Business India

Beautiful bargains

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CORPORATE WORLD

October 14 to 27, 2002

Rs.15

Mercedes Benz is showing it off to potential customers. ICICI Bank is using it to boost its customers' banking experience. Indiaart.com the brainchild of mechanical engineer and soft entrepreneur, Milind Sathe, is using luxury car showrooms and a high technology bank foyer to showcase paintings by a paletteful of upcoming and bring them to the notice of potential buyers.
“It began as an accident when I bumped into some artists and they were complaining about exhibition costs being very off-putting,” says Sathe, who had earlier founded Link Software in Pune to provide web-based applications and give clients a low-cost internet showcase. “So I thought, why not take such people to the Net?”
Doing his homework, Sathe discovered that most artists needed a forum to reach out without spending too much money. And so Indiaart.com was born, with an avowed mission “to create a technology-enabled market place, create opportunities for artists and artisans to take their work to communities all over the world and create a value proposition for buyers.”

 But now he realizes that the gallery cannot survive on the Net alone. "1 experimented with physical spaces, setting up a bricks-and-mortar gallery in Pune in April 2002," he says. "In the next five years I will have 20-plus galleries. Worldwide." The first one abroad is already taking shape — it will be in California and open by the end of this year. Sathe is sure there is a big future (or his concept, especially sticking to being "professional, ethical, fair and transparent". "The focus is on creating a process-driven business, not one that is person-dependent," he says. "The concept is gaining acceptance in the marketplace, corporates are seeing an as adding value for their customers." The Pune gallery also organises training in art appreciation with lectures, workshops, live demonstrations by artists and "history of an" modules. These run to packed houses, with as many as 150 people crowding the gallery for two-hour demonstrations. But he is "very clear that Indiaart.com is not an NGO or a non-profit body, but a business organisation", The evangelism about promoting art and artists is an extra.
 ¨        SEKHAR SESHAN

He points out that the last part is as important as the first because media hype about art and artists has led the common man to think  “this is  not  for  me” though he spends a fortune on doing up his house with interior décor and furniture. ”So this is a forum to give any opportunity to the common man as a buyer, as well as for emerging artists,” Sathe explains. :It is an attempt to break out of  the closed circle of known artists-dealers-rich patrons.”
So why exhibit at Mercedes Benz showrooms? His answer is facile: “The rich also want good value propositions. Besides the new buyers, we want to show the traditional ones that they can buy more for the same money – in number, variety and talent.” Adds Hans-Michael Huber, managing director and CEO of DaimlerChrysler India Ltd, “The exhibitions give our customers and friends an unique opportunity to experience works of art.” The art world he points out, attracts the crème de la crème of society and high net-worth individuals and hence it is “highly appropriate” for the Mercedes-Benz brand to get involved.
The luxury car market has supported the art exhibitions by inviting “all customers and friends of Mercedes-Benz”, taking care of their hospitality and providing space at its dealers showrooms in seven cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Mumbai and Pune – between June and September this year. As one of several customer relationship initiatives taken by the company it has received “awesome response” according to Huber.
 Sathe has spun Indiaart.com into a separate company and has ambitious plans for it, including acquiring strategic funding. “Now there is a business model, a proven revenue model,” he says, “We have fulfilled orders world wide, shipping paintings as soon as the order and payment are received from our web site.”