Zivame

Zivame is an Indian lingerie retailer and brand founded in Bangalore (Bengaluru) in 2011 by the entrepreneur Richa Kar. It began as an online shop for bras and underwear, aimed at women who found buying lingerie in a conventional Indian store awkward or worse, and grew into a house brand with its own shops and franchise outlets. Since 2021 it has been controlled by Reliance Retail, which bought an 85 percent stake for about 1,200 crore rupees.

The Problem Zivame Was Built For

The founding idea is easy to state. In much of India around 2010, buying a bra meant asking a male shopkeeper across a counter for a size, with little room to try anything on and less advice on fit. The result, as Zivame's founding story tells it, was that many women wore whatever was available rather than what fitted. An online shop removed the counter. A customer could browse in private, read about sizing, and have the parcel delivered to her door.

That was the case for the business when Kar started it in Bangalore, then the center of India's young e-commerce industry. Earlier versions of this page called Zivame India's first online lingerie marketplace. That is how the company is often described, but it could not be confirmed against an independent source here, so this entry makes the more modest claim: it was one of the earliest and became one of the best known.

Fit as a Selling Point

Zivame leaned on fit education from the start. Its site still offers a fit-finder tool and a bra size calculator, and earlier coverage credited it with guides on bra construction and sizing for a market where few women had been professionally measured. The underlying lesson is the same one Western retailers spent the twentieth century teaching: band and cup are separate measurements, and the right full cup bra or T-shirt bra depends on both.

By the late 2010s the company was well known enough to appear as a sponsor of the second season of India's Next Top Model, and one Wikipedia article on Bengaluru's economy describes it as "fast growing into the number 1 brand in India." Those are signs of reach rather than measured market share; the company does not publish sales figures in the sources available here.

From Marketplace to House Brand

Zivame started by selling other companies' lingerie alongside its own. Over time the balance shifted toward the Zivame label, which now covers bras, panties, nightwear, activewear, shapewear and swimwear. The site still lists partner brands, among them Inner Sense, Cukoo, Komli, Souminie and Maroon Clothing, but the in-house line is the core.

The business also moved off the screen. Zivame runs physical stores, which it lists through a store locator, and it offers franchise partnerships to people who want to open one. The stores carry over the original promise of privacy and fitting help into a physical setting. The company does not publish a current store count on its main site, so none is given here.

Reliance Retail, 2021

The biggest change came in 2021, when Reliance Retail, the retail arm of Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, acquired 85 percent of Zivame for about 1,200 crore rupees. Reliance was assembling a broad portfolio of consumer and fashion businesses at the time, and Zivame gave it an established women's intimates brand with an online customer base it could put into its own stores and platforms.

The company's website now names Reliance Retail Limited as the parent and gives a registered address in Mumbai, though the customer service lines still use Bangalore numbers. What happened to the founding team after the sale is not covered by the sources checked for this entry.

Where Zivame Sits

Zivame competes with a crowded field, though two of its rivals now share its owner: Reliance bought the lingerie maker Amante in 2021 and 89 percent of Clovia in 2022. Beyond the group there are established Indian makers, international labels, and the lingerie sections of every large online fashion platform. Its advantage is the name it made first and the fit education that went with it. The brand that set out to get women out of the awkward shop counter is now owned by the largest retailer in the country by revenue.

Last updated October 1, 2026