Zivame

Timeline

1. 2011Richa Kar, a former SAP executive, founds Zivame as an online lingerie store from Bengaluru.
2. 2013The company launches private labels, moving on from being a pure aggregator of third party brands.
3. 2013A 6 million dollar round is raised from private equity investors, and Ronnie Screwvala's Unilazer Ventures backs the company.
4. 2015Zivame raises Rs 250 crore in a Series C round led by Zodius Technology Fund and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, at a valuation of about 100 million dollars.
5. 2015Ratan Tata invests an undisclosed amount in the company.
6. 2015The company says it will open 100 fitting stores across ten cities in two to three years, and launches its mobile app.
7. 2016New stores open in Pune, Gurgaon and Chandigarh as the offline plan widens.
8. 2017Richa Kar steps back from daily operations and the company pivots from an inventory led ecommerce model to a marketplace.
9. 2018Zodius Capital raises its stake by buying out Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India, becoming the largest shareholder.
10. 2018Zivame commits about Rs 40 crore to offline expansion and lifts its store target from 26 to 100.
11. 2018Reported loss for the year falls 44 per cent to Rs 32.1 crore, from Rs 57.6 crore a year earlier.
12. 2019The company raises Rs 60 crore in a round led by Zodius Capital and other investors.
13. 2019Zivame holds talks with private equity firms to raise 50 million dollars at a valuation of about 200 million dollars.
14. 2019Revenue is reported at about Rs 140 crore for the year to March 2019, with a stated aim of crossing Rs 250 crore the following year.
15. 2019The brand says it holds about 26 per cent of India's online women's lingerie market.
16. 2019Management says it wants to expand from about 35 stores to 60 in the next financial year and break even within 12 months.
17. 2020Reliance Brands buys out Ronnie Screwvala's entire stake in Zivame, bringing the brand into the Reliance Retail fold.
18. 2020The business is described as having more than 30 retail stores and a presence in over 800 partner stores.
19. 2021Reports say Gaja Capital and L Catterton are in separate discussions to buy about 40 per cent of the company.
20. 2021Reliance Retail buys Amante from MAS Holdings, building an innerwear portfolio around the Zivame acquisition.
21. 2022Amisha Jain, who had run Zivame as chief executive, leaves to lead Levi Strauss in India.

What it does

Zivame is an Indian lingerie brand that sells intimate wear to women, mainly through its own website and app, its own stores and a network of multi brand outlets. The business is run by Actoserba Active Wholesale Private Limited, which is registered in Bengaluru. Its range covers bras, briefs, shapewear, sleepwear, activewear and swimwear, sold under its own brand rather than as a reseller of other labels.^[13]

The company sits in the middle of the Indian lingerie market rather than at the top of it. Bras sold under its own label are priced for a middle class customer, and its growth has come from persuading women who had only ever bought intimate wear from a neighbourhood shop or an assistant attended counter to order it online. That was a behaviour change as much as a retail play, and it is what gave the brand its early visibility.^[5]

Zivame makes money on the margin between what it pays to manufacture and what a customer pays for the finished product. Private labels in fashion can earn gross margins of 30 to 60 per cent, roughly double the margin on selling someone else's brand, which is why the company stopped aggregating third party labels and went all in on its own.^[14]

The physical side of the business exists to solve a sizing problem rather than to add a shop. Indian women are underserved on bra sizing, so a fitting store where staff measure a customer and explain shapes converts far better than a web page. Zivame has said that conversion in its stores is about twice the rate it sees online, with an average order value at least 1.2 times higher.^[7]

History

Zivame was founded in late 2011 by Richa Kar, who had worked at SAP before starting the company. The idea came from watching how women bought lingerie, and the first version of the business was an online store that stocked other companies' brands, including Enamor, Amante and Jockey, and shipped them to customers who did not want to buy in person.^[1][5]

The first institutional money arrived in December 2013, when the company raised about 6 million dollars from private equity investors. Ronnie Screwvala's Unilazer Ventures was among the backers from that period and kept investing in later rounds, and the company has said it raised roughly 8 to 9 million dollars in its first two rounds altogether.^[3][4]

By 2015 the business had reached enough scale to raise the largest round any Indian lingerie retailer had then seen. In September 2015 it raised Rs 250 crore, or about 40 million dollars, in a Series C round led by Zodius Technology Fund and Khazanah Nasional Bhd, the investment arm of the government of Malaysia, with Unilazer Ventures, IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital also taking part. The round valued Zivame at about 100 million dollars. Ratan Tata separately invested an undisclosed amount in the same period.^[4][6]

The 2015 round came with a plan for physical retail. Richa Kar said the money would be used to build fitting stores, and that the company aimed for 100 of them across ten cities in two to three years, starting in Bengaluru. She also said that about 55 per cent of purchases were already coming from mobile phones and that about 60 per cent of revenue came from the company's own products, which set the direction for everything that followed.^[5]

The pivot that reshaped the company came in 2017. Zivame moved away from holding inventory on its own books and towards a marketplace model, and Richa Kar stepped back from running the business day to day, with the chief operating officer taking over operations. In the same period the company stopped being a multi brand store and became, in effect, a single brand retailer.^[13][14]

The years after the pivot were about making that model work. Zodius Capital took control of the shareholding in 2018 by buying out Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India, and the company committed about Rs 40 crore to opening stores, with a target of moving from 26 outlets to 100. Losses narrowed, with the reported loss for the year to March 2018 falling 44 per cent to Rs 32.1 crore from Rs 57.6 crore, while expenses rose 8 per cent to about Rs 126 crore.^[7][9]

By the end of the decade Zivame was the second largest selling women's lingerie brand in India after Jockey, and it held roughly a quarter of the online market for women's lingerie. It had also become an acquisition target. In November 2020 Reliance Brands bought out Ronnie Screwvala's holding, and the company moved into Reliance Retail's innerwear business, which Reliance then widened by buying Amante from MAS Holdings the following year.^[7][15][16]

Founders and leadership

Zivame was founded by Richa Kar, an engineer and a BITS Pilani alumnus who had worked as an executive at SAP before starting the company. She was the public face of the brand for its first six years, and the company's early coverage almost always framed the business through the awkwardness of the category: a woman selling bras online in a market where the subject was not discussed openly.^[1][2]

Kar ran the company through three funding rounds, the move into private labels and the first phase of store opening, then stepped back from daily operations in 2017 as the company changed its model. She stayed connected to the brand after the change of control, and the company's later chief executive, Amisha Jain, left Zivame in 2022 to lead Levi Strauss in India.^[13][14]

Leadership below the founder changed more often than the founder's role did. Zivame appointed Shaleen Sinha as chief operating officer in 2016 to push the ecommerce side of the business, and it later brought in senior hires for technology and people functions as the company shifted from a pure web business to one with stores, warehouses and a supply chain.^[7]

Ownership of the company has mattered more to its direction than any individual appointment. The board has been controlled successively by Unilazer Ventures, then by Zodius Capital from 2018, and then by Reliance Brands from 2020, and each change of control arrived with a change in strategy. The pivot to a marketplace, the store push and the move into a large group all followed decisions made by whoever held the largest stake at the time.^[9][15]

Products and brands

Zivame began as a shop window for other people's labels. Its early catalogue carried Enamor, Amante and Jockey among others, and the company earned a retail margin on each sale without owning the brand. That changed in 2013 when it launched private labels, and by 2015 about 60 per cent of its revenue came from products it owned.^[14][5]

The private labels were Penny, Cou Cou and Rosaline, and they covered different price points and styles rather than competing with each other. In 2016 the company decided to fold all three into a single Zivame brand, on the argument that a single strong label would build recall faster than three small ones, even though that meant giving up the option of selling a cheaper and a premium tier under different names.^[14]

The range has widened well past bras since then. Zivame sells briefs, shapewear, sleepwear, loungewear, activewear and swimwear, and it has used its own fitting data to push sizes and shapes that mainstream Indian brands did not stock. Product breadth is the reason the company describes itself as an intimate wear brand rather than a bra retailer.^[4]

Sizing is the commercial core of the range. Zivame has claimed to stock more than 5,000 styles in about 100 different sizes drawn from around 50 brands at the peak of its aggregator years, which at the time was a far wider size run than a physical store could carry.^[4]

The online store and the app

The website is where the brand was built. Zivame's pitch was privacy: a woman could buy intimate wear without a shop assistant, a family member or anyone else watching, and the company made that the centre of its early marketing even when the subject was considered awkward to advertise. It is the reason the brand could grow before it had any physical presence at all.^[3]

Mobile arrived quickly, and the company followed the traffic. By 2015 about 60 per cent of Zivame's traffic came through phones and about 55 per cent of purchases did, so the company launched its own app and said that a phone was a more private device to browse and buy on than a shared computer. That judgement has held, and mobile remains the main channel.^[4][5]

The company also invested in the machinery behind the website. It set up a data sciences lab to work on sizing, fit and merchandising, and it used that data to decide what to stock in which stores. Running a business where a customer cannot try before buying means the recommendation and sizing layer has to carry more weight than it does in ordinary apparel retail.^[5]

The online channel also gave Zivame reach that a store chain could not buy. About one third of its revenue came from tier two and tier three cities, where a woman who wanted a wider size range had almost nowhere local to shop. That geography is the reason the brand's later expansion into smaller cities was a plan to convert existing online customers rather than to find new ones.^[4][15]

Fitting stores and offline retail

Zivame's offline strategy started from a measurement problem rather than a marketing one. Most Indian women wear the wrong bra size, and a store that measures a customer and explains shapes sells more per visit than a website can. The company's first stores were built as fitting stores, small outlets where the fitting room and the trained staff were the product, and it opened its first ones in Bengaluru.^[5]

The rollout was slower than the original plan of 100 stores in two to three years. Two stores opened in Pune, Gurgaon and Chandigarh in 2016, and by early 2018 the chain had 26 outlets with a fresh target of 100 by the end of the next financial year, backed by about Rs 40 crore of investment. That target was also missed: by 2019 the company was working with about 35 stores and had set a new aim of 60.^[7][8]

What the stores did deliver was measurable conversion. Zivame has said that conversion rates in its stores were about twice what it saw online and that average order values were at least 1.2 times higher, so each store paid for itself on fewer customers than a website needs. The chain also gave the company a way to sell shapewear and sleepwear that customers rarely buy unseen.^[7]

The store network is only part of the physical footprint. Zivame also sells through more than 800 multi brand partner stores, which puts the brand in front of customers who will never visit a Zivame outlet. That combination of a small owned chain and a large partner network is what the company means when it describes itself as an omni channel retailer, and it is the model it was still running when Reliance bought in.^[15]

Revenue and financials

Zivame's disclosed financials are a story of a company that grew revenue and lost money doing it. Revenue was reported at about Rs 140 crore for the year to March 2019, with management saying it expected to cross Rs 250 crore in the following year. Whether that target was met is not established, because the company has disclosed nothing since.^[15]

The loss figures that are public show the pivot working before the sale. For the year to March 2018 the reported loss fell 44 per cent to Rs 32.1 crore, down from Rs 57.6 crore the year before, while total expenses rose 8 per cent to about Rs 126 crore. A narrowing loss on rising revenue and only mild expense growth is the signature of a retailer getting its unit economics under control rather than one buying growth.^[8]

Capital has always been easy for Zivame. It raised about 6 million dollars in 2013, then Rs 250 crore in 2015 at a valuation of about 100 million dollars, then Rs 60 crore in 2019, and in between it held talks to raise a further 50 million dollars at about 200 million dollars. That is a lot of capital for a company with revenue in the low hundreds of crores, and it reflects how expensive the category is to run: inventory, warehouses, stores and a fitting network all cost money before a single bra is sold.^{[3][4][10][11]}

The deal that ended the independent years in November 2020 was struck on those numbers. Zivame was described at the time as having posted about Rs 140 crore of revenue for the year to March 2019 and as hoping to cross Rs 250 crore the next year, and it had 30 plus stores with a presence in more than 800 partner outlets. Reliance Brands bought the Unilazer Ventures stake in that context, and Reliance Retail then extended the same logic to Amante in 2021.^[15][16]

Shareholding and ownership

Zivame's cap table has changed hands four times in little more than a decade, and each time the largest shareholder changed the company's strategy. Unilazer Ventures, Ronnie Screwvala's investment vehicle, was the first significant backer from 2013. Zodius Technology Fund and Khazanah Nasional Berhad arrived with the 2015 Series C, and among the early venture investors were IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital.^[2][4]

The consolidation began in May 2018, when Zodius Capital raised its stake by buying out both Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India, which had been investors since the early rounds. By 2019 Zodius held about 60 per cent of the company, with Unilazer Ventures and Khazanah Nasional holding most of the rest, and it was Zodius, not the founder, that was negotiating the company's future.^[9][11]

Those negotiations produced the Reliance transaction. In November 2020 Reliance Brands bought out Ronnie Screwvala's entire stake in Zivame, adding the brand to a retail group that was already assembling an innerwear business. Reports at the same time said Reliance Brands was looking to take a larger position in the company, and Zodius was the shareholder on the other side of that table.^[15]

One more bid is on the record. Reports said Gaja Capital and L Catterton were in separate discussions to acquire about 40 per cent of Zivame, with Gaja Capital said to be in advanced talks, at a time when Zodius Capital was the largest shareholder with roughly 60 per cent and the brand was the second largest selling women's lingerie brand in India after Jockey. Reliance's purchase settled the question in the end.^[9][15]

The practical effect of all this is that Zivame is no longer independently owned. Its founder does not control it, its venture investors have exited, and it operates inside Reliance Retail, which has also bought Amante from MAS Holdings. For a brand built on being a challenger to the way Indian women shop, the final structure is that of a large group's specialist label.^[16]

Employees and offices

Zivame is headquartered in Bengaluru, where it was founded and where Actoserba Active Wholesale Private Limited is registered. The city gave it access to the ecommerce engineering talent of the time, which mattered because the company ran its own website, app, data sciences lab and warehouse operations rather than outsourcing them.^[5][13]

The workforce is split between a corporate and technology team and a large field organisation. Fitting stores need trained staff, and a chain of a few dozen outlets plus a partner network of more than 800 stores needs a sales and merchandising team to service them. That mix of a digital company and a retail floor operation is unusual in Indian ecommerce, where most companies of Zivame's vintage had no physical staff at all.^[5][15]

The company has never published a headcount. Its disclosures have been about revenue, losses and store counts instead, and specific employee numbers in circulation should be treated as estimates rather than disclosed figures. What is known is that the company kept its corporate centre small enough to move decisions quickly: it went from an aggregator to a private label business, then to a marketplace and then to a store chain inside eight years.^[8][15]

Acquisitions and ownership changes

Zivame has been the subject of transactions rather than the buyer of them. It has made no significant acquisitions of its own, and its history reads as a sequence of stake purchases by larger investors and strategic buyers, starting with Unilazer Ventures in 2013 and ending with Reliance Brands in 2020.^[2][15]

The most consequential transaction before the Reliance deal was Zodius Capital's buyout of Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India in May 2018. That single move put about 60 per cent of the company in one pair of hands, converted a scattered cap table into a controlled one, and gave the company a shareholder who could decide on a sale without needing the agreement of several venture funds.^[9]

The 2020 change of control was followed by a widening of the buyer's portfolio rather than by any acquisition by Zivame itself. Reliance Retail bought Amante from MAS Holdings in 2021, the same year reports said Gaja Capital and L Catterton were circling Zivame, and the group's innerwear business was built around those brands. Zivame's role in that structure is as the mass market intimate wear label with the strongest online recognition.^[9][16]

No partnership in Zivame's history has been confirmed as transformative. It has worked with multi brand retailers, marketplaces and its own franchise style store network, but there is no record of a joint venture or licensing deal on the scale of its funding rounds. That is consistent with a company whose strategy ran through its balance sheet and its stores rather than through alliances.^[4][15]

The Indian lingerie market

The category Zivame plays in is large and was, for a long time, almost entirely offline. When the company raised its Series C in 2015 the Indian lingerie market was estimated at about 3 billion dollars with less than 2 per cent of it online. The online lingerie category itself was put at roughly 1 billion dollars at that point, which is why the company's pitch to investors was about shifting an existing spend rather than creating a new one.^[4][5]

Adoption has been the bottleneck. Zivame's then chief executive said in 2019 that only about 6 per cent of the 40 million women shopping online in India bought lingerie online, and that the pool of online women shoppers was itself expected to grow to about 130 million by 2025. Even a small improvement in that 6 per cent figure would have moved the company's revenue materially, which is the bet the whole business rests on.^[11]

The market's structure also helps a private label. Most Indian lingerie is sold through unbranded and regional players in small shops with limited size runs, so a national brand with consistent sizing and a wide range can charge more than a local competitor without competing against another national label. Zivame's early rivals in online were small, and several of them, including OyeGirl, shut down while Zivame kept raising money.^[4]

The category is now much more contested. Amante, Jockey and Enamor are all national brands with physical distribution, Clovia and Pretty Secrets built online businesses in the same years, and Reliance Retail's entry means the two strongest online lingerie brands ended up under one owner. That consolidation is a direct consequence of how slow the margin on logistics and stores is to arrive.^[4][16]

Competition

Zivame's largest competitor is Jockey, which is the biggest selling women's lingerie brand in India and, unlike Zivame, built its position through department stores and multi brand outlets before going online. Zivame was described as the second largest selling women's lingerie brand in India after Jockey, which is a strong position for a company that started eleven years after most of its rivals.^[9]

Its direct online rivals were Pretty Secrets and Laceandme among others, and the company's funding round in 2015 was framed very explicitly as a race against them: Zivame's Rs 250 crore was the largest round any Indian lingerie retailer had raised, and Pretty Secrets had raised 2 million dollars in its Series A from Orios Venture Partners, Indian Angel Network and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels.^[4]

Amante and Enamor compete for the same customer at a similar price point and have the advantage of being in physical stores that Zivame had to build from scratch. Zivame answered that with fitting stores and its partner network, but the cost of matching an established brand's distribution is the main reason its losses ran as long as they did.^[5][7]

The competition that mattered most in the end was between owners rather than brands. Reliance Retail, which already had a large apparel business, bought Zivame and then Amante from MAS Holdings, which shut the argument about whether an independent online lingerie brand could fund its own distribution. The answer the market gave was that it could grow, but not get large enough quickly enough to stay independent.^[15][16]

Controversies and criticism

Zivame's earliest problem was social rather than commercial. Selling bras online in India meant advertising a product that many families treated as unmentionable, and the company's founder has spoken publicly about the discomfort the category caused at home and the difficulty of finding investors willing to fund a business built on a taboo. The company turned that into its pitch: privacy was the product.^[1][2]

The pivot to a marketplace in 2017 drew criticism from within the category. Discarding the aggregation model meant delisting other brands from the site and concentrating the business on Zivame's own products, which some in the trade read as the company turning a multi brand destination into a single brand shop at the risk of losing customers who wanted choice. Even commentators quoted at the time warned that a single brand strategy takes a bet on brand acceptance and can cost recall.^[14]

Financial performance was questioned throughout. Zivame lost money for years and its Rs 40 crore offline push in 2018 was a bet that stores would convert better than the website, made by a company that was still loss making. The narrowing loss that followed justified the call in part, but the targets management set for store counts were missed repeatedly, first 100 stores by 2019 and then 60 by 2020, against a chain that was still around 35 outlets in 2019.^[7][8]

The company's post sale identity is its open question rather than a controversy. A brand that built its reputation on being an independent challenger now sits inside Reliance Retail alongside Amante, and its founder and venture investors are gone. Whether a large group keeps a challenger brand's edge is something the market has not yet settled.^[15][16]

Reading the numbers

The first number to hold on to is about Rs 140 crore, which is what Zivame's revenue was reported to be for the year to March 2019. That is a modest figure for a company that had raised roughly Rs 310 crore of equity across its first three rounds, and it explains why a sale rather than a listing was the outcome.^[4][11][15]

The second is the loss. Rs 32.1 crore in the year to March 2018, down 44 per cent from Rs 57.6 crore, on expenses of about Rs 126 crore, means the company was losing roughly a quarter of its revenue on the way to breaking even. Two things follow: the unit economics were improving, and there was still a long way to go when Reliance arrived.^[8]

The third is the store count, because it is the honest measure of the offline bet. The plan moved from 100 stores in 2015 to 100 stores by 2019 to 60 stores by 2020, against an actual base of 26 in early 2018 and about 35 in 2019. A target that moves twice and is still missed is the clearest evidence in the public record that building a lingerie chain in India costs more and takes longer than the model suggested.^{[5][7][8][12]}

The fourth is the market share. About 26 per cent of India's online women's lingerie market in 2019, and second place overall behind Jockey, is a genuinely strong position, and it came from a much smaller revenue base than Jockey's. That gap between share of online and share of the total market is the whole story of the category: Zivame won the channel that was growing and was still small relative to the shops.^[9][11]

Put together, the numbers describe a company that was good at the front of the business, the brand and the customer experience, and slower at the back of it, distribution and cost. Its valuation went from about 100 million dollars in 2015 to a reported 200 million dollars in 2019 while revenue stayed in the low hundreds of crores, and the eventual buyer was a retail group that could fund the distribution Zivame had been building store by store.^[4][11][15]

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