Little Black Book
Little Black Book grew from a Delhi discovery platform into eight cities. This is the editorial work behind that growth: the city launches, the teams and the standards that kept each city local.
- Brand
- Little Black Book (LBB), city discovery and shopping, now part of Nykaa
- The work
- City launches, editorial leadership and editorial operations
The idea
By the time LBB was growing, every restaurant, shop and event in India was already listed somewhere. Finding options was easy. Knowing which were any good was hard, and that judgement is what readers came back to LBB for.
Led by Aakanksha Singh Devi: From one city to eight
LBB began in Delhi. Bangalore was its first new city, with no audience, no name recognition and no model to copy.
Aakanksha built the Bangalore edition from scratch, then took the model to Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. She hired and led the city teams, wrote the tone of voice and the editorial system, added travel as a category, and extended the work across discovery, shopping, video and search.
Led by Shaili Contractor: Mumbai and the homepage
Shaili was the editor in charge of LBB Mumbai, leading a team of seven across content, strategy and operations, and ran LBB Delhi for a period.
She worked directly with the founder on what the homepage and the app showed each day, using reader data to decide what went first, and built recurring formats the platform could keep running. She also managed push notifications and the India-wide content plan.
Led by Fatema Hanif: Kolkata
Fatema led LBB Kolkata. She built the editorial workflows and the standards for the city, and the plan for what the Kolkata edition covered.