Saffronart's Minal Vazirani: The art of auction
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. We live in a world where ‘Google’ is a verb," says Minal Vazirani, president and co-founder, Saffronart, an online art marketplace and auction house. Today browsing for objects and products, including art, online and having them shipped anywhere in the world seems commonplace, almost instinctive.
However, back in 2000 when Saffronart started in Mumbai, things were very different. Buying art online was almost unheard of. And yet the couple who founded it—Minal and Dinesh Vazirani—couldn’t think of any other way they wanted to do it.
Saffronart’s roots go back to the 1990s when the two were students—Dinesh attended Stanford and then Harvard in the US, while Minal went to UCLA in the US and then to INSEAD in France. When the couple met at a Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco, Dinesh was in graduate school while Minal was pursuing her undergraduate studies. They bonded over a common interest in art, design and art history; a year-and-a-half later, the two tied the knot.
The young couple would spend weekends browsing through art of all kinds at galleries and museums in the US. By that time, Minal had begun her career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), while Dinesh had joined his family business. “That is what we did for fun, away from work," shares Minal, 53, over a video call.
As they started building a small personal art collection, the two realised that there weren’t many resources for modern Indian art. It wasn’t just knowledge of Indian art that was lacking but also details about pricing. Soon after, they moved to Mumbai from the US, where they carried with them this passion for art.
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