We live in a Country, where women are shamed for hanging their lingerie in open to dry.
We live in a Country, where the image of a sanskari woman is more important than having a solution to the shoulder pain caused due to wearing a wrong bra.
Most of the sales men in the Lingerie stores in India are men. Thus one young Enterpreneur Richa Kar decided to bring an end to this problem by starting to sell Lingerie Online. Thus Zivame was born in the year 2011.
Zivame was started by Richa Kar and her husband, Kapil Karekar in the 2011, with an Investment of Rs. 30 Lakhs they had borrowed from friends. Richa is an Engineering Graduate from BITS Pilani and an MBA from NMIMS, Mumbai and Kapil is a corporate veteran with over 10 years experience in companies like Yahoo!, ESPN, and InMobi.
Her Mother was embarrassed about her idea of selling lingerie online because it is a taboo in our society and her father did not understand her business idea. Determined to succeed she built Zivame, which today is worth more than Rs. 681 Crore.
The idea of Zivame came into her mind while working at SAP; she tracked the online sales of Victoria’s Secret which is America’s largest retail company of women’s lingerie. She observed that the sales figures crossed the target, but there was no such market for Indian Women. After working 8 years in the retail sector, Richa Kar got the fair knowledge of that sector and decided to start something of her own.
Investors got impressed from dedication and hard work of Richa Kar and she received her first funding of $3Mn in May 2012. Then another funding of $6Mn in Dec 2013 and $40Mn in 2015. Today her company valuation is more than Rs. 681 Crores.
Zivame at one point had 5 million visitors online every month out of which nearly 1 million were unique visitors. This number has grown multifold since then. Zivame’s consignments have reached all Indian states with the exception of Lakshadweep. With e-commerce becoming mainstream, Ziavme was quick to extract the maximum out of this domain by being amongst the early adopters.
The company had so far, raised $ 9 million from IDG Ventures India, Kalaari Capital and Unilazer Ventures. Alongside, Zivame counts Ratan Tata as an investor. Now that is big! Currently, Zivame is India’s leading online lingerie store which offers a variety of 5,000 styles, 50 brands and 100 sizes with a valuation of $100 million.
Image Source: Zivame.com
Reference:
https://startuptalky.com/richa-kar-zivame-founder-success-story/
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