom, against whom, and why us? When the answer is sharp, the rest of the work gets easier and cheaper. When it isn't, no amount of media spend fixes it.
03 The full-stack marketer beats the specialist.
The marketers who do the best work are usually the ones who can hold both the brand argument and the spreadsheet in their head at the same time. I've spent ten years moving between the analytical and the editorial sides of this craft on purpose, because the most interesting problems live where they meet.
02 Taste is a Strategy
In an industry rapidly automating its outputs, the companies that win will be the ones whose work is recognizably theirs. Brand voice, visual judgment, and the editorial instinct to know what to leave out are no longer "soft" skills — they're the moat. AI didn't make taste less valuable. It made it scarce.
04 The brief is rarely the brief.
"We need more leads" almost always turns out to be a positioning problem. "We need a brand refresh" almost always turns out to be a clarity-of-thinking problem. The most useful thing I do in the first week of any engagement is figure out what the actual question is. The work after that is usually obvious.
Career Map
I started in fashion retail in Delhi and ended up leading marketing for a vertical AI platform in Paris, with a few stops in between. The categories changed. The cities changed. What didn't is the work itself, building brands that mean something, in industries that don't always make it easy
Explore my work
Subject Matter
A weekly newsletter and podcast on storytelling, technology, and the brands reshaping global commerce particularly from the Global South.
I founded it in 2024 to capture cultural shifts from the global south: India, SEA, Lagos, the Gulf, São Paulo. It's part essay, part reporting, part conversation, written for marketers, founders, and operators who want to think a layer deeper than their feed allows
The Labs
A podcast at the intersection of heritage, business, and innovation across the craft and fashion ecosystem.
I started it to spotlight founders, makers, and thinkers — particularly from the Global South — who are keeping cultural crafts commercially relevant in an age of mass production and AI.
These are the conversations mainstream fashion media isn't having: with the people building textile studios in India, fashion-tech in Pakistan, craft economies in Tunisia, climate-led design in Nigeria. Less interview, more long-form thinking, with founders most podcasts haven't found yet.
An IRL community I'm building in Paris for marketers, creatives, and founders who believe marketing is part craft, part culture, part experimentation. Expert circles, work-in-public sessions, signals from the field, and a peer group that takes the work seriously. Free signals for everyone, paid expert circles for members.
The Labs exists for the people who want to think better, not just execute faster and who suspect the most useful conversations about marketing happen in rooms, not on LinkedIn.