Our brand story

Nordic wonderkids and its story behind

STAGE 1

While conceiving the idea of starting an early years program for young ones, two things struck us: value-based foundation and real-life skills. There was a realization that while skill learning can be simulated in a school environment, values can only be imbibed through observations and expressions. This led us to believe that there is a need to blend the world’s best early years curriculum with our own Indian value system. This will be a unique platform for our children to undergo holistic learning. It’s a huge responsibility that requires collaboration amongst founders, teachers, parents, and other social influencers to facilitate this learning. This thought process acted as a brief for the creative team. The outcome was 3 visual concepts.

While each one of them has its own significance, we zeroed down on Hamsa for a simple reason that it resonated with our vision and purpose. Hamsa stands for knowledge, elegance and purity and supposedly has the ability to seperate water from milk and teaches us that in everyday life we come across situations where we need to separate good things from bad and know what’s right thing to do. And that’s possible only if they are equipped with ‘knowledge’ alongside ‘skills’.

STAGE 2

The second stage of our brand journey was to decide on our motto that best represents our philosophy around learning and education.

Our initial research was quite an exploratory exercise and language agnostic. We contemplated what would resonate the best with the ‘Hamsa’ symbol and ideated a couple of options:

• oppia ikä kaikki  (finnish) means ‘live and learn’
• gnōthi seautón (greek) means ‘know thyself’
• अप्प दीपो भव “app dipo bhav” (samskrit) means ‘be your own light’
• questus paratus (latin) means ‘getting ready’
• सा विद्या या विमुक्तये “sā vidyā yā vimuktaye”(samskrit) means ‘knowledge is that liberates us’

The last one spoke to us as we believe that education and learning should not be limited to skill building alone, it should go beyond to help us understand how to live a happy life. Accordingly we chose our school motto:
सा विद्या या विमुक्तये “sā vidyā yā vimuktaye”
‘knowledge is that liberates us’

Each dot was getting connected. Further visualisation enabled us to design our next version of the logo.

In our enhanced logo, while ‘Hamsa’ sits in the center and radiates love, purity, and elegance, the shield is protecting us from the bad.

The sun-rays signify our intent to pull us out of the darkness.

Our motto सा विद्या या विमुक्तये reminds us that education is the medium that empowers us to break the barrier of our prejudices, judgments and leads us to a meaningful and blissful life.

The next task was to converage to our school name and its tagline.

STAGE 3

In Feb 2019 we had the opportunity to meet Suzanne Perkowsky and Janne Jormalainen who were visiting from Finland and seeking collaborators to introduce the Finnish early childhood education program in India. Thanks to Ashish Srivastava who introduced us to them and catalysed this conversation. We were quite impressed with their approach, values and framework. That day we decided to be their partner. ‘nordic’ prefix comes from that discussion. We wanted to create a learning envirnment where we can identify the potential of our young ‘kids’ from diverse background and experiences and celebrate the things that do that make us feel ‘wonder’.

Finally our research began to find a tagline. We were very sure of creating an environment where learning pedagogy is not prescriptive. Teachers should have enough freedom to choose the learning methods and tools and children must find it enjoyable experience. Curriculum framework should enable free flow of ideas, experiences, feedback etc. That landed us to the tagline “where learning flows freely”.

STAGE 4

After having completed the Brand logo, motto, school name and tagline exercise, we were contemplating having some house names. Why house names?

House names can serve as a way to create a sense of belonging among the young learners and it can also be a fun way of engaging and collaborating with your team. It will provide them a sense of identity to represent themselves in an event and help them to connect with the rest of the school community.

We deeply reflected on what values we want our children to imbibe and demonstrate in everyday chores and during learning activities. And agreed that these house names subtly communicate those values!

We brainstormed about various dimensions of life such as animals, birds, flowers and even marine life and finally our exploration ended with  “Reef”,, “Mosaic”, “Rainbow” and “Constellation”.

While “Reef” suggests the idea of a diverse and inclusive community of marine life, “Mosaic” refers to a piece of art made up of many small, individual pieces that come together to create a larger, cohesive image ‘Rainbow’ represents the diversity and beauty of individuality and ‘Constellation’ represents interconnectedness.

We feel that this combination of names is a great representation of the values we are looking to convey. And this makes a complete story of nordic wonderkids where learning flows freely.

Thanks Shubhradeep Guha and Sunny Kumar for their continued support during brand conceptulisation phase and thanks Ashish for being a true partner on this journey!