Tv's Rising Star

WITH SMART TVs IN LARGER SCREEN SIZES, SARAF’S VU IS COMPETING WITH SONY, SAMSUNG, AND LG TO PROVE THAT AN INDIAN BRAND IS NO LESS.

- Aveek Datta

DEVITA SARAF

38, CHAIRMAN AND CEO VU TECHNOLOGIES

KEY NO CHANGE MOVED UP MOVED DOWN NEW RETURNEE

IN JANUARY 2017, WHILE DONALD TRUMP WAS GETTING INAUGURATED AS THE 45TH U.S. PRESIDENT, DEVITA SARAF BECAME THE talk of the town in Mumbai. The 38-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Vu Technologies, which sells TVs under the brand name Vu, brought out a full-page advertisement in The Times of India congratulating Trump. It featured a photo of her with the real estate baron from a couple of years ago when they had met during his visit to India.

In her own words, half of her father’s friends from the business community “fell off their chairs” the morning the ad was published, and she got massively trolled on social media. The head of a competing brand asked a common friend, a hotelier, to check how much she had paid to make this photo op possible. Her friend called her at 7.30 a.m. and put the competitor’s query to her. “I asked my friend to tell this gentleman that I didn’t charge Donald Trump anything!” Mumbai-based Saraf says with a laugh.

This feistiness is an essential trait Saraf has put to good use while taking on the big global daddies of the consumer durables world to carve out a large niche for her brand in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for almost everything money can buy.

The ad might have seemed an impulsive decision to outsiders but served a larger purpose. It helped put brand Vu

“in the right place”, says Saraf, since Vu’s products were getting designed at a lab in California, and therefore had an American connect. “My channel dealers loved the ad and some of them even framed and kept it.”