Richa Kar

Timeline

1. About 1980Born; press reporting in 2013 described her as a 33 year old at the time.
2. 2000sStudies engineering at BITS Pilani and works in the software industry before moving into retail.
3. 2011Launches Zivame in August as an online lingerie store from Bengaluru, under the company Actoserba Active Wholesale.
4. 2012IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital put in about 3 million dollars, the first institutional round.
5. 2013UTV founder Ronnie Screwvala leads a 6 million dollar round, about 36 crore rupees, through Unilazer Ventures.
6. 2013She tells the press the money will go into personalisation and into reaching women in smaller cities, and describes lingerie as the new chocolate.
7. 2014Ratan Tata invests an undisclosed amount in the company.
8. 2015Zivame raises 250 crore rupees in a Series C round from Zodius Technology Fund and Malaysia's Khazanah Nasional, at a reported valuation of about 100 million dollars.
9. 2015The company changes direction, moving from a marketplace selling other labels to a brand selling mostly its own.
10. 2015Shaleen Sinha joins from the Aditya Birla group in November as chief operating officer.
11. 2016FY16 results show a loss of 54 crore rupees on revenue of 62.6 crore rupees, with losses 84 per cent wider than the year before.
12. 2017In January the chief operating officer takes charge of day to day operations in what is described as an investor led rejig.
13. 2017She submits her resignation as chief executive in February and steps down in March, staying on the board without selling her shares.
14. 2017Zivame applies to the government to convert into a single brand retailer so it can sell its own products in stores and online.
15. 2018Amisha Jain becomes chief executive and Zodius buys out Kalaari and IDG to hold at least 45 per cent of the company.
16. 2018Losses narrow to just over 32 crore rupees for FY18.
17. 2019Losses narrow again to 19.56 crore rupees on revenue of 137.9 crore rupees, and the company raises 60 crore rupees in a bridge round.
18. 2020Reliance Industries acquires Zivame.
19. 2022Amisha Jain leaves Zivame to lead Levi Strauss in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Early life and education

Richa Kar is an engineer and a BITS Pilani alumnus, and the reporting on Zivame's early funding described her that way from the beginning, in the headline of the story that announced the company's first large round.^[5] Outside the degree, the public record of her early life is thin: she has not published a date of birth, and profiles of the company have concentrated on the business rather than on her family or her schooling before university.^[5]

Reporters writing in 2013 described her as 33 years old, which places her birth around 1980, and that single line is the only dating of her age in the coverage of the company.^[4] Before Zivame she worked in the software industry, and the move into lingerie retail was a change of sector rather than a step along a retail career: she has described the choice in terms of a category nobody was serving properly rather than a category she had grown up in.^[4]

The rest of what is known about her comes from how she ran the company. In the interviews she gave while Zivame was growing she talks about fitting, sizing, privacy, personalisation and the technology that supports them, which is the language of the product and the platform rather than of fashion.^[11]

The idea for Zivame

The premise of the company was simple and, in India in 2011, unusual: women did not want to buy lingerie in a shop with a male shopkeeper behind the counter, and the category was badly served as a result. Kar put it plainly in interviews, saying that the company was making a category that had been treated as something to be embarrassed about into an ordinary part of what women buy.^[4]

She also framed the market in numbers. India had about 150 million internet users at the time, women were 39 per cent of that traffic and growing faster than men, the lingerie market was worth about 3 billion dollars and was dominated by unbranded sellers, and the shopping experience itself was poor in a way that an online store with a real size range could fix.^[4]

The competition she was entering was mostly multi brand e-commerce rather than specialist retailers. Zivame was competing with the big general marketplaces for the same orders, and the established Indian lingerie brands sold through shops and were only beginning to look online. The global comparison the reporting used was Victoria's Secret, which took more than a quarter of its 5.5 billion dollars of sales online, and Indian brands such as Enamor and Peri Peri were starting to follow the same path after seeing how much of their own volume had moved to marketplaces.^[4] That context is why a specialist store with a fitting service was a defensible position: the general marketplaces could sell a bra, but they could not tell a woman her size.^[4]

The values the company was built around, as Kar described them, were confidence, comfort and choice, and the fitting stores that came later were an attempt to make the same promise work in a physical space.^[12] She summarised the ambition in one line that the press quoted repeatedly, that lingerie was the new chocolate: a category that could be sold as a small everyday indulgence rather than as a purchase a woman had to steel herself for.^[4]

Founding Zivame and the early years

Zivame was founded in late 2011 and launched in August of that year, run out of Bengaluru by a company called Actoserba Active Wholesale. It began as an online store carrying a wide range of styles and sizes, and the proposition was privacy, a real size range and the ability to buy without a shop assistant.^[11][12]

The first outside money arrived quickly. IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital invested about 3 million dollars in the early rounds, and by 2013 Ronnie Screwvala's Unilazer Ventures was leading a 6 million dollar round, about 36 crore rupees, which took the total raised to roughly 9 million dollars. Screwvala's own explanation of the bet was that broad based consumption stories in India were scalable and capable of becoming brands.^[4][5]

Kar's plan with that money was specific. She said it would go into the technology backbone, to improve personalisation, recommendations and merchandising, and into marketing aimed at getting more women in tier two cities to buy online, with the company betting on quadrupling its online sales over three to five years.^[4] Ratan Tata invested an undisclosed amount in 2014, which is the kind of backing that older Indian companies often cite as a signal of legitimacy.^[1]

The early years were a period of building a category as much as a company. Kar argued that a fifth of the company's women customers had never shopped online before they bought from Zivame, and described the firm as a change agent for them.^[4] That framing, a brand whose job is to teach a market rather than simply to serve one, stayed with the company even after she left.

The funding ladder and the pivot

The largest round in Zivame's history came in 2015, when Zodius Technology Fund and Malaysia's sovereign fund Khazanah Nasional led a Series C of 250 crore rupees, with existing investors Unilazer, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital also taking part. Before that the company had raised about 8 million dollars across its series A and B rounds, and the 2015 round valued it at a reported 100 million dollars.^[11][10]

The round came with a change of strategy. Zivame moved away from holding inventory for many labels and towards selling mostly its own products, because private label margins were in the range of 50 to 60 per cent against the 15 to 20 per cent a marketplace earns on somebody else's brands. At the time of the funding about 60 per cent of sales already came from its own label.^[1][11]

Kar explained the use of the 2015 money in terms of awareness, technology and stores: raising understanding of the category, ramping up the platform and the mobile experience, and opening fitting stores across the country. She said the company would start with Bengaluru and open 100 fitting stores across the top ten cities over two to three years, where women could be fitted and could learn which styles suited their body type.^[11]

Mobile became a large part of the plan at the same time. The company launched an app, and Kar said about 55 per cent of purchases were coming from mobile phones, which she explained by the fact that a phone is a private device and therefore suited to a category people did not want to browse publicly. The company also set up a data sciences lab to work on personalisation, and said about 60 per cent of revenue came from its own products.^[11]

Building the brand: sizing, fitting and stores

Zivame's differentiator was not the range on its own but the fit. The company built its early pitch around a large size range, a fitting service and a private buying experience, and the stores it opened were designed around the same idea: dedicated spaces for sessions with fit experts, comfortable changing rooms and appointments booked online or taken at the door.^[12]

The first stores were a deliberate experiment in making an online brand physical. After a flagship store in Bengaluru the company opened in Pune, Gurgaon and Chandigarh and then Delhi, with the stores sized differently in each city, and it added a feature it described as a first in India, a lingerie party for a small group of women that combined shopping with games and a photo booth. Kar said at the time that the flagship's response was the reason for taking the format to more cities.^[12]

The numbers behind the store strategy were better than the online channel on two measures. Zivame said conversion rates in stores were twice those online and the average order value at least 1.2 times higher, and the company was covering about 800 points of sale in addition to its own stores.^[6][7] That is why the plan moved from a handful of stores to a target of 100, with an investment of 30 to 40 crore rupees behind it.^[6]

Sizing was the other half of the story. The company developed several labels under its own name for different needs, including Zivame, Velocity, Rosaline and Penny, and by 2018 almost 90 per cent of its revenue was coming from those own labels rather than from other brands.^[6] Kar's own summary of what the business was selling was that it wanted to play a major role in teaching women about intimate wear and in making good lingerie accessible and affordable.^[11]

Running Zivame as chief executive

The period in which Kar ran the company day to day was also the period in which it spent the money it had raised. In FY16 the company's total expenses reached 43.3 crore rupees as it invested in its own label and product design, advertising and marketing more than doubled to 46.7 crore rupees, inventory costs rose 35 per cent to 47.8 crore rupees, and net sales grew 38 per cent to 62.6 crore rupees while net losses widened 84 per cent to 54 crore rupees.^[1][3]

Those numbers describe a company buying scale rather than a company in trouble, and Kar's public position through the period was that the pivot to selling its own brands would eventually pay for itself. A market participant quoted in the coverage of the change explained the arithmetic the board was working with: marketplaces earn far less per unit than a brand selling its own label, but running a brand means holding inventory, which is a heavier business and one that requires different measures of success.^[1]

The strategic direction she steered was omni channel, with the online store and the fitting stores feeding each other, and new categories beyond lingerie. The plan announced in 2017 was to move into women's wear more broadly, adding categories such as active wear, on the way to breaking even in the 2018-19 financial year, with the company expecting the multiple channels to cut its cash burn by 60 to 70 per cent over eighteen months.^[3]

By the time she stepped back the company had also applied for a single brand retail licence, which would have let a foreign funded company sell only its own products in its own stores and online. The application, made in 2017, was part of the same strategy the fitting stores served: control the product, control the shelf, control the margin.^[13]

The boardroom change and stepping down

The change at Zivame came from the board rather than from the founder. In January 2017 Shaleen Sinha, who had been hired as chief operating officer in November 2015 from the Aditya Birla group, took over the day to day operations in what the press described as an investor led rejig. The company's line at the time was that Kar remained chief executive and was working closely with the board on strategic projects, having moved away from day to day business.^[1]

Two months later she resigned. She submitted her resignation to the board in February and stepped down as chief executive in March, and the company went further, reverting to a marketplace model in which it would curate collections from other brands alongside its own. The shareholders, five in number by then, appointed the managing director of Zodius Capital, Shilpa Kulkarni, as the single board member the management would deal with, a structure the company said was meant to give young companies one clear channel instead of five voices.^[2]

Kar kept her shares and her board seat, and the company was explicit about it, saying she had not diluted or sold her equity.^[2] That separation matters when reading the accounts of the period: the founder left the management of the company while remaining one of its owners, which is why the criticism of the change was aimed at the board's reorganisation rather than at her.

The organisation that succeeded her kept changing. Sumeet Yadav, a former country head of Tommy Hilfiger, was appointed executive chairman in October 2017; Shaleen Sinha moved on; Amisha Jain became chief executive in 2018; and Zodius bought out the early venture investors Kalaari and IDG to hold at least 45 per cent of the company, controlling three of its six board seats.^[6]

Business career and companies

Kar's business career is short on employers and long on one company. She trained as an engineer at BITS Pilani, worked in the software industry, and then spent most of the following decade building Zivame, the company she founded in 2011 and led until 2017.^[5] That single company is the whole of her verified business record, which is unusual among founders of her generation and is a fair description of how she worked: one category, one brand, one long build rather than a portfolio.

The roles she held inside it changed over time. She was founder and chief executive from the launch in August 2011 through the Series C, the branding of the company's own labels, the fitting stores and the mobile app, and she gave up the day to day running of the business in January 2017 when the board put the chief operating officer in charge of operations, formally stepping down as chief executive in March.^[1][2] She kept her board seat and her shares, and the company said publicly that her equity was untouched.^[2]

The corporate structure around her is worth setting out because the naming confuses readers. The store was branded Zivame, the company that ran it was Actoserba Active Wholesale Private Limited, based in Bengaluru, and a separate entity called Mila Star Retail made and sold the private labels.^[6][2] Mila Star reported a net loss of 20.51 lakh rupees for the financial year ended 31 March 2016, slightly narrower than the 22.60 lakh rupees of the previous year, which is the kind of small number that tells a reader how thin the margins in apparel were.^[2]

Her own holdings were never broken out in a public filing. What the record carries is the fact of ownership rather than its size: she was a shareholder in a company whose five investors were Zodius, Khazanah, Unilazer, IDG and Kalaari, she retained her stake when she left the chief executive's chair, and the company was later sold to Reliance Industries.^[2][6][14] Any percentage attached to her name today would be an invention.

What happened to Zivame after she left

The company that Kar founded kept growing in the years after her exit. Losses narrowed from just over 32 crore rupees in FY18 to 19.56 crore rupees in FY19 while revenue from operations rose from 86.6 crore rupees to 137.9 crore rupees, marketing spending fell 18 per cent, and the online channel still accounted for about 80 per cent of the business. The company put the Zivame brand's annual run rate at 340 crore rupees for FY20 and said the share of gross sales coming from its app had risen from 50 per cent to 65 per cent in a year.^[8][9]

It also kept raising. In 2019 Zivame raised 60 crore rupees in a bridge round led by Zodius Technology Fund and a group of individuals, alongside 10 crore rupees in an extended Series C from Allana Investment and Trading Company, and was reported to be in talks to raise 50 million dollars at a valuation of about 200 million dollars.^[7][10] The investors by then were Zodius with about 60 per cent, with Unilazer and Khazanah holding the rest.^[10]

The end of the story for the original company came in 2020, when Reliance Industries acquired Zivame.^[14] Amisha Jain, who had run the business since 2018, later moved on to lead Levi Strauss in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.^[14] Kar's creation therefore ended up inside India's largest retail group, which is a common destination for a well built consumer brand in the sector.

The market argument she made in 2011 has also largely come true, and the numbers the company published at the time show how it was expected to develop. The Indian intimate wear market was worth about 3 billion dollars, only 40 per cent of it organised, and it was expected to reach 6 billion dollars within five years with the organised share rising to 60 per cent, while the number of online women shoppers was expected to grow from 40 million to 130 million by 2025.^[9][10] Those are the figures a reader should hold on to when judging the size of the bet she was making.

Net worth and wealth

There is no published estimate of Richa Kar's personal net worth, and this page does not carry one. What is documented is that she was a founder and shareholder of Zivame, that the company said in 2017 that she had not diluted or sold her stake when she stepped down as chief executive, and that Zivame itself was valued at about 100 million dollars when it raised in 2015.^[2][11]

Those three facts do not add up to a personal figure, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Her shareholding percentage was never published, the 2019 reports of a 200 million dollar valuation were about a fundraising in progress rather than a completed transaction, and the price Reliance paid for the company in 2020 was not disclosed in the coverage of the deal.^[10][14] A reader who wants to know what the founding stake was worth in the end will not find it in the public record.

What can be described with sources is the scale she built. Zivame went from a store launched in August 2011 to a company with 250 crore rupees of institutional funding behind it by 2015, revenue of 137.9 crore rupees and losses of 19.56 crore rupees for FY19, and a brand run rate of about 340 crore rupees a year by FY20.^[11][9] For a founder, those are the numbers that describe the asset, which is the honest substitute for a wealth estimate.

Family and personal life

Kar has not discussed her family in public and no verified record of a spouse or children appears in the reporting on Zivame, which is why this page records none. The coverage of her is entirely professional: funding rounds, store openings, management changes and the strategy of the company she founded.^[4][8]

The one personal detail that recurs is the framing she gave the category. She told interviewers that shopping for intimate wear in India was avoided because it was embarrassing rather than because it was unwanted, that a quarter of the company's customers had never bought anything online before, and that a private channel and a proper size range were the fix.^[4] That is closer to a statement of purpose than a private fact, and it is the way she explained the business whenever she was asked about it.^[12]

The absence of a personal record is stated here rather than left blank so that a reader does not mistake it for an oversight. Where the public record does not carry a date of birth, a spouse or a home address, this profile says so plainly instead of filling the gap with something that looks like a fact.^[5]

Public profile and speaking

During the years she ran Zivame, Kar was the company's main public voice and the person quoted in almost every story about it. She spoke at funding announcements, store launches and category debates, and the quotes that survive from that period are about the market rather than about herself: the size of the opportunity, the need to educate women about fit, the value of privacy and the way a phone makes private shopping possible.^[4][11]

Her most quoted lines are still the ones that describe the category. She said the company was making a category that had been treated as embarrassing into a part of fashion accessories, that a fifth of its women customers were shopping online for the first time, and that lingerie was the new chocolate, a small indulgence rather than an awkward purchase.^[4] She also described the goal in plain terms at the 2015 funding, saying the money would be used to educate women about intimate wear and to make good lingerie accessible and affordable.^[11]

After she stepped back from day to day management her public appearances stopped being product announcements and became company level statements. The explanation of the board's reorganisation, that a young company with five shareholders needed one point of contact for management, was given by the company rather than by her, and the retreat from the chief executive role was announced without a lengthy statement from the founder herself.^[2]

Awards and recognition

The recognition recorded for Kar is attached to the company she founded rather than to her personally. Zivame's funding rounds were the vehicle for the attention: the story in which Unilazer invested was carried with her BITS Pilani background in the headline, and the 2015 Series C from Zodius and Khazanah was covered as a milestone for Indian ecommerce in a category nobody had taken seriously.^[5][11]

She also carried a category first that is worth naming. Before Zivame, online lingerie retail in India barely existed as a funded business, and by 2019 the company was claiming a 26 per cent share of India's online women's lingerie market, a position built on a size range and a fitting service rather than on discounts alone.^[10] That market share is the closest thing to an award in the public record.

On the verified record there is no individual award in Kar's name, and this profile does not claim one. The clearest recognition she has received is that the company outlived her involvement, kept raising money after she left and was eventually acquired by Reliance Industries.^[14]

Controversies and criticism

The criticism attached to Kar's period in charge is financial, and it comes from the company's own filings. For FY16 Zivame reported a loss of 54 crore rupees, an 84 per cent increase over the previous year, on net sales that had grown 38 per cent to 62.6 crore rupees, with marketing spending more than doubling to 46.7 crore rupees and inventory rising to 47.8 crore rupees.^[1][3] The company was spending far ahead of its revenue in pursuit of scale, and that is the substance of the case against the strategy she was running.

The bigger criticism was about control. Her departure came through an investor led reorganisation rather than as a planned succession, with a professional chief operating officer taking over daily operations first and the shareholders appointing a single board member to direct strategy. The accounts of it in the business press describe a founder who had to accept the board's decision and whose involvement was scaling back sharply, even as the company insisted she remained chief executive and stayed on the board.^[1][2]

The pivot itself drew scepticism. A market participant quoted in the coverage argued that moving from a marketplace to a brand meant a heavier inventory model and different measures of success, which is a fair description of the risk the company took and the reason its losses widened before they narrowed.^[1] Whether that trade was worth it is settled by the later results: losses fell from over 32 crore rupees in FY18 to 19.56 crore rupees in FY19 as the brand model found its footing.^[8]

Nothing in the verified record alleges personal misconduct by Kar, and this profile says so for a reason. The disputes around her tenure were about strategy, board control and burn rate, all of which are documented in the company's own numbers.^[1][2]

The questions people search about Richa Kar

• Who is Richa Kar? She is the founder of Zivame, the Bengaluru based online lingerie retailer she started in 2011 and ran as chief executive until 2017.^[5][11]
• What did Richa Kar study? She is an engineering graduate of BITS Pilani, and she worked in the software industry before starting Zivame.^[5]
• How old is Richa Kar? Reporting in 2013 described her as 33, which puts her birth around 1980 and her age at about 46 in 2026. She has not published a date of birth.^[4]
• Is Richa Kar still the CEO of Zivame? No. She stepped down as chief executive in March 2017 after an investor led reorganisation, though she stayed on the board and kept her shares.^[2][6]
• Who owns Zivame now? Reliance Industries acquired the company in 2020. Before that Zodius Capital was the largest shareholder with at least 45 per cent.^[14][6]
• How much funding did Zivame raise under Richa Kar? About 9 million dollars in its early rounds, then 250 crore rupees in a Series C in 2015 from Zodius and Khazanah.^[4][11]
• What is Richa Kar's net worth? No figure has been published. Her stake was never disclosed as a percentage and the price Reliance paid in 2020 was not made public.^[2][14]
• Why did she start Zivame? She has said the category was avoided by women because buying it in a shop was embarrassing, and that an online store with a wide size range and a private buying experience fixed that.^[4]
• Is Richa Kar married and does she have children? Neither is in the public record. She has not discussed her family publicly.^[4]
• What is Zivame's revenue? Actoserba, the company that runs Zivame, reported revenue from operations of 137.9 crore rupees in FY19 with a loss of 19.56 crore rupees.^[8][9]

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