Founder, Zivame | Founded 2011 | Bengaluru
An engineer with other plans
Richa Kar did not set out to sell lingerie. She graduated from BITS Pilani in 2002 with an engineering degree, and in 2005 she enrolled for an MBA at NMIMS in Mumbai. Her campus placement took her to Spencer’s Retail in Kolkata, where she learned how organised retail worked from the shop floor up. Two years later she moved to SAP as a consultant.
By early 2011 she was already thinking about a business of her own. Outlook Business reported in 2016 that she was working on a food and grocery idea, an offline one. Then a client project changed her mind.
The client behind Victoria’s Secret
At SAP, one of her clients was Limited Brands, the American company behind Victoria’s Secret. Tracking its numbers, Kar noticed how sharply online orders jumped around Valentine’s Day. She told Outlook Business that almost a quarter of the lingerie maker’s sales were coming from the internet.
She set that against what she knew of India. Lingerie was sold over a counter, often by a male salesman, from a narrow range of sizes kept out of sight. “I soon realised that the customer experience in the category is very poor in India,” she said in a 2015 interview quoted by BW Disrupt. She listed the problems, “right from unavailability of size options to presence of male sales executives.”
Selling online would let a woman browse, compare and order without explaining anything to anyone.
March to August 2011
The idea came in March 2011, and by April she was serving her notice period at SAP. She called her then boyfriend, Kedar Gavane, now her husband, to talk it through, and he became her first investor. She visited Lifestyle and Shoppers Stop to study how lingerie was sold in stores. By May she had Triumph and Jockey signed up to sell on her site.
She named it Zivame, from the Hebrew “ziva”, meaning radiance: a “radiant me”. The first ₹30 lakh came from friends and family, according to Outlook Business. Friends built the website for free, and Kar listed the products herself. The Week and Inc42 name Kapil Karekar as her co-founder.
Zivame went live on 25 August 2011. Its first customer was in Indore.
The awkward conversations
The hardest part was not technical. It was the word “lingerie”.
“My mother was shocked at the idea,” Kar said in a 2013 interview quoted by BW Disrupt. “My father did not quite understand what exactly I wanted to do.” Outlook Business reported that her mother found it hard to tell friends and relatives what her daughter was selling. Kar chose not to ask her parents for money.
When she rented her first office, a shared space with classmates who ran a consulting firm, she described Zivame as an apparel company. Payment gateway providers held up approvals because her product description mentioned lingerie. She often took her boyfriend to meetings so the company would not look like a one-woman operation.
None of it seems to have put her off the category itself. Outlook Business reported that she was never uncomfortable selling lingerie, and that men on her team, including the head of product design, ran parts of operations and design.
Running on empty
About two months after launch, Zivame was running out of money and her credit cards were maxed out. Around three months later it raised $3 million from IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital. In a YourStory interview in November 2012, she credited Vani Kola of IndoUS Venture Partners, the firm now called Kalaari Capital, for a quick funding decision and for mentoring her.
By then Zivame was shipping to every state except Lakshadweep. It carried about 18,000 products from 20 brands and offered cup sizes from A to G, a range that was hard to find in Indian stores. “We don’t think of lingerie as a category,” she told YourStory. The team had grown to around 100.
Growth brought its own trouble. In mid-2012 a systems failure delayed orders for three days, and Kar and her team spent three or four nights packing boxes in the warehouse themselves. When her receptionist quit, she answered the phones under the receptionist’s name for a while. “There were nights when I felt I would die,” she told Outlook Business, describing the stretches when the company might have run out of funding. Her view of leadership was simple: “If you don’t get your hands dirty, then how do you expect your people to do it?”
Fitting lounges and own labels
More money followed. In 2013 Zivame raised $6 million, with Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures joining. That year Kar told an interviewer: “I want to make Zivame a billion-dollar enterprise in the next five to seven years.” In 2015 a $40 million Series C came in from Zodius Technology Fund, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional and existing investors. In September 2015 Ratan Tata invested personally.
Zivame used the money to tackle fit. A company survey found that 82% of Indian women had never had professional help finding the right bra. In early 2015 it sent a mobile fitting lounge to colleges in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. In December 2015 it opened its first physical fitting lounge in Bengaluru. In July 2016 it stopped selling other brands and focused on its own labels, among them Penny, CouCou and Rosaline. By then it delivered to more than 20,000 pin codes.
“Despite everything that happens, whether Zivame makes it or not, it is my responsibility and the buck stops with me,” she told Outlook Business that year.
Stepping back
The change came quickly. In January 2017, BW Disrupt reported that Kar had moved away from day-to-day operations in what it described as an investor-led restructuring. Shaleen Sinha, who joined from the Aditya Birla Group as COO in 2015, took over running the business. In March 2017, People Matters, citing The Economic Times, reported that she had stepped down as CEO. She stayed on the board and kept her shares. The board named Zodius Capital’s managing director, Shilpa Kulkarni, as its representative for strategic decisions.
Zivame today
In July 2020, The Week reported that Reliance Brands had bought Unilazer’s 15% stake in Zivame and planned to take full control, a deal reported at up to $160 million (about ₹1,200 crore). Zivame now sits within Reliance Retail.
The business has had a harder run since. Filings reported by Inc42 show revenue of ₹191.7 crore and a loss of ₹39.4 crore in FY24, then ₹164.7 crore in revenue and a smaller ₹15.7 crore loss in FY25. In March 2026, Inc42 reported more than 170 Zivame stores across India and a push into smaller cities through franchises. The company has said it turned profitable in a recent quarter; that has not been confirmed in public filings.
Fifteen years after launch, buying a bra in India can still be awkward. Zivame showed that a large business could be built on making it less so.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: Outlook Business (November 2016); YourStory (November 2012); BW Disrupt (January and March 2017); People Matters (March 2017); The Week (July 2020); Indian Retailer (November 2024); Inc42 (March 2026); Whalesbook (February 2026).
