Popular influencer Aashita Sood Agarwal’s Artffaire provides activities for parents and kids
After-school hours, birthday parties, or summer holidays spent with hands covered in arts and crafts materials, is a memory that many of us grew up with. Despite some glitches, creating something beautiful with one’s own hands, with a friend, sibling, or a parent, was a great pastime. It’s this connection between children and the grown-ups in their lives that Aashita Sood Agarwal’s new venture, Artffaire, hopes to foster through hands-on activities. “When I was hosting my son’s second birthday, I realised that beyond the usual bouncy castle or caricature artist, there’s nothing that engages the children or the adults. Everybody is busy – children and adults are doing their own things but there’s nothing to connect the two. I want to present activities that both can do together, with adults having a way to unwind and children having a platform where their creativity comes to life,” she explains.
Launched in March, Agarwal offers activities such as figurine painting, playing with kinetic sand, a board and brush activity, allowing kids to customise trinkets like photo frames, pen stands, and fridge magnets, along with a block printing activity that allows kids to customise clothes and tote bags. These can either be delivered to your doorstep or set up at events with end-to-end guidance and required materials. The idea was to provide utility alongside fun, explains Agarwal. “As a mother and as someone who grew up in an Indian household, a lot of return gifts would either be recycled for the next party or kept in the cupboard. We want our activities to have utility – created and designed by you and something that you can feel pride in using,” she says.
A former lawyer, Agarwal, the daughter of the director of the CBI and former DGP of Karnataka, Praveen Sood, took a break in 2020, following her marriage to cricketer Mayank Agarawal in 2018, to travel. Since then, she has grown as a lifestyle influencer and been a teacher at an NGO. Crediting her family with being a pillar of strength through this shift to business, she says, “I had a lot of support from my husband, in-laws and my parents. Mayank has been one of my pillars of strength, he’s been there throughout and he’s my biggest hype man and salesman,” she smiles, adding, “I keep getting messages and calls on how we can take this forward, what other activities we can introduce – they are doing the behind the scenes work for me and without them, I don’t think I’d have come this far.”