When passion leads the way, an artist becomes an entrepreneur.

I was born in Bangalore, a peaceful pensioner’s paradise and soon to be the bustling Silicon Valley of India.

My father crafted model airplanes at National Aeronautics and my mother was a homemaker. I was 4 years old when we lost my dad. Mom rallied around me and my sister, and worked hard through tough times to bring us up.

The first time I remember recognising the artist in me, I was 7 years old. I had created a sketch that made everyone around me sit up and take notice, which in turn made me realise I had something special.

I wasn’t a class topper, but from then on, I participated in a lot of art competitions and won enough to make me a popular name in school.

By the time I turned 15, my calling and my passion, both led me to study art and design at Ken School of Art, after which I enrolled for a degree in Art and Visual Communication at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat. 

For 5 years, I honed my skill as an artist. In an era before digital graphic designing, I learnt to make everything from posters and portraits to lifelike sculptures by hand.

Despite my mother’s best efforts to keep the household running, our financial situation was always precarious. To make ends meet, I picked up several part-time jobs.

Starting out as a cleaner, I went on to work as a caricature artist, a stage designer and a film set designer, I even created cutouts of politicians during elections. Slowly, but surely, my artist’s soul and entrepreneurial mind helped me earn enough while I did what I loved.

By the time I turned 20, the presence of computers was changing the way we lived. Always hungry to learn, I was keen on exploring the intersection between art and technology. I taught myself coding and design, disproving the popular myth of the dominant left or right brain.

My growing fascination with coding, coupled with the lack of respect for artistic talent in India, led me to a job in the Middle East. Once there, my hunger for learning pointed me towards New Zealand.

At 22, I embarked on my studies at DNA College in Christchurch which helped me evolve into a true, well rounded designer. I emerged from college with a bank of knowledge of not only technology and art, but psychology and strategy as well. I was ready to capture the market with a skillset worth reckoning.

At 25, the love of my life, Kruti, and I got married. The analytical Gujarati mind met the artistic soul, forming the complete yin-yang. 

New Zealand opened up a world of opportunities for me. This beautiful country became a second home and I began working at VWD in Queenstown after which, moved on to Webstore in Hamilton.

In Auckland, I worked at Ogilvy and TBWA, where not only did I design for the biggest brands, I also learnt how to build a team from scratch and picked up a few international awards along the way.

Even though I was enjoying my professional journey in New Zealand, I couldn’t stop thinking about the lack of India’s contribution to the design world. My new goal was to put India on the map for design. I came back home, with a big dream for a big country. 

I embarked on this journey with a big idea and a small home studio. In our rush to send proposals out to our prospective clients, our nameless venture was quickly christened Pixitree.

I was 32 when Pixitree became Lollypop. In our first studio, it was just me and one other member. Not only was I a designer here, I was also the salesman, the project manager, the HR team as well as the cleaner and coffee boy and everything in between! As I slowly learnt what it took to run a studio, within a year, we had moved into a garage studio and started hiring more designers.

Soon, Lollypop had become a strong team of 25 amazing designers. Our focus was designing solutions for small startups and medium-sized companies. At this stage, we also moved into our very own self-designed studio, which for me, was an absolute dream come true.

During this time, I took every opportunity to spread design awareness on all the platforms I could access. After having worked with Myntra, Swiggy, Housing.com and many other successful startups, Lollypop was now a well-recognised design studio. Our reputation was that of a startup friendly studio that helped empower and enable every big idea in India.

Our rapidly growing team, as well as our popularity amongst startups, necessitated our presence in Mumbai. We were now a team of 80+ digital magicians with two offices. Accolades began pouring in and we received many national and international awards. 

In less than 5 years, we had doubled our business and transformed into a full-fledged design studio with end to end services for our clients. 

During this time, we welcomed some international clients, garnering recognition for our unique value addition to their products. Our design-first approach became popular across the globe and team members took to the skies to spread the word.

A new city beckoned! We opened an office in Chennai, making us a team of more than 100 members across three cities. We became even stronger in research, and our team travelled across India to study people and their response patterns. Bigger brands were opening their doors to us and our design-first ideology. The top 5 brands in India came onboard with us.

2019 was a landmark year for our journey. Our exponential growth led to a merger with TerraLogic. Now, not only were we strong in design, but with experts in tech integrating with us, we became unstoppable. Merging with a tech giant gave us the final push towards global expansion.

Lollypop won government projects in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, enabling us to open a center in Dubai. Coming a full circle in my professional journey, I was back in the Middle East crafting a beautiful story of design and technology, now on my terms.

In 2020, I turned 40, and with that we opened our 4th center in Vietnam. Pushing the boundaries of design and technology, we opened a center in Ho Chi Minh City to explore talent in the world of Augmented Reality and 3D.