Spices, yarn and a mill, 1958–1966.

Reliance began as a trading firm. Reliance Commercial Corporation was set up in 1958 by Dhirubhai Ambani as a small venture trading commodities, especially spices and polyester yarn, according to Wikipedia. In 1965 the partnership ended, and Ambani carried on the polyester side of the business himself.

Manufacturing followed a year later. In 1966, Wikipedia says, Reliance Textiles Industries Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in Maharashtra, and in the same year it set up a synthetic-fabrics mill at Naroda in Gujarat. On 8 May 1973 the company became Reliance Textiles Industries Limited. It held its initial public offering in 1977, and in 1979 the textile company Sidhpur Mills was merged into it.

Textiles also produced a consumer name. From 1975, Wikipedia says, the company expanded its textile business, and Vimal became its major brand in the years that followed.

The company went on making the raw material behind the cloth. In 1980 it set up a polyester filament yarn plant at Patalganga in Raigad district, Maharashtra, with financial and technical collaboration from the American chemical company E. I. du Pont de Nemours, Wikipedia says. The next steps moved further up the chain, from yarn to the petrochemicals used to make it. In 1985 the company dropped the word “Textiles” from its name and became Reliance Industries Ltd.. The Hazira petrochemical plant was commissioned in 1991–92, and between 1998 and 2000 the group built an integrated petrochemical complex at Jamnagar in Gujarat.

One name, many businesses.

The single word Reliance came to cover very different trades. In 1998–99, Wikipedia says, the company introduced packaged LPG cylinders under the brand Reliance Gas. In 2001–02 Reliance Petroleum was merged into Reliance Industries, and in 2002–03 the company bought a majority stake in Indian Petrochemicals Corporation from the government, renaming its Vadodara plants as the Vadodara Manufacturing Division.

Energy kept the name in the news. In 2002, Wikipedia says, Reliance announced a natural-gas discovery in the Krishna Godavari basin off India’s east coast. In 2010 Reliance and BP announced a partnership in oil and gas, including a joint venture to source and market gas in India, and in 2017 the company set up a joint venture with the Russian company Sibur to build a butyl rubber plant at Jamnagar. In August 2019 the company added the technology business Fynd, chiefly for its consumer businesses and its e-commerce work, and its Global Depository Receipts are listed on the London Stock Exchange, Wikipedia adds.

In October 2005 the split of the Reliance group between Dhirubhai Ambani’s sons was formalised, with Mukesh Ambani taking Reliance Industries and Anil Ambani taking businesses such as Reliance Communications and Reliance Power, Wikipedia says.

Retail brought the name onto high streets. In 2006, Wikipedia says, Reliance entered organised retail with a store format called Reliance Fresh. The retail arm, Reliance Retail, now runs many formats whose names begin with the word, among them Reliance Digital, Reliance Trends and Reliance Footprint.

Not every consumer brand carries the prefix. Wikipedia lists LYF, a 4G phone brand from Reliance Retail, and the media company Network18, whose channels have been grouped under the Colors TV brand. In February 2024, Wikipedia says, Reliance and The Walt Disney Company agreed to merge their streaming and television assets, a deal that closed in November 2024. Mukesh Ambani chairs the company, which is headquartered in Mumbai and listed on the National Stock Exchange of India and BSE.

Founders, icons and merged names.

Company identities in Asia often grow out of a single founder group or family holding, and the corporate mark has to cover businesses as varied as refining, retail, telecoms and software. The name tends to stay fixed while the symbol beside it is redrawn as the group changes shape, so one logo can sit above many trading names at once.

For app-first businesses the logo and the app icon are frequently the same object. A mark that must read at the size of a fingertip on a crowded phone screen is drawn as a simple, closed shape in one strong colour, and the full wordmark is reserved for larger formats such as signage, delivery bags and helmets.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates, in which a day and month repeated as numbers become the name of a sales event, is a recurring pattern in regional e-commerce. The date itself works as a brand asset that can be printed, counted down and repeated each year.

Mergers and new holding structures are a common trigger for redesign. A combined group may add a new parent name above existing consumer brands, or redraw a symbol to signal a shift from a single service to a wider platform, while keeping familiar colours so that customers still recognise the product.

Jio, 2016.

The group’s newest mass consumer brand has a name of its own. In 2010, Wikipedia says, Reliance entered broadband by acquiring Infotel Broadband Services, a company that had won spectrum in a nationwide fourth-generation auction held by the government. Six years later that business was launched to the public under the name Jio.

The launch came at the company’s annual meeting. On Thursday 1 September 2016, Business Today reported, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, announced the launch of Jio 4G services in India at the company’s 42nd annual general meeting in Mumbai, with services to begin on 5 September. “Jio stands on five pillars,” Ambani said, listing a high-capacity all-IP broadband network, affordable 4G smartphones, applications and content, digital service and simple tariffs.

The name came with a story about its letters. In a timeline published on 5 September 2016, Business Today quoted Ambani saying that “data is the new oil”, and reported that one company insider had said the Jio logo is a mirror image of the word “oil”, reflecting the group’s move from oil to data.

Jio later gained its own corporate layer. In October 2019, Wikipedia says, Reliance announced a restructuring that put its digital initiatives and telecom assets, including Reliance Jio Infocomm, into a new subsidiary, Jio Platforms, and in 2022 Akash Ambani was named chairperson of Jio.

For a design guide, Reliance Industries shows how one corporate name can work as a prefix for shops and gas cylinders while a separate brand, Vimal in fabrics and Jio in telecoms, carries the consumer story. Compare Mahindra, another Indian founder group whose businesses share one name and whose Rise positioning was meant to hold them together, and Wipro, which kept its name through a change from cooking oils to technology services. For this guide we use gold, a navy and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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