Good girls, good cars, great stories

Founded by Ritika Jatin Ahuja as India’s first all-women supercar club.

Queens Drive Club was founded by Ritika Jatin Ahuja, Chief Operating Officer and Marketing Head of Big Boy Toyz, as India’s first all-women supercar club.

By the time I joined in mid-2023 it already had what most new brands never get: a genuine founder story, sixty-plus committed members, and coverage in India Today, BusinessWorld, Indulge Express and The Daily Guardian. The proposition was sound and the attention was real.

What it did not yet have was the apparatus of a brand. A club runs on moments. A brand runs on systems, and somebody has to build the second without flattening the first.

That line tells you the register. Not corporate feminism, not a diversity initiative. Something funnier and sharper, aimed squarely at women who already knew what they wanted and were tired of being handed the passenger seat.

Five jobs that in a larger organisation would belong to five people.

I ran the brand day to day as its marketing executive, and later as manager, under the founder’s direction. In practice that meant five jobs that in a larger organisation would belong to five people.

• Identity & collateral

  The applied identity system. Stationery, invoice books, business cards, envelopes, member gifting and print collateral, built out from the crest into a consistent physical language.

• Events & guest list

  Invitation design and despatch, guest list curation and management, and on-ground coordination for the drives. In a members' club the guest list is the product.

• Social & campaigns

  Channel management, content planning and campaign execution across the club's platforms, including partner activations and collaborations.

• Commerce

  Keeping the storefront current. Product listings, seasonal merchandising and campaign tie-ins across the club's online shop.

• The drives

  Organising the Queens Drive itself. The thing every other asset exists to serve, and the only one where a mistake is visible to everybody at once.

Reclaiming the colour is the joke and the point simultaneously.

The brand’s decision to sit in magenta was made before I arrived, and it was the right one. Reclaiming the colour is the joke and the point simultaneously.

My job was to stop it reading as decoration. A heraldic crest, lions and unicorn and crown, in gold on racing green, does something a wordmark cannot: it borrows the visual grammar of motoring clubs that have excluded women for a century, and simply takes it.

The discipline was in the restraint. Magenta carries the personality, so everything structural stays gold rule, green field, ivory ground. Where the collateral is functional, an invoice, a letterhead, the pink recedes entirely and the gold banding does the work.

No design system survives a badly curated room.

The part of this job that looks administrative on a CV and is actually the strategy: deciding who is in the room.

An exclusive club is not made exclusive by its price or its logo. It is made exclusive by curation, one name at a time, and by the discipline to say no to people who would dilute the room. Guest list management under the founder’s guidance was where the brand positioning either held or collapsed, every single event.

No design system survives a badly curated room.

Brand work is not a discipline you apply from outside.

Queens Drive Club is where I learned that brand work is not a discipline you apply from outside. For sixteen months I was the identity system, the invitation list, the social calendar, the storefront and the person checking that the right number of cars turned up.

That breadth is unusual and I would not trade it. It is also the reason I now recognise, quickly, when a beautiful brand deck has no operating reality underneath it.

See Wolf Moon — the QDC × Opalina campaign →