Bringing speed, clarity, and control to managing art transport
Palette combines deep art logistics experience with intelligent technology to support the people, relationships, processes, and decisions behind every art shipment.
About us
A structured way to manage art shipping
Palette is the art shipping management platform connecting galleries, auction houses, collection professionals, and specialist shippers around the world.
We give the art world a simpler, more structured way to organize shipping. Instead of losing valuable time chasing estimates over email, art professionals can request, evaluate, and manage everything in one secure, intelligent system, with clear, standardized options and direct access to trusted transport providers.
Palette is software, not a shipper or a broker. We never take commission, mark up shipping rates, or interfere with your commercial agreements. Our role is to connect the industry through a more structured and transparent process: one that reduces repetitive admin, protects sensitive information, improves visibility across shipping activity and costs, and delivers the insight to make faster, more confident decisions.
Our story
An evolution of trust
Every so often, something appears in the art world that isn’t loud, but you can feel it shift the air. Palette is one of those things.
Palette wasn’t born in a lab or written on a tech incubator whiteboard. It came from two industry veterans who have spent decades navigating the global art market from the inside.
Leadership
Meet our founders
Simon Hornby
Executive Chair and Co-Founder
Simon brings more than 30 years of international experience across logistics, security, and risk management. His career spans directing Securicor’s operations across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, advising Lloyd’s underwriters on high-value fine art risk placement at Willis, and leading commercial strategy and growth as President of Crozier Fine Arts, one of the world’s leading specialist fine art logistics providers.
A recognized authority on fine art risk mitigation and transit security, Simon lectures internationally and previously co-chaired the ICEFAT Standards Committee, helping define global standards for fine art transport.
Having worked in art logistics from operations and insurance to risk and client relationships, he concluded that resolving the industry’s administrative friction required something new: a neutral, independent platform built for the professionals who manage these processes every day.
Mike Lardner
CEO and Co-Founder
Mike’s career has been defined by a refusal to accept that “that’s just how it’s done.” He approaches operational problems analytically, identifying the structural bottlenecks others overlook and designing scalable solutions around them.
He has spent nearly two decades leading international business strategy across Europe for organizations including Oxford University Press, Crown Worldwide, and UEFA.
For more than a decade, Mike and Simon worked in tandem, scaling Crozier Fine Arts across Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and London, partnering with leading auction houses including Christie’s, and working daily with clients across every major art market. Throughout that expansion, they kept encountering the same flaw: capable operations teams overwhelmed by manual paperwork, while significant investment in software changed very little. Palette was engineered to finally solve that problem.
The team
The expertise behind the platform
Palette brings together expertise in technology, the art market, and specialist logistics. Alongside the founders, the team applies a shared discipline: intelligent automation where it saves time, human judgement where it matters, and software that is precise, secure, and intuitive to use.
Product and engineering
With backgrounds spanning Oxford computer science, mathematics, and statistics, our product and engineering team has delivered demanding technology projects where accuracy and reliability are essential, and confidentiality is non-negotiable.
Their portfolio includes secure AI document systems for regulated industries, financial reporting platforms built to withstand scrutiny, intelligence tools serving one of the world’s largest sports organizations across dozens of countries and languages, and digital transformation for global logistics businesses.
Art market and marketing
Our wider team brings experience scaling Artsy, Artnet, and White Cube and shaping marketing for specialist fine art shippers including Martinspeed, Momart, and Crozier.
That experience spans art platforms, galleries, and logistics providers, bringing an understanding of both the opportunities technology creates and the trust on which the industry depends. It helps shape how Palette engages with the art world, communicates its value, and builds lasting connections with the professionals it serves.