India's mid-market manufacturers are exporting more than ever, now accounting for 48.55 percent of the country's total merchandise exports in FY25, according to Ministry of MSME data.
Yet a growing number of businesses in the Rs 20 to 200 crore turnover bracket are losing international contracts, formal credit, and senior talent not because of product quality or pricing, but because their brand presentation does not reflect the scale at which they actually operate.
This is the pattern that Beryl Agency, a Noida-based branding and UI/UX studio with sixteen years of experience and 1,573 client engagements across 67 industries and 19 countries, has been documenting consistently across India's manufacturing belt.
“A manufacturer operating at Rs 80 crore walks into a conversation with a European distributor or a private equity firm, and the first evaluation that happens is a visual and verbal audit of the company,” said Prashant Gupta, Founder of Beryl Agency and member of the CII National Committee on Design Innovation and Design Policy.
“If the brand is speaking at a Rs 5 crore level while the business operates at Rs 80 crore, the meeting is effectively over before the product catalogue is opened.”
A May 2025 joint report by SIDBI and CRISIL found that approximately 70 percent of Indian MSMEs continue to rely on traditional, largely unbranded modes of marketing, a figure researchers identify as a primary barrier to market access and scalability.
Medium enterprises were found to carry the highest addressable credit gap within the MSME ecosystem, partly because formal lenders struggle to assess organisational maturity when a business cannot present itself coherently.
Akshat Raghava, Co-founder and Creative Director at Beryl Agency, who brings a Rhode Island School of Design background to the firm's strategic work, noted that the gap is particularly visible to international audiences.
“Indian B2B manufacturers have built extraordinary capabilities over the decades. A sophisticated international buyer reads the mismatch between what a company has built and how it presents itself immediately, and they move on.”
Beryl Agency works with mid-market manufacturers and growth-stage enterprises to align brand identity, digital presence, and communication language with the commercial stage the business has actually reached.
For more information, visit: www.beryl.agency