Taking The Taboo Out Of Lingerie In India By Putting It Online
February 10, 2015 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Lingerie shopping in India has typically been something nobody talks about. The ‘one size, one style – fits all’ necessary purchases were usually found at the local market shop, and bundled into a discreet brown paper bag. Until one young engineer-turned-MBA decided to shake things up a bit, using the Internet as her tool.
“In our environment shopping for lingerie is taboo culturally – you can’t just dash in and out of a shop to buy something that requires assisted sales,” says Zivame Founder and CEO Richa Kar, “we needed a way to let women consult us and make shopping private, discrete, and fun.”
So, Zivame was born, in the way most babies of this decade are, online.
The name ‘Zivame’ is a combination of the Hebrew word, ‘Ziva’, meaning ‘radiance’, and the English word ‘me’, giving way to the name, ‘Radiant Me’, says Kar, who hit on the idea of creating an accessible way of enabling women to shop for lingerie in India, three and a half years ago, as a 28-year old working in corporate India.
Zivame Founder and CEO Richa Kar. Photo courtesy Zivame.
On discovering that U.S. based Victoria’s Secret, owned by Limited Brands, makes over 25% of their sales online, Kar said she realized there was a huge gap in the market in India which could potentially be filled in the same way.
“If the problems in shopping for lingerie were so large in the bigger cities, then it was so much worse in the smaller towns, so putting everything online made sense,” says Kar, herself from the small industrial city of Jamshedpur, located towards the eastern part of India.
The engineer-turned-MBA graduate hedged her bets well in 2011. A.T. Kearney’s 2014 report on the global retail sector anticipates India’s e-commerce market will grow more than 50 percent in the next five years.
