Because places are always more than their postcards

You’ve all seen this; the story of a place getting limited to its postcard version until everything outside the postcard frame gets overlooked, forgotten and finally rejected as not of that place. Where we practice in Sri Lanka, this postcardification of places happens quite often in tourist towns that slowly lose the layers of their identity and become flattened.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast, which repeatedly enters ‘world’s best places to visit’ lists, is one of those. Its stories are saturated with images of beaches and coconut palms, surfboards, people silhouetted against sunsets dissolving into the sea.

Yes, there’s a reason why tropes exist. The palms, surfboards and sunsets are all true often enough. Tropes can be useful too; we don’t discard them entirely because they cater to expectations and sometimes even help make a business more approachable and familiar. But our role as commercial creators is not just to manage expectations; it’s also to create culture. Limiting the stories of a place to only its tropes reduces and flattens it, leaving out microcultures and environments that colour its reality much richer than its postcards.

A few years ago, we stumbled on a fragment of a South Coast story in a vintage devotional print from India. It depicts a scene from the Hindu epic Ramayana that’s interestingly concurrent with Sri Lankan mythology; Hanuman, the monkey god, crosses into Lanka carrying a part of the Himalayas mountain containing a life-saving medicine for his fallen warrior friend. Sri Lankan folklore says Himalayan fragments fell along the journey, forming several places across the island; most famously, Rumassala hill in the South Coast of the island, in Unawatuna. Even the etymology of the name ‘Unawatuna’ points to the Sinhala words ‘Onna-watuna’ (there it fell). The hillock’s unusual flora and long association with medicinal plants continue to keep the story alive, somewhere between mythology and possibility.

We wanted to bring this print into contact with circles that visit the south coast of Sri Lanka. Being a richly coloured chromolithograph, its visual language stands out distinctly against the homogenized, elegantly muted ‘coastal fantasy’ aesthetics of Sri Lanka’s southern seaside belt. This is precisely why we were drawn to it. It introduces a layer of cultural curiosity to a flattened representation of Southern Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast carries layered histories shaped by trade, migration, mythology, religion, language, and centuries of cultural exchange. Those stories deserve visual space too. Places are rarely as singular as tourism imagery makes them seem. Do we think Hanuman alone symbolizes Unawatuna? No. But we do think it adds a layer to the symbols, stories, and visual references that form part of a richer and more truthful identity for Sri Lanka’s South Coast.

This is how we test stories

This print is essentially a hypothesis of a story we believe has earned its place in the cultural landscape of a destination. We publish and sell stories like this through our store, and the commercial side of that matters: it gives us useful information on which stories resonate and which ones don’t find their audience. They tell us what people choose to take home, to frame, to give as gifts; that’s a form of cultural response that no focus group can replicate, and this is what we use to help our studio clients make products, spaces and experiences that actually work.

This is where our publishing work and our studio work inform one another. The objects, prints and booklets we put into the world are always tests of culture-making. They let us watch how a story travels, whether it lands with the traveller who knows the mythology, or the one who’s simply drawn to the image before understanding why. Whether it finds the diaspora or the curious outsider first. What questions it raises in the room it ends up in.

That intelligence shapes how we work with clients in travel and retail; brands building experiences around place. The risk we see most often in that work is the same risk the postcard represents: a compression of culture into its most frictionless version. Easier to sell, maybe. But harder to remember, and ultimately less true.

We’re also curious about something else: what does it feel like to encounter an image from your own culture, recognized and held with significance somewhere else? As more Indian travellers arrive in Sri Lanka, some specifically along the Ramayana trail, that question feels increasingly relevant. We’ll have an answer after a few seasons of testing this story out. That testing, in a way, is the point.

We’re drawn to stories that complicate a place slightly, that give people something to turn over in their minds. We don’t set out to create complexity for its own sake, but we welcome truthful layers that make a destination understood through people, beliefs, nature, ideas, and history rather than a Pinterest board. The ‘Hanuman in Lanka’ print is a small test of that idea. Hanuman in Lanka is now available in our store, as a cotton-mix, direct-to-film printed T-shirt. And we’re watching to see what it teaches us. We’ll tell you more when we find out.

The stories we tell in moments of crisis

A story that’s not relevant to the audience might as well not be told.

Building relevance is finding where a story belongs in the moment it is released, and whether it respects the emotional weather its audience is currently living through. When a major event shifts the collective mindset, we often reshape stories to meet it. Stories do not exist in isolation; they exist inside time, place, and shared experience. When the ground moves, socially, politically, and environmentally, stories that ignore that movement risk feeling hollow, performative, or worse, indifferent.

When Sri Lanka was shaken up by the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah, several stories being produced in our studio for the island's audiences were paused and carefully reconsidered to assess whether they were appropriate, necessary, and true to the moment.

In situations like this, we talk to our clients to understand their genuine responses to the ongoing situation, and refer back to the values of their brand articulation framework before reshaping stories to be relevant, sensitive and respectful to what’s happening in the daily lives of their audience. This process is about maintaining honesty and sensitivity in stories, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than rush to fill silence.

For some businesses, the stories were a direct channel to support relief efforts and offer solidarity. Our role as story makers was to extract their genuine sentiments and efforts and bring them into story formats that matched their most successful communication platforms; seen in this example is one such story made to call for relief support through Instagram. It channelled Black Cat's Caregiver and Lover archetypal persona.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka, we reshaped or completely restructured planned stories to imbue sensitivity, relief efforts and helpful insight into the stories of client businesses; to give shape to their grief, empathy, and solidarity through stories, while staying true to their voice and values. This didn’t mean turning every story into commentary or every business into a spokesperson. Stories can acknowledge loss without exploiting it. They can offer support without centering themselves. They can point toward relief, resources, or collective care without pretending to be heroes. Stories should be genuine acts of participation rather than declarations.

Often, this means slowing down production, stripping stories back to their core intention, and asking what role, if any, they should play right now. Sometimes the answer is to offer support, relief, or insight. Sometimes it is to step aside altogether. And yes, this process costs us extra in production time, but we’d rather do more for better stories than maintain strict build cycles for so-so outcomes.

In some cases, it was about offering insight; in Rithihi's case, being a brand with a dominant Sage archetype, offering insight into the culture of giving was a genuine response that stemmed from the business itself. We only create the longform stories for the Rithihi blog, while their in-house team handles the blog formatting and what's published on social media. But, we always offer capsule versions of the longform stories designed by us, to point their audience to the blog; like this one.

Being able to express, connect, and mobilize is important for entrepreneurs and businesses in moments of collective crisis. Not because businesses must suddenly become moral authorities, but because they are part of the social fabric. They employ people, serve communities, and operate within shared systems that are also affected by disruption. This is because the work they do always starts as a response to the society and the world they inhabit. No business is created in a vacuum. Products, services, and ideas emerge from specific needs, tensions, and cultural conditions. When those conditions change, responding thoughtfully is not a deviation from the work; it’s a continuation of it.

That’s what makes responding to the realities of our world an extension of the work of a business; it’s not CSR, it’s not charity, nor is it being exceptional. It is simply being alive and responsive to the world a business shares with its audience. Responsiveness is not about virtue-signalling; it is about relevance, respect, and responsibility.

Stories that a business tells are a big part of these living, real, and relevant conversations that it has with its audience. Stories are where values become visible, where intent is tested against reality, and where trust is either strengthened or eroded.

Folktales: treasures from unclaimed terrains

A folktale is shaped by many voices across time. They echo generations. Rarely written down, but remembered and retold. Never owned, but carried. A folktale is a story that lives in the oral tradition of a people, passed from mouth to ear, from elder to child, from stranger to another. It is shaped not by a single author but by the collective imagination of a community. And like all things born in the wild, folktales resist being contained.

They feature ordinary people, animals, spirits, moral dilemmas, and natural wonders. They carry the weight of local wisdom, shared fears, communal humour, and codes of survival. Folktales were used to share everyday wisdom, explain the inexplicable, and warn without scolding. They entertain with meaning. Traditionally transmitted through oral storytelling, later adapted into print and digital forms. Oral roots shape its rhythm, repetition, and memory-friendly structure.

A folktale is

• Mostly translated through oral origins, with growing print and digital transmission.

• Anonymous authorship, evolving with each retelling.

• Rooted in culture, shaped by rituals, beliefs, and the worldview of its people.

• Uses symbolism, using simple characters.

• Adaptable, changing slightly depending on who tells it and where.

• Voices vary, but gravitate towards overarching, all-knowing, genderless ones. 

• More often detached from personal bias, folktale narrations usually observe, guiding listeners through the story while allowing the lesson to reveal itself. Sometimes, didactic lessons are brought in, directly judging.

"Folktale narration often takes the form of an omniscient, timeless voice; one that is neither male nor female, neither young nor old. Folktales usually use simple language, rhythmic structure, and moral lessons."

In cultures with strong oral heritage, folktales preserve history, tradition, and identity. They encode ancient knowledge, how to read the stars, how to listen to the wind, how to live in harmony with the land. They teach through metaphor, not instruction. Through wonder, not doctrine.

Folktales are mirrors of the collective psyche; unclaimed because they belong to no one storyteller. They allow people to process awe, fear, grief, longing, and love. They are the wild stories of shared terrains. And like the flowers that bloom without permission, they remind us that wonder, meaning, and truth often grow accessible, unclaimed, uncontained, but entirely necessary.

Read another blog story featuring a Sri Lankan highland folktale drawn from that shared well.