In anticipation of Women’s Day, Urban Company and Talented’s new ad strives to create a conversation around the dignity of labour for women massage professionals.
In 2023, they started a conversation to narrow the respect gap between ‘blue-collar’ and ‘white-collar’ professionals. This year for Women’s Day, they have gone a step further by taking an intersectional approach to talk about the dignity of labour for their women professionals – specifically belonging to the Spa category.
The film follows the journey of a young Spa professional who unpacks the stigma surrounding her profession, first for herself and then for her family. She comes home to an angry younger brother, who has been ridiculed in his building because his sister is a massage therapist. She then proceeds to unpack this misogynistic bias and makes him understand the systemic stigma that results in this prejudice.
Tarun Menon, Director of Brand at Urban Company said, “Our cultural biases colour certain professions in India, and those bleed onto perceptions of Professionals on the Urban Company platform. Each Professional goes through weeks of vocational-skill training conducted by experts and is certified by the NSDC – it’s the reason they’re called Professionals. Despite that, such biases colour their careers. Everyone has the right to work with pride and dignity, and more importantly, to be respected for it. This is true for Professionals on our platform as it is for society at large – work isn’t always just work, for some, it’s their life’s work.”
Binaifer Dulani and Leena Gupta, Creatives at Talented said, “The mainstream media portrayal of massages are shrouded in pervasive secrecy and indentured servitude on the back of sexually coloured undertones. A masseuse is an expert in the science of body relaxation, but her technical craft and expertise are completely disregarded in media portrayals of the vocation, and society at large. The same, however, is not true for physiotherapists who also engage in touch-based wellness. We translated the lived experiences of hundreds of UC Spa Pros to develop our plot, and our creative decisions were guided by ethnographers and fieldwork researchers, and academicians in gender, Garvi Dhar and Dr. Papori Bora. The UC Spa Professional doesn’t just create equity for all masseuses, but all working women whose success is often credited to everything but their hard work and expertise.”
Urban Company’s video has received more than 1.1 million views on Instagram and more than 45k views on YouTube till date along with a host of compliments. “Hats off to Urban Company!!!” one user praised. “Not easy to put such a conversation forth with Indian media, the thoughtful writing and concept are truly moving,” another wrote.
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