Richa Kar built Zivame to give Indian women a private way to shop lingerie

For most of Richa Kar’s childhood and adulthood, lingerie shopping in India was a small, uncomfortable ritual. Women filed quietly into a shop, mumbled their size to a male shopkeeper, and walked out with something approximate. There was no privacy, very little fit science, and almost no choice. It was a quietly broken category that almost everyone tolerated, because alternatives did not exist.

In 2011, Richa Kar built one. Zivame began as a small online lingerie store run out of Bengaluru with a tiny team. Today, it is one of India’s best-known innerwear brands, with a presence both online and across physical stores, and is part of the Reliance Retail family after a majority acquisition.

From BITS Pilani to a quiet retail problem

Richa Kar grew up in Jamshedpur and studied at BITS Pilani before earning her MBA from NMIMS in Mumbai. Her early career was in retail and enterprise technology, first at Spencer’s Retail and then at SAP, where she worked on lingerie clients and saw how the category was sold in mature markets.

That window into how Victoria’s Secret, Marks & Spencer and other global names treated the lingerie consumer made the Indian experience look even more dated. Indian women had specific size profiles, specific fabric needs and a specific cultural relationship with the category, and almost none of that was being honoured by either local retailers or imported brands.

The original idea: privacy first

Zivame’s founding insight was disarmingly simple. Indian women did not necessarily hate buying lingerie. They hated being seen buying it. They hated being lectured by shopkeepers who did not understand fit. They hated being limited to whatever happened to be in stock at the nearest neighbourhood store.

Online retail could solve every one of those frictions at once. It could offer privacy, range, fit guides, video tutorials, discreet packaging, and a calm shopping experience in a customer’s own bedroom. Richa Kar pitched Zivame to early investors as a category-defining play on this insight, not just a website that sold lingerie online, but a respectful experience layered on top of it.

Building Zivame in Bengaluru

Zivame launched in 2011, headquartered in Bengaluru. Like most early Indian e-commerce companies of that era, it had to solve hard infrastructure problems alongside the core product, payments, returns, supply chains, customer trust. Lingerie added an extra layer of complexity: women were not used to buying anything intimate from a website.

The brand responded with content. Long before content commerce became fashionable, Zivame invested in fit guides, how-to videos, and editorial articles that helped women understand their bra size, the differences between bra styles, and how to shop for body types that Indian retail had largely ignored. That content layer became one of Zivame’s most enduring assets, and it pulled in a huge base of organic search traffic that traditional retailers could not match.

From pure-play e-commerce to omnichannel

As Zivame matured, Richa Kar and her team experimented with physical Zivame Studios, small, focused fit-led stores in metros where women could try on, get fitted by female associates, and shop without judgement. It was an early example of an Indian D2C brand recognising that some consumers still wanted the offline experience, provided it was redesigned around them.

Over its first decade, Zivame raised multiple rounds of venture capital from firms such as Kalaari Capital, IDG Ventures (now Chiratae), Unilazer Ventures and Zodius. In 2020, the brand was majority-acquired by Reliance Retail’s subsidiary Reliance Brands, effectively integrating it into one of India’s largest retail conglomerates and giving it access to a much wider physical distribution network.

A category re-imagined

Richa Kar stepped back from day-to-day operational roles at Zivame around 2017, transitioning the company to professional leadership while remaining a key figure in its story. Her legacy in Indian retail is hard to overstate. Before Zivame, almost no one talked publicly about bra fit, size inclusivity or the design of lingerie for Indian body types. After Zivame, a generation of younger D2C lingerie brands has been able to build on a customer who is informed, online and not embarrassed to talk about her own size.

“If a category feels too small to disrupt, look again. Sometimes the silence around it is exactly what makes it the biggest opportunity.”

What founders can learn from Zivame

The Zivame story is a reminder that some of the best consumer businesses are hidden behind cultural taboos. Indian women had been shopping for lingerie for decades, but the conversation around it had been so muted that the opportunity was invisible to most investors and operators. Richa Kar treated the silence itself as the opportunity.

For women founders, especially those building in underserved consumer categories, the Zivame arc has a particularly useful through-line. Sometimes the right competitive advantage is just to take a customer’s existing discomfort seriously, and to design every touchpoint, copy, content, returns, packaging, around respecting it.

Frequently asked questions about Richa Kar and Zivame

Who founded Zivame?

Zivame was founded in 2011 by Richa Kar. Pre-Zivame, Richa had earned her MBA at NMIMS Mumbai, then worked at Spencer’s Retail in brand communications and subsequently at SAP as a retail-business-process consultant, where exposure to global lingerie clients shaped her insight into the Indian category. The company was set up in Bengaluru with a thesis that lingerie retail in India was structurally broken, the product existed but the buying experience did not respect the consumer.

Why was the category considered untouchable?

Lingerie retail in India had historically been a cultural problem rather than a product problem. Most physical stores were uncomfortable spaces for women shoppers, fit was often poorly handled, and brand discovery was almost entirely word-of-mouth. Online retail offered an immediate solution to two of those problems, privacy and selection, but until Zivame, no Indian player had built a credible online lingerie destination at scale. Zivame’s early build was essentially a category-creation exercise on top of an existing product market.

Is Zivame still an independent company?

Not in the venture-backed sense. Reliance Retail acquired a majority stake in Zivame, widely reported in 2020, integrating it into the larger Reliance Retail beauty and apparel platform. Zivame today operates as part of the Reliance family, with the brand identity largely intact and product expansion continuing across categories.

What is the lasting lesson from Zivame?

Zivame is one of the cleanest Indian examples of category creation through silence-breaking. The company did not invent lingerie; it changed the buying experience for it. Founders working in any category where the product exists but the experience does not respect the consumer, menstruation, sexual health, mental health, reproductive care, women’s financial services, can read Zivame’s build as a template for moving inside a silence and reshaping it commercially. The outcome (a Reliance acquisition rather than an IPO) is one valid endpoint for that kind of work, not the only one.

What is Richa Kar’s net worth?

There is no net-worth figure for Richa Kar from a reputable, independently-verifiable source. Zivame was acquired by Reliance Retail (2020) and the founder had already substantially diluted and stepped back; no credible personal net-worth figure is publicly reported. The numbers that appear on celebrity or “net worth” aggregator sites are unsourced and inconsistent, so, in line with our editorial policy,