Surbhit Krishna
Creative Storyteller.

Who is Surbhit Krishna?

Surbhit Krishna is the Co-Founder and CEO of Awesome Sauce Creative — one of India's most forward-thinking branding, strategy, and marketing agencies, headquartered in Lucknow. He is the creative storyteller at the heart of the agency: the person who oversees how campaigns are planned, how content is created, how visual narratives are built, and how every piece of work the agency produces comes alive for the audience it is made for.

Together with Rishi Singh, Surbhit co-founded Awesome Sauce Creative in 2019 — the two original "mavericks" who built a world-class creative agency from a Tier 2 city. Where Rishi owns the domain of growth strategy, business systems, and structural thinking, Surbhit's world is entirely distinct: the complete creative process — from campaign planning and content creation through to visual art direction, photography, and cinematography. He also leads Papaya Productions — the agency's dedicated content production venture.

Surbhit brings a dual education that is rare in the Indian creative industry: a Bachelor of Design in Textile Design from NIFT — grounding him in visual craft, texture, material intelligence, and compositional thinking — and a Postgraduate qualification in Visual Design & User Experience from IIT Hyderabad — equipping him with the analytical understanding of how visual decisions shape human experience. Together, these give him both the instinct to tell a compelling story and the rigour to build creative systems that deliver it consistently.

Education: Where Craft Meets Systems Thinking

Surbhit Krishna's educational arc is one of deliberate deepening — from material-level design craft at NIFT to human-centred systems thinking at IIT Hyderabad. Together, these two institutions gave him the rare ability to work across both the aesthetic and functional dimensions of design — an ability that defines Awesome Sauce Creative's output to this day.

This combination — NIFT's craft sensibility and IIT's analytical framework — is precisely what distinguishes Surbhit's creative practice. He doesn't design by instinct alone; he designs with evidence, structure, and an awareness of how visual decisions travel through systems. In an agency context, this means his work connects aesthetics to outcomes in ways that most designers cannot.

During his time at NIFT, Surbhit was also a significant presence beyond the classroom — serving as President of the Sports Club, Head of the Core Committee for NIFT Spectrum 2016, and Flag Bearer at NIFT Converge 2016. These roles reflect the leadership instinct that would later define his role as CEO: a person who steps up, organises systems, and carries a team forward.

Jaipur Rugs: The Heritage Design Grounding

Before co-founding Awesome Sauce Creative, Surbhit worked on design projects in collaboration with Jaipur Rugs — India's most celebrated luxury textile and craft company, renowned globally for its handwoven rugs and its direct-artisan supply chain model. This wasn't a transactional professional engagement; it was an immersion in the kind of design thinking that places human stories, material integrity, and cultural authenticity at the centre.

For a designer trained in textiles, collaborating with Jaipur Rugs was a natural fit — and a formative one. The experience sharpened Surbhit's understanding of how great brands are built not just through visual systems, but through the quality of conviction that runs through every design decision. It also reinforced something that would become central to Awesome Sauce Creative's positioning: that the best design work always begins with deep research and genuine respect for the people it serves.

Co-Founding Awesome Sauce Creative: The Original Bet

In 2019, Surbhit Krishna and Rishi Singh incorporated Awesome Sauce Creative Pvt. Ltd. in Lucknow — a decision that, on paper, looked unconventional. Starting a creative agency in a Tier 2 city, without metro client networks or established credibility, and in the early days with just the two of them — it was an act of conviction that most people would have talked themselves out of.

What made it work was the complete separation of responsibilities between the two founders. Rishi owned the strategic and commercial side: growth systems, business development, and structural problem-solving for clients. Surbhit owned the creative side in its entirety: campaign planning, content creation, visual art direction, photography, and cinematography — the full creative process from brief to final output. There was no overlap. There was no confusion about who owned what.

This clean division is rare in small agencies, where co-founders often step on each other's toes. At Awesome Sauce Creative, it became a structural advantage: clients got two distinct experts, not two people doing the same thing. And the agency built its reputation as much on the quality of its creative output — Surbhit's domain — as on the sharpness of its strategic thinking.

The Full Creative Process: Surbhit's Domain

Surbhit Krishna's remit at Awesome Sauce Creative spans the entire creative arc — from the moment a campaign begins to take shape in a brief, through to the final frame of a brand film or the last visual in a content series. He is not a specialist confined to one part of the process; he is the creative leader who holds all of it together.

Campaign planning, content creation, visual art direction, photography, cinematography — these are not separate functions handed to separate people at Awesome Sauce Creative. They are connected disciplines that Surbhit oversees as a unified creative process, ensuring that the story a brand wants to tell is coherent, compelling, and consistently executed from strategy to screen.

As Content Production Principal on the agency's homepage and the driving force behind Papaya Productions, Surbhit is the creative eye that every piece of work passes through. Whether it is a campaign concept being shaped at the planning stage, a content calendar being built for a brand's social presence, or a cinematography brief being translated into a brand film — he is present, and his creative judgement defines what goes out.

Papaya Productions: Building a Dedicated Content Production Venture

Mentorship & the Culture of Learning

One of Surbhit Krishna's most consistent qualities — attested to by colleagues, collaborators, and team members — is his passion for mentoring design aspirants. This is not an occasional activity; it is a defining feature of how he shows up as a leader.

In a country where the gap between design education and industry practice is often significant, practitioners who take time to mentor the next generation play an outsized role in shaping what Indian design becomes. Surbhit's commitment to mentorship is both personal — rooted in his own NIFT experience — and professional: he understands that the quality of the people around him determines the quality of the work the agency produces.

Career Timeline

A Storyteller Building from Lucknow

Surbhit Krishna's choice to build Awesome Sauce Creative and Papaya Productions from Lucknow is a statement about what great visual storytelling looks like when it isn't constrained by geography. The assumption that high-quality photography and cinematography for brands requires a Mumbai or Hyderabad studio is exactly the kind of convention Surbhit has spent six years quietly dismantling.

What he brings to every production is the eye of someone trained at two of India's most rigorous institutions — and the conviction of someone who co-built an agency from nothing and has never confused activity with craft. The quality of a photograph, a brand film, or a content series does not depend on the city it was made in. It depends on who is behind the camera and what story they are trying to tell.

Through Papaya Productions, Surbhit is building a production house in Lucknow that earns its place on the national stage not through noise, but through the quality of the stories it tells.

Why Surbhit Krishna Matters

India's content economy is growing faster than its storytelling talent. Brands across every category — FMCG, real estate, fashion, lifestyle, technology — are investing in photography and video at unprecedented levels, often discovering that production quality alone does not produce memorable content. What separates forgettable content from content that builds brands is the quality of the story being told and the intentionality of the visual choices being made.

Surbhit Krishna sits exactly at that intersection. His training — NIFT's visual craft education and IIT Hyderabad's human-centred design thinking — gives him both the aesthetic intelligence and the analytical framework to tell stories that work. His work through Papaya Productions gives those qualities an institutional home with its own identity and standards.

As Indian brands invest more seriously in content that goes beyond the transactional, the demand for creative storytellers who can oversee photography and cinematography with genuine craft will only grow. Surbhit Krishna is already there — and he has been since 2019.