In March 2022, Reliance Retail Ventures paid ₹950 crore ($125 million) for an 89% stake in Clovia, the lingerie brand it called a bet on India’s underpenetrated innerwear market. Three fiscal years later, the audited books of Clovia’s parent, Purple Panda Fashions, showed revenue of ₹238.6 crore for FY25 — lower than the ₹295.5 crore it had booked the year before the deal closed.
That gap between the acquisition story and the filing cabinet is the real subject of this piece: a founder-led brand that solved lingerie’s original e-commerce problem — the discomfort of buying it in a shop staffed by strangers — only to run into a much older problem once a conglomerate owned the cap table: growth on paper is not the same as growth in the ledger.
Quick facts
| Company | Clovia (legal entity: Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd) |
| Founded | Incorporated 2012; the Clovia brand launched in 2013 |
| Founder(s) | Pankaj Vermani, Neha Kant and Suman Chowdhury |
| Businesses | Women’s innerwear, loungewear, sleepwear and swimwear; newer men’s innerwear and kids’ nightwear lines |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹238.6 crore (FY25, per MCA filings tracked by Inc42 Datalabs); Clovia and trade press have separately cited a higher, differently-scoped FY24 figure of ₹450 crore — see “The numbers” |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹58.5 crore (FY25, Inc42 Datalabs) |
| Listed | Private — majority-owned subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures Limited |
| Market value / last valuation | Implied whole-company value of roughly ₹1,067 crore, based on Reliance’s ₹950 crore payment for 89% in March 2022 (reported) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (89% since March 2022); CEO Pankaj Vermani and the founding team hold the remaining stake |
What they do
Clovia sells women’s innerwear, loungewear, sleepwear and swimwear, and has more recently added men’s innerwear and kids’ nightwear, to buyers across India through its own website and app, e-commerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, and a growing network of physical stores. Its customers skew towards women in tier-2 and tier-3 towns rather than metro India, and its pitch has always been the same one it started with: let a woman find her correct size and buy discreetly, without the friction of an in-store fitting conversation with a stranger.
The origin
The idea did not come from a market map. Co-founder Neha Kant, working in marketing roles at India Today and Smile Interactive Technologies before Clovia, had noticed how uneasy Indian women were about buying lingerie at a departmental counter, and a trip to Europe sharpened the contrast: markets there treated the category as ordinary retail, not something to be embarrassed about. Her co-founder and husband, Pankaj Vermani, an IIT Delhi engineering graduate, brought a different kind of familiarity with the category — he had spent time as a teenager around his father’s retail store in Meerut, which sold innerwear. The third co-founder, Suman Chowdhury, had worked her way up from senior designer to product manager at Lee Cooper and brought the product-design eye the other two lacked. Purple Panda Fashions was incorporated in 2012, and the trio launched Clovia in 2013 as an online-first, size-inclusive alternative to the shop-counter experience.
The struggle years
The first near-miss was a pricing mistake, not a funding crisis. Clovia launched at the premium end, pricing bras between ₹1,500 and ₹2,000, aiming at the same shopper Marks & Spencer or Enamor were courting. It did not work: a customer at that price bought once a year. By repositioning quickly to a ₹300–1,000 range, the company found a customer who could buy several times a year instead of once, and volumes followed — by November 2016, founder Pankaj Vermani said the business had grown 4.7 times while having spent only ₹15 crore of the ₹30 crore Series A it had raised from IvyCap Ventures in June 2015, and described the company as operationally profitable after marketing spend from close to its start.
The second setback took much longer to show up, and it is still unresolved in the public record: after Reliance Retail took control in March 2022, the audited numbers moved the wrong way. Revenue that had reached ₹295.5 crore in FY23 slipped in the filings tracked by Inc42 Datalabs to roughly ₹263–279 crore in FY24 (a decline reported at around 11% year-on-year) and further down to ₹238.6 crore in FY25 — a three-year stretch of contraction inside the audited entity even as Clovia’s own press statements, over the same period, described an aggressive rollout of physical stores. Losses over the same window did not shrink in step: a net loss of ₹52.2 crore in FY22 widened 54% to ₹80.9 crore in FY23, per The Kredible’s review of the company’s FY23 filing, before landing at ₹58.5 crore in FY25.
The turning point
The defining event is unambiguous: on 20 March 2022, Reliance Retail Ventures Limited bought an 89% stake in Purple Panda Fashions, Clovia’s parent, for ₹950 crore in a mix of primary and secondary investment, with the founding team retaining the remaining 11%. It was Reliance’s third purchase of an online lingerie retailer, after Zivame and Amante, and it valued the whole company at roughly ₹1,067 crore by simple arithmetic on the disclosed stake and price.
The numbers on either side of that date tell two different stories. Before the deal, Clovia had raised a little under ₹190 crore (about $22.7 million) across four institutional rounds since 2015 and was still running at a loss, dependent on its own balance sheet and outside investors to fund growth. After the deal, it had a conglomerate’s distribution network behind it — by FY24 the brand was stocked in roughly 2,000 multi-brand outlets and 600 large-format stores, and had opened 75 exclusive brand outlets of its own, according to trade coverage of its offline push. What that scale bought it, on the audited top line, was three straight years of revenue decline. Ownership changed the company’s reach; it has not yet, on the public numbers, changed its trajectory.
The money behind it
Clovia’s funding shape before Reliance was a slow, round-by-round climb rather than a single mega-raise:
- June 2015 — Series A, ₹30 crore (~$4.7 million), led by IvyCap Ventures: the first institutional capital, which funded the pivot to mass-market pricing and the initial scale-up (as per BusinessToday’s 2016 profile of the company).
- 2017 round, ~$4 million, led by Ravi Dhariwal (former CEO of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd) and Singularity Ventures: brought in an investor with Times Group-scale media and distribution credibility.
- January 2019 — Series C, $10 million, led by AT Capital: the largest single round before the acquisition, funding the shift toward an omnichannel model.
- December 2020, ~$4 million, from Golden Birch Investments and She Capital: closed just as pandemic-driven online shopping was lifting e-commerce demand for essentials.
- March 2022 — Reliance Retail Ventures Limited acquires 89% for ₹950 crore: a mix of primary infusion and secondary sale that ended Clovia’s run as an independently funded startup.
Total pre-acquisition funding is reported at approximately $22.7 million by StartupTalky’s round-by-round tally, though a broader aggregator count (cited via WebEngage’s profile of founder Pankaj Vermani) puts total funding, across smaller and undisclosed rounds, at $25.3 million from 34 investors — the higher figure likely includes seed and angel cheques not broken out in the round-by-round table.
How it makes money
Clovia is a direct product seller, not a marketplace or a subscription business — it earns by manufacturing and selling innerwear, loungewear, sleepwear and swimwear, plus newer men’s and kids’ lines, at retail margins across several channels at once.
- Own website and app: historically Clovia’s single largest channel, accounting for about 50% of sales as of the company’s 2016 disclosure to BusinessToday — the channel it controls most tightly on price and data.
- Third-party marketplaces: roughly 35% of sales in that same 2016 breakdown, sold at marketplace-set economics and take rates.
- Physical retail: about 15% of sales in 2016, since expanded sharply — by FY24 the brand’s exclusive brand outlets had grown to 75, alongside roughly 2,000 multi-brand outlet listings and 600 large-format store placements, per trade coverage of its offline push.
- Quick commerce: a newer channel, with the brand listing on platforms such as Zepto and Blinkit for same-day delivery of basics, according to D2C Insider Pulse’s coverage of its distribution strategy.
The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating this as a pure-play online success story: Clovia’s own disclosures show a company that has spent a decade building nine-odd overlapping distribution channels — website, app, marketplaces, quick commerce, general trade, large-format stores and its own exclusive outlets — precisely because none of them alone gets it to scale profitably. The audited filings suggest that spread has not yet translated into operating leverage: expenses have outpaced revenue in every year for which both figures are publicly available (FY23 revenue of ₹295.5 crore against expenses of ₹376.4 crore, per The Kredible), meaning each additional channel has so far added cost as fast as it has added sales.
The numbers
Figures below are drawn from Registrar of Companies filings for Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd, as compiled by Inc42 Datalabs and The Kredible. All amounts in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 171.0 | (52.2) |
| FY23 | 295.5 | (80.9) |
| FY24 | approx. 263–279* | not disclosed in the trackers reviewed |
| FY25 | 238.6 | (58.5) |
*FY24 is a genuinely contested number. Inc42 Datalabs’ filing-based tracker puts FY24 revenue near ₹263 crore (down about 11% from FY23), while Snackfax’s reporting, also citing filings, puts it at ₹279.24 crore — both in the same broad range and both markedly below the figure Clovia has put in front of trade press. Indian Retailer and DFU Publications separately reported FY24 revenue of ₹450 crore, and Apparel Resources reported it as $53.03 million (roughly the same order of magnitude in rupee terms), all citing company statements rather than filings. The size of that gap — filings near ₹270 crore versus company-cited figures near ₹450 crore — is large enough that it most plausibly reflects a difference in scope (standalone revenue from operations versus a broader retail or GMV-style figure) rather than a rounding difference, and this piece leans on the audited filing figures for the trend line above, as the house style here prefers filings over company statements.
- FY23 loss widened 54% year-on-year to ₹80.9 crore from ₹52.2 crore in FY22, on expenses of ₹376.4 crore against revenue of ₹295.5 crore (The Kredible; YourStory).
- FY25 net loss stood at ₹58.5 crore on revenue of ₹238.6 crore, a net margin of roughly -24.5% (Inc42 Datalabs).
- Revenue has not grown, on the audited numbers, since FY23 — three consecutive years without a filing that beats the FY23 top line.
Where the money comes from
- Tier-2 and tier-3 cities generate about 65% of Clovia’s revenue, a figure reported consistently by both Snackfax and Indian Retailer’s coverage of the brand’s expansion plans — this is the opposite geographic mix from most funded D2C apparel brands, which typically lean on metro demand.
- Historic channel split (as disclosed in 2016): about 50% of sales through Clovia’s own website and app, 35% through third-party marketplaces, and 15% offline — the earliest verifiable breakdown of the business, from BusinessToday’s profile of the company.
- Current channel footprint (FY24): roughly 2,000 multi-brand outlet listings, 600 large-format store placements and 75 company-run exclusive brand outlets, alongside online marketplaces, its own site/app and quick-commerce apps such as Zepto and Blinkit — a much wider physical footprint than the company had a decade earlier, though a current percentage split across these channels is not disclosed in the sources reviewed.
- Product mix has broadened beyond the founding category: alongside women’s innerwear, loungewear, sleepwear and swimwear, Clovia has added men’s innerwear and kids’ nightwear lines, per Snackfax’s coverage of the brand’s recent product expansion.
- The surprise: a brand built to solve an urban, English-speaking discomfort about buying lingerie in a shop has ended up earning most of its money from smaller-town India, where, on the company’s own account, awareness and aspirational spending on branded innerwear are rising rather than saturated.
The risks
- Structural unprofitability at scale: in every fiscal year for which both figures are available in the filings reviewed, expenses have outpaced revenue — FY23 expenses of ₹376.4 crore against revenue of ₹295.5 crore is the clearest documented instance (The Kredible) — and the FY25 net margin was roughly -24.5% (Inc42 Datalabs), meaning scale so far has not resolved the cost problem.
- Sibling-brand competition inside the same parent: Reliance Retail’s March 2022 purchase of Clovia was its third acquisition of an online lingerie retailer, after Zivame and Amante (Entrackr; YourStory), leaving Reliance to allocate capital and shelf space across three competing innerwear brands it now owns outright — a structural risk to any one of them getting disproportionate investment.
- Revenue concentration in discretionary, price-sensitive geographies: with about 65% of revenue coming from tier-2 and tier-3 cities (Snackfax; Indian Retailer), Clovia’s topline is more exposed than a metro-weighted peer to swings in smaller-city discretionary spending, and to newer quick-commerce entrants competing on price and delivery speed for basics in the same markets (D2C Insider Pulse).
The takeaway
Clovia’s founding insight — that discomfort, not price, was the real barrier to buying lingerie in India — was correct and durable enough to build a real business on. But the company’s own filing history after being bought by India’s largest retail group is a reminder that solving a consumer problem and building a scalable, profitable enterprise are two separate exams, and passing the first does not guarantee passing the second. A distribution network can widen a brand’s reach a great deal faster than it can fix its unit economics, and the surest way to find out which one a deal actually bought is to wait for the audited numbers a few years out, not to read the press release the day it is signed.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Clovia now?
Reliance Retail Ventures Limited has held an 89% stake in Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd, Clovia’s parent company, since the deal closed in March 2022, with the founding team holding the remaining 11%.
When was Clovia founded, and by whom?
Purple Panda Fashions was incorporated in 2012, and the Clovia brand was launched in 2013 by Pankaj Vermani, Neha Kant and Suman Chowdhury.
Is Clovia profitable?
Not on the audited numbers available: Purple Panda Fashions reported a net loss of ₹58.5 crore in FY25, following losses of ₹80.9 crore in FY23 and ₹52.2 crore in FY22, per filings tracked by Inc42 Datalabs and The Kredible.
How much did Reliance pay for Clovia?
Reliance Retail Ventures paid ₹950 crore (about $125 million) in March 2022 for an 89% stake, implying a whole-company value of roughly ₹1,067 crore at the time, as reported by Entrackr, BusinessToday and Forbes.
What does Clovia sell, and where?
Women’s innerwear, loungewear, sleepwear and swimwear, plus newer men’s innerwear and kids’ nightwear lines, sold through its own website and app, e-commerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, and roughly 2,000-plus offline retail touchpoints including its own exclusive brand outlets.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Reliance Retail Ventures acquires majority stake in Clovia,” March 2022
- BusinessToday, “Reliance Retail acquires 89% stake in Clovia operator Purple Panda for Rs 950 cr,” March 2022
- Forbes, “Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail Acquires Majority Stake In Online Retail Brand Clovia For $125 Million,” March 2022
- Inc42, “Reliance Retail Acquires Majority Stake In D2C Lingerie Brand Clovia For INR 950 Cr,” March 2022
- YourStory, “Reliance Retail acquires majority stake in Clovia for Rs 950 cr,” March 2022
- BusinessToday, “Clovia’s Secret” (magazine profile), November 2016
- StartupTalky, “Clovia – Founders | Business Model | Revenue Model | Funding,” 2026
- The Kredible, “Reliance-owned Clovia’s revenue scales to Rs 295.5 Cr in FY23, expenses rise to Rs 376 cr,” November 2023
- YourStory, “Reliance-backed Clovia’s FY23 loss widens 54% YoY,” November 2023
- DFU Publications, “Clovia records impressive revenue growth, reaching Rs 291.71 cr in FY’23”
- DFU Publications, “Clovia’s revenues rise to Rs 450 crore in FY24”
- Indian Retailer, “Retail India News: Clovia Charts Aggressive Growth with New Launches and Expansions”
- Apparel Resources, “Clovia touches a high revenue of US $53.03 million in FY ’24”
- Inc42 Datalabs, Clovia company and financials profile (accessed September 2026)
- Snackfax, “Clovia: Redefining India’s Lingerie Industry With ‘Joy’ And Innovation,” 2026
- D2C Insider Pulse, “Clovia Accelerates Offline Expansion in Tier II & III Markets to Deepen India’s D2C Lingerie Play”
- WebEngage, “Pankaj Vermani’s Triumph in the Lingerie Market” (eMagazine profile)
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