Fastrack Brand Guidelines: Titan’s 1998 Youth Sub-Brand, Spun Off on Its Own in 2005

Born inside a watch company, given its own name.

Fastrack is a youth accessories brand owned by Titan Company, the Tata Group watch, jewellery and eyewear business with its corporate headquarters in Bengaluru. English Wikipedia says Titan began in 1984 as Titan Watches Limited and that, after its marketing partnership with Timex ended in 1997, it launched an economy watch range, Sonata, and a watch and accessories sub-brand aimed at younger buyers, Fastrack.

The trade magazine afaqs! set out the brand’s timeline in December 2014. Fastrack was launched in 1998 as a sub-brand of Titan, and in 2005 it was spun off as an independent accessory brand aimed at urban youth. In the same year it added sunglasses, and in 2009 it added bags, belts and wallets, steps the magazine tied to the brand’s aim of becoming a complete fashion label. English Wikipedia’s Titan article gives the same 1998 and 2005 dates in its section on the brand, while its opening summary dates Fastrack’s launch to 2005, the year it became a separate label.

The spin-off gave the name its own shopfronts. As of December 2014, afaqs! counted more than 150 Fastrack stores across India. Titan’s brand list, as English Wikipedia sets it out, now places Fastrack and Fastrack smart among the group’s watch brands, Fastrack Eyecare among its eyewear and Fastrack Bags among its fashion accessories, so the one name now spans several of Titan’s divisions.

Move On, in many versions.

Fastrack’s identity has been built mainly through advertising. Its brand thought, as afaqs! described it in 2013 and again in 2014, is “Move On,” a line each new campaign reinterprets. In April 2013 the magazine reported a set of 20-second television films by the agency Lowe Lintas, which went on air in the first week of April during the sixth season of the Indian Premier League. The films, titled Closet, Dining and Live in, had no dialogue, used a song by the French electronic duo Daft Punk, and dealt with social taboos through suggestion; each ended on a short written line built around “Move On.”

The agency told afaqs! that the films were thematic brand work with only subtle cues of the product range. The magazine reported that Fastrack targets 18- to 21-year-olds, and it singled out graphic details in the execution, such as a yellow landline telephone used as a prop.

Outdoor work followed in the same tone. In December 2014 afaqs! reported a billboard campaign called “Sorry For What,” created by L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, built on role reversals: a female model shaving her head and a male model wearing thongs among them. It ran from 15 December to 14 January on more than 100 large-format billboards in 20 cities and showed watches, bags, sunglasses and other products from the range; the outdoor agency was Milestone Brandcom and the media agency Maxus. Fastrack’s marketing head told the magazine that the brand thinks about social stereotypes and saw billboards as a way to address them. The same report listed earlier campaigns including “Just Be,” “Dump Them, Move On,” “Keep Trippin” and “Mature is In.”

For a designer, the record is one of attitude more than product. The agencies behind the 2013 and 2014 work described campaigns that carry only subtle cues of the range, and in the campaigns afaqs! listed, the constant is the “Move On” line, reworked each time.

Indian accessory brands and their owners.

Indian footwear, bag and accessory brands tend to present themselves through names more than through pictures. A single company often runs several labels at once, each with its own logo, catalogue and shop page, so that a rubber slipper, a sports shoe and a formal shoe can reach different buyers while sharing factories and distributors. On company websites the parent name usually sits in the footer and the investor pages, while the sub-brand names lead on the shelf.

Shopfronts carry much of that identity. Many of these companies sell through a mix of exclusive showrooms, franchised stores, multi-brand dealers and online marketplaces, and their own pages count those outlets and list the cities and states they reach. Some names are above all store names: Metro Brands runs Metro Shoes and Mochi as separate store banners.

Group ownership is part of the picture. Fastrack belongs to Titan Company, the watch and accessories business, and Woodland is the outdoor brand of the Delhi company Aero Club. Others, such as Relaxo, Liberty, Campus and Khadim’s, are listed companies whose corporate pages describe their founders, their factories and their share listings on the National Stock Exchange of India and BSE.

Advertising often leans on film actors, named in dated campaigns reported by the trade press, and on dated catalogues for each range. For a designer, the useful material is the documented part: the names, the store formats, the founding dates and the factories. The palettes and type in these guides are unofficial interpretations, and no logo or product is reproduced.

One name across watches, bands and perfume.

Fastrack has since moved into newer categories under the Titan umbrella. In November 2018 The Hindu BusinessLine reported that the brand had launched its Reflex smart bands in April 2017 and was then introducing the Reflex WAV, a band with gesture controls for changing music, taking photos and handling calls. Titan told the paper it had set up a separate business unit, Wearables and PAD, short for personal adornment devices, to focus on design, innovation and technology in that category.

A year later the name reached fragrance. In December 2019 afaqs! reported that Titan had launched Fastrack Perfumes, with the actor Ananya Panday as brand ambassador and seven variants with names such as Trance, Beat, Pulse and Solo. Titan already sold a fragrance brand, Skinn; a Titan executive told the magazine that the Fastrack range was “edgy, bold and experimental” in its language, where Skinn was meant to feel refined. The magazine noted that the brand had not yet launched an advertising campaign for the range at that point.

Taken together, the dated reports describe one name spread across watches, sunglasses, bags, belts, wallets, smart bands and perfume, with Titan’s other brands, such as Titan itself, Sonata and Skinn, kept separate for different buyers. Fastrack’s role in that portfolio, as the trade press has described it since 2013, is the youth label.

For a design guide, Fastrack shows how a parent company can give a sub-brand its own voice, its own shops and its own categories while keeping it inside a larger group. Compare Titan, the parent watch brand that took the name Titan Company in 2013, according to English Wikipedia, and Wildcraft, another Bengaluru name in bags and accessories. For this guide we use charcoal, ink and a warm yellow with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fastrack’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.