This story appears in the February 7, 2016 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe to Forbes Asia
Buying bras in India can be excruciating--what with male staff milling around, clueless salesgirls and the aura of embarrassment shrouding the experience.
Richa Kar, founder of online lingerie retailer Zivame, sought to change all of that when she started her company in 2011. (Zivame is derived from the Hebrew "ziva," which means "radiant.") Kar's site offers 5,000 styles, 50 brands and 100 sizes--but more important it offers privacy and dignity in shopping.
"Imagine you are trying to buy a bra and there's a sales guy right across--you just want to die and go away," says Kar, 35. "A woman has to feel comfortable shopping for something that's intimate, necessary and functional. In a country like India this is a cultural problem, and we are using technology to solve this."
The predicament--and opportunity--seems to have registered elsewhere: The Malaysian sovereign fund, Khazanah Nasional, has invested in Zivame.
India's $3 billion lingerie market has its fair share of retailers, but many of them sell innerwear along with other apparel. "We wanted to take one category and completely dominate it," says Kar--in the process converting taboo to cool.
Zivame, which has raised $48 million in four years, has hit a chord with the growing population of economically independent Indian women who want to pamper themselves. The site has 2.5 million unique visitors a month and sells two bras a minute. Revenues are projected to cross $15 million by March 2016 with about 200,000 items being shipped every month. (Returns are free, while shipping is free over a $15 minimum.)
Kar has an engineering degree from the premier Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences and a management degree from Narsee Monjee Institute. She recalls her mother's first reaction when she gave up a well-paying job at
While working on a project with SAP, however, she'd learned that international leader Victoria's Secret got a fourth of its revenues from online sales. That set her thinking about the potential in India.
After starting Zivame with $600,000 in seed money--from her own savings and that of her then boyfriend (now husband) and other family and friends--she realized something else: Most Indian retailers stock only the fast-moving bra sizes, leaving a lot of the national market wanting for choice as well as discretion.
So she started developing in-house brands handling the design, manufacture and supply. She's rolled out labels like Pen.ny (for urban women), Cou Cou (for younger women) and Rosaline (a premium cotton product).These now contribute two-thirds of revenues. The bras are hand-sewn in eastern Europe, Bangladesh, China, Latin America--and India, too. But the bulk of the manufacturing is done abroad because of better expertise.
In December Zivame opened a fitting lounge in Bangalore's tony Indiranagar to help women understand their sizes as well as guide online orders.
"We don't want to get into the business of having [offline] inventory, because you'll never be able to stock all the sizes that are required," Kar says. "Buying a bra is not an emergency. Once it is ordered online it can be shipped in a day or two."
Of course, online success draws a crowd, and the Indian sector now also has the likes of PrettySecrets (backed by Orios Venture Partners), Clovia (backed by Ivycap Ventures) and Secret Angel. And Zivame has to contend with retail brands like
But the Malaysians took a shine to Kar's venture. Their $35 billion sovereign fund, which invests in everything from power to health care to financial services, across multiple geographies, made its first e-commerce investment in India with Zivame.
The fund shies from press inquiries, but Kar recounts its executives contacted her last year amid her third funding round. Her pitch drew near-immediate investment with a note of support for Zivame's "mission of women empowerment within and beyond India."
