Co-founder, Director and Chief Revenue Officer, Clovia | Founded 2013 | Noida
A decade ago, many Indian women could not have told you their bra size. Most bought what the neighbourhood shop happened to stock, and hoped it fitted. When Neha Kant and her co-founders set out to sell lingerie online in 2013, that silence was the problem they had to solve first.
Nine years later, Reliance Retail paid ₹950 crore for a majority stake in the company they built. This is the story of how Clovia got there, one measurement at a time.
A small town, a different path
Neha Kant was born in Delhi and grew up in Haridwar, according to Founder Thesis, which interviewed her on its podcast. Her family was connected to BHEL, the public sector engineering company, and the expected road for her was a conventional one. She grew up in a small town with few places to shop.
She studied mathematics at Miranda House, Delhi University, and then took a postgraduate diploma in business management at FORE School of Management in New Delhi.
Learning to sell
Her career began in advertising. She worked as an account executive at FCB Ulka, one of India’s best-known agencies, before moving into media at the India Today Group, where she went on to head sales and marketing. According to company profiles, she also worked as marketing head at Smile Interactive Technologies. In all, she spent more than a decade in corporate roles, Adtech Today reported in 2026, much of it learning how brands talk to customers and how online shoppers behave.
Her husband, Pankaj Vermani, came to the idea from a different direction. Business Today reported in 2016 that his father ran a lingerie shop in the Sadar Bazar of Meerut, and that Pankaj worked there as a teenager in the 1990s. He went on to study at IIT Delhi and build technology businesses. Between them, the couple had a rare mix: one understood marketing and media, the other had grown up behind a lingerie counter and knew technology.
Starting a conversation nobody was having
The company, Purple Panda Fashions, was set up in 2012, and the Clovia brand launched in 2013, with three founders: Pankaj Vermani as CEO, Neha Kant as Chief Revenue Officer, and Suman Chowdhury, a fashion designer who had been a product manager at Lee Cooper, as COO. Zurich-based Mountain Partners put in a seed round in 2013. The team worked out of Noida.
The gap they saw was simple. Lingerie in India was sold in cramped shops with a narrow range of sizes, often by male shopkeepers, and the experience was awkward. Shops stocked only the common sizes, so manufacturers made only those. According to Founder Thesis’s account of her interview, an internal survey found that 85% of women did not know their correct size.
Even advertising the product was hard. “When we started, there was no place to advertise. Even putting up a hoarding would invite objections,” she told IMPACT in 2026.
Clovia went online first, which gave women privacy, and built its message around education and humour. Early photographs used blonde models, Founder Thesis reported, and they did not connect with Indian shoppers. The brand switched to models who looked like its customers.
Building India’s own size chart
The real work was fit. Clovia sold bras by both band and cup size, and gathered feedback from its own customers on sizing, comfort and fit. Those answers fed into what became the Clovia Curve Fit Test, a short online tool that recommends a size based on body shape.
The data showed something the industry had largely ignored. Bodies, tastes and climates varied across the country. “The north-eastern sizing is very different from a Punjab sizing or from a south Indian sizing,” Pankaj Vermani told Business Today in 2016. “The tastes are different, so are the colour choices.” Fabrics, too, had to change with the seasons in different regions.
Neha watched how women actually shopped. Many kept two sizes, she told Business Today, “because she knows she can gain weight or lose weight.”
Over the years, the feedback became a large body of data. Clovia says it has collected more than a million Indian fit data points and over a million product reviews, and now offers more than 50 sizes with solutions for nine body types.
Fast, cheap and close to the customer
The second decision was about speed. Clovia designed in house, used around ten outsourced manufacturers, and launched 100 to 150 new options every month, Business Today reported in 2016. A repeat style of bra could be remade in 12 days and briefs in seven, Neha said, against an industry norm of about three months.
Prices came down too. At launch, a bra cost ₹1,500 to ₹2,000. To reach more women, Clovia moved to a range of ₹300 to ₹1,000. By 2016, it was selling about 2.5 lakh units a month, and about 60% of revenue came from tier II and tier III cities.
It did this on little money. IvyCap Ventures invested ₹30 crore in a Series A in June 2015, and the company said in 2016 it had used only half of it. Revenue grew from ₹18.6 crore in FY15 to ₹30 crore in FY16, according to VCCEdge data reported by YourStory.
Growth, stores and loyal customers
More funding followed: $4 million in 2017 from Singularity Ventures and others, a Series B of about $10 million led by AT Capital, and a $4 million pre-Series C round in December 2020. Clovia moved offline as well, opening its own stores and selling through chains such as Central and Brand Factory. Revenue reached ₹52 crore in FY18, Fashion Network reported, and crossed ₹100 crore by FY20, according to figures compiled by Inc42.
The fit work showed up in loyalty. In December 2020, Vermani told BW Disrupt that repeat customers made up 50% of sales.
The Reliance years
On 20 March 2022, Reliance Retail Ventures announced it would acquire an 89% stake in Purple Panda Fashions for ₹950 crore, through a mix of buying existing shares and fresh investment. The founding team and management kept the remaining stake. The announcement also noted that Soumya Kant and Abhay Batra had recently been elevated to co-founders. Reliance already owned Zivame and Amante, and Clovia became the third intimate-wear brand in its portfolio.
The founders stayed on. Neha continues as Director and Chief Revenue Officer, and also serves as an independent director at the jewellery brand BlueStone, Adtech Today reported in February 2026.
Growth under Reliance has not been smooth. Figures compiled by Inc42 put Clovia’s operating revenue at ₹238.6 crore in FY25, with a loss of ₹58.5 crore.
The customers, though, have kept coming back. In July 2026, Neha told IMPACT that repeat customers account for nearly 68% of Clovia’s sales, and that the brand now runs more than 85 stores. Bras remain its largest business, with sleepwear and activewear growing fastest.
Looking back on twelve years, she put it plainly. “We pulled lingerie out of the closet and made it a mainstream topic,” she told IMPACT.
It began with a question most women could not answer, and a company that kept asking until it could.
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.
Sources: Business Today (November 2016, March 2022); Reliance Industries media release (March 2022); YourStory (April 2017); Fashion Network; BW Disrupt (December 2020); Tofler; Inc42; Founder Thesis podcast; Images Business of Fashion (April 2025); Adtech Today (February 2026); IMPACT (July 2026).
