Lingerie e-tailer Zivame.com run by Bangalore-based Actoserba Active Wholesale Pvt Ltd, has appointed former Aditya Birla Group senior executive Shaleen Sinha as its chief operating officer (COO).
The appointment is part of Zivame's plan to strengthen its top management team.
“We plan to hire top industry talent across the board, in line with our growth expectations,†said Richa Kar, founder and CEO, Zivame.
Sinha will be responsible for identifying new growth areas for Zivame, building a road map for timely entry into those verticals and ensuring their success as the company scales up.
“We aim to build a customer-centric company and catalyze the massive growth that we are witnessing while setting new standards of execution excellence,†Sinha said in a statement.
At Aditya Birla Group, Sinha was vice president at the chairman’s office where he was heading consumer franchises within ABG which span Idea, More, Madura and Pantaloons.
Sinha is a graduate of IIT, Kharagpur and has an MBA degree from IIM, Calcutta. He has earlier worked with Boston Consulting Group and Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
To support its operations and hire top talent across the board, Zivame had raised Rs 250 crore (around $40 million) in its Series C round of funding from Zodius Technology Fund and Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah in September. Its existing investors Unilazer, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital also participated in the round.
The startup had previously raised around $9 million in two rounds of funding from IDG Ventures, Kalaari Capital and Unilazer Ventures.
Zivame was founded by Kar in August 2011 and deals in lingerie, loungewear, swimwear, nightwear and allied categories. The portal has recently added categories such as fashion apparel.
The company has a lion’s share of the lingerie e-commerce market and claims to sell more than one bra per minute. Zivame claims its mobile app contributes close to 60 per cent of its traffic.
Zivame has a number of private labels including Penny and Coucou and over 60 per cent of its revenue comes from its in-house products.
The company has also launched a data sciences lab to make confidence boosting affordable products.
Lingerie e-commerce players compete among themselves as well as against lifestyle apparel sellers such as Jabong and Myntra besides horizontal e-tailing giants Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.
Several lingerie e-tailers have got venture funding. Delhi-based Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd, which runs online-first lingerie and sleepwear brand Clovia, had raised Series A funding from IvyCap Ventures in June this year.
In September last year, Mumbai-based MTC Ecom Pvt Ltd, owner of online lingerie shop PrettySecrets, secured its Series A round of funding from Orios Venture Partners, a VC fund run by angel investor Rehan Yar Khan, besides Indian Angel Network (IAN) and early-stage investor IndiaQuotient.
Other prominent players in the online lingerie shopping space are StrapsAndStrings, ShopImagine and Cilory. Earlier, two other companies—Oyegirl and HerStyle—had shut their operations.
