FOUNDING TEAM
ZAHRA BALDIWALA
Founder and Creative Head, Studio Ruining Magazines
Zahra holds a Master's degree in Fashion Brand Management from POLIMODA in Florence, Italy, and has worked across the fashion industry, from local to global luxury brands. In 2019, she pivoted to design, working in graphic design and production for VH1 India. She currently leads art direction and design for Spotify India's social media and runs Studio Ruining Magazines full time.
ZAHEER BALDIWALA
Co-Founder and Business Head, Studio Ruining Magazines
Zaheer is the co-founder of Studio Ruining Magazines. He previously worked at a Mumbai-based investments and financial services firm, where he handled private investments, global alliances and market entry into new businesses. He is currently pursuing his MBA at Georgetown in Washington, DC. His love for art brought him to Studio Ruining Magazines, where he brings the business side to the creative.
WHO WE ARE
Studio Ruining Magazines is a Mumbai-based studio built around one instinct: collage as a way of making campaigns, music videos, and animation.
Led by founder and creative head Zahra Baldiwala, our team exists to bring that instinct to life at scale, for clients from young start-ups to multi-billion dollar companies, across the world.
OUR MODUS OPERANDI
Every brief arrives as a puzzle, and we treat it like one: cut it apart, see what it's made of, put it back together as something that couldn't have existed before. That's Zahra's instinct at the core - carried into every project by a small team of designers who build it out into full campaigns, motion, and animation.
We also partner with creative experts across fields when a project calls for it, drawing on a deep-rooted network in the Indian design community.
THE STORY BEHIND 'RUINING MAGAZINES'
Here's a peek into the story of our founder and creative head, Zahra Baldiwala. Picture a young Zahra, fuelled with ideas and the need to create - crayons dancing across paper from the start.
It began with her grandmother's old fashion magazines. Flipping through the glossy pages, Zahra's eyes would light up, spotting a fashion model ripe for transformation. Armed with an ink pen, she'd cut, tear, and rearrange, collage, before she even had the word for it - playfully "ruining magazines," in the most delightful way.
The tools changed. Colour pencils and ink pens gave way to design software, and eventually to motion, the same instinct to cut and rebuild, now applied frame by frame. Collage learned to move.
That instinct; cut, transform, ruin something on purpose, is still the whole method at Studio Ruining Magazines today.