PrettySecrets once called itself the second-largest lingerie store chain in India, built from 21 outlets in ten months flat. It had raised somewhere between $8.8 million and $13.9 million from investors across seven rounds. Type its web address in today and it redirects to a spa supplies store that has nothing to do with lingerie, e-commerce, or India.
That gap – between the growth claims of 2018 and the dead domain of 2026 – is the whole story. This is what the public record shows about how PrettySecrets built itself, why it flipped its channel strategy twice, and why the numbers never quite caught up with the ambition.
Quick facts
| Company | PrettySecrets (MTC Ecom Private Limited) |
| Founded | MTC Ecom was incorporated on 8 December 2011; the brand traces to founder Karan Behal’s offline nightwear label from 2005 and relaunched online as PrettySecrets.com in August 2012, after briefly operating as Mylace.in |
| Founder(s) | Karan Behal, Founder and CEO |
| Businesses | Lingerie, nightwear, activewear and swimwear, sold through its own website, company-owned and franchise stores, marketplaces and wholesale trade counters |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹10 crore (~$1.5 million at the time), FY2016-17 (Inc42 Datalab; Apparel Resources) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Not publicly disclosed for any year (see “The numbers”) |
| Listed | Private; never listed on any stock exchange |
| Market value / last valuation | Undisclosed on every round; total funding reported at $8.8 million (Inc42) to $13.9 million across seven rounds (Tracxn) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Karan Behal (Founder-CEO); institutional backers include Orios Venture Partners, India Quotient and RB Investments (Tracxn cap-table data) |
What they do
PrettySecrets sold women’s lingerie, nightwear, activewear and swimwear under its own brand, positioned as an affordable, India-focused alternative to imported labels. Unlike marketplaces that listed multiple third-party lingerie brands, PrettySecrets designed and sourced its own range – roughly 1,200 SKUs at its peak, according to Apparel Resources (November 2018) – and sold it directly to consumers through its own website, its own and franchised retail stores, large marketplaces such as Myntra and Ajio, and wholesale trade counters reaching more than 19,000 pin codes, per Apparel Resources’ 2018 reporting.
The origin
Karan Behal came from a family that had spent three decades manufacturing and exporting women’s nightwear, according to Apparel Resources (November 2018) and a YourStory profile of the company from June 2014. He first tried to build a premium sleepwear brand sold through department stores and multi-brand outlets starting in 2005. The insight he kept returning to was simple: India’s organised retail had almost nowhere a woman could comfortably buy lingerie, and the category needed a dedicated selling environment before it needed a bigger catalogue.
That insight produced two different companies before it produced PrettySecrets. First came a multi-brand retail chain called Lace – The Lingerie Club, built to fix the environment problem at the point of sale. Only later did Behal conclude that stores themselves were the wrong lever, and that e-commerce could strip out the distribution layer that was holding the category back.
The struggle years
The path to PrettySecrets.com ran through at least two documented false starts, both traceable to the same root cause: India’s offline lingerie retail infrastructure could not support the brand Behal wanted to build.
- 2009 – the premium sleepwear brand stalls: demand existed, but the market for high-end women’s sleepwear sold through general retail was too narrow to scale, and the number of stores willing or able to stock it properly was limited (YourStory, June 2014, as reported in subsequent web research this session).
- 2009 onward – Lace stores expose the category’s real problem: Behal launched Lace – The Lingerie Club, a multi-brand chain that reached 12 outlets across Mumbai, Ludhiana and Pune. The stores that carried lingerie, Lace included, suffered from undertrained sales staff, no trial rooms, cramped floor space and poor ambience – failures that matter more in an intimate category than in general apparel (YourStory, June 2014).
- 2011-12 – full retreat from offline: concluding that brick-and-mortar retail required a “complex system of middlemen and distribution points” that e-commerce could remove, Behal withdrew the brand from more than 250 points of sale and shut the Lace stores entirely (YourStory, June 2014).
- 2011-12 – a rebrand mid-launch: the online business first went live as Mylace.in before being renamed PrettySecrets.com in August 2012, within months of launch (YourStory’s October 2012 funding report; Inc42 Datalab’s company timeline).
None of this was smoothed over in the telling. The company’s own later interviews describe an unglamorous sequence of trying one channel, hitting a wall specific to how Indian women actually shopped for intimate apparel, and starting again.
The turning point
The defining swing came in April 2017, when PrettySecrets did the opposite of what its founding story suggested: having spent five years arguing that e-commerce was the fix for offline retail’s flaws, it opened its first company-owned store in Mumbai and began building a chain (India Retailing, April 2017; Indian Online Seller, April 2017).
The before-and-after is stark. Before April 2017, PrettySecrets was an online-only brand competing for share in a category where, as Inc42 Datalab reported in its lingerie-sector review, “online lingerie etailers are struggling to breakeven and make profits.” Ten months after opening that first Mumbai store, the company said it had 21 exclusive outlets live across 14 cities and had become – in its own telling, repeated uncritically by Apparel Sourcing Week and Apparel Resources in their 2018 coverage – the second-largest chain of lingerie stores in India by outlet count. It followed with public targets of 100 stores by the end of 2018 and 300 franchise-owned stores by the end of 2019, alongside 350 wholesale trade-store placements it hoped to grow to 1,500 (Apparel Resources, November 2018). The dilemma this move created was significant enough that it became the subject of a Harvard Business School teaching case, “PrettySecrets.com: Challenges of Selling Lingerie Online” by Subhadip Roy and Nikita Matta, built around the exact question of whether the company should stay online-only or relaunch physical retail.
The money behind it
PrettySecrets raised capital across at least seven rounds between 2012 and 2018, per Tracxn’s funding history, though no round’s valuation was ever disclosed.
- October 2012 – angel round, amount undisclosed: backed by Indian Angel Network members Rehan Yar Khan and Farooq Oomerbhoy, HBS Alumni Angels India, Orios Venture Partners and stylist Allia Al Rufai, meant to fund catalogue expansion, customer service and supply chain (SiliconIndia; YourStory, October 2012).
- September 2014 – Series A, reported at roughly ₹12 crore (~$2 million): led by Orios Venture Partners and India Quotient, with continuing angel participation (YourStory, September 2014).
- April 2016 – $2.77 million: led by Orios Venture Partners (Tracxn funding history).
- June 2016 – $6.13 million, reported as roughly ₹40 crore: led by RB Investments Pte Ltd, Singapore, the largest single disclosed round in the company’s history (DealStreetAsia, June 2016).
- June 2017 – $6.31 million Series B (Tracxn funding history).
- May 2018 – $4.49 million Series B, the last round on record (Tracxn funding history).
What each backer changed: the 2012 angel cohort funded the initial online catalogue and operations; Orios Venture Partners and India Quotient’s 2014 Series A financed the shift to a standalone online brand after the Lace shutdown; and RB Investments’ 2016 round – the single largest – financed the capital-heavy pivot into company-owned and franchise retail stores that began in April 2017. Total funding is reported at $8.8 million by Inc42 Datalab and at $13.9 million across seven rounds by Tracxn; the gap most likely reflects Inc42’s estimate predating the 2017 and 2018 rounds rather than a true disagreement over any single figure. Tracxn’s latest available cap-table snapshot shows founders holding 19.15%, institutional funds 54.43%, and angel investors 17.27% of the company.
How it makes money
PrettySecrets ran a vertically integrated, owned-brand model rather than a marketplace, which is what let it sell through both its own channels and other platforms at once.
- Money in – direct-to-consumer: full-price and promotional sales through PrettySecrets.com and its own retail stores, its highest-margin channel.
- Money in – marketplace and wholesale: listings on Myntra and Ajio and supply to roughly 350 wholesale trade-store partners (Apparel Resources, November 2018), trading margin for reach.
- Money in – franchise stores: franchise partners funded their own outlets under the PrettySecrets brand, a lower-capital way to add store count than company-owned locations.
- Costs out – sourcing: product was split roughly 50:50 between Indian contract manufacturers and Chinese imports, mainly for bras and nightwear, with in-house design and pattern teams based in Mumbai (Apparel Resources, November 2018).
- Costs out – people and marketing: staff and employee benefits ran at 25-30% of total expenditure and marketing and advertising at roughly 15% in FY2016-17, together consuming 30-45% of net expenses (Inc42 Datalab, citing the company’s FY2016-17 filings).
- Where the margin sits: the company’s own e-commerce channel was described in later coverage as the more profitable line relative to physical retail, which is precisely why the April 2017 move into stores was treated as a live strategic bet rather than an obvious win – the subject of the HBS teaching case referenced above.
- The part people get wrong: “online lingerie brand” undersold what PrettySecrets actually was by 2018 – a multichannel retailer with more revenue exposure to physical stores and wholesale than to its own website.
The numbers
Reliable, filed multi-year revenue and profit figures for PrettySecrets are not publicly available, and that gap is itself part of the record: company filings with India’s Registrar of Companies show MTC Ecom Private Limited’s balance sheet was last filed for the year ended 31 March 2018, according to Ministry of Corporate Affairs data indexed by ZaubaCorp (accessed September 2026). No profit or loss figure for any year appears to have been publicly disclosed by the company; only expense ratios (above) and a single confirmed revenue year are on record.
| Metric (₹ crore) | FY2015-16 | FY2016-17 | FY2017-18 |
| PrettySecrets revenue | Not disclosed; Inc42 notes FY2016-17 grew only 3% over this year | ~10 | Reported only as a “₹10-50 crore” band by Tracxn; too wide to state as a figure |
| PrettySecrets profit/loss | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Zivame revenue (for scale) | ~53 | 60 | 94.25 (loss of 32.11) |
| Clovia revenue (for scale) | 38.6 | 39 | 51.8 |
The scale comparison matters more than any single PrettySecrets figure: in FY2016-17, the three companies combined for roughly ₹100 crore in revenue, with PrettySecrets contributing the smallest share at ₹10 crore against Zivame’s ₹60 crore and Clovia’s ₹39 crore (Inc42 Datalab). Zivame’s FY2017-18 loss of ₹32.11 crore on ₹94.25 crore of revenue – a category leader losing roughly a third of its revenue in cash – is the clearest public evidence that even the best-funded player in Indian online lingerie was burning capital at this time (Inc42 Datalab). PrettySecrets never published a comparable figure, but it was competing in the same unprofitable category with a fraction of the revenue base.
Where the money comes from
- Channel split: by late 2018 the company operated simultaneously through its own website, 24 company-owned or franchise stores across 10 states, marketplace listings, and roughly 350 wholesale trade counters (Apparel Resources, November 2018) – a materially different mix from the online-only brand it had been through 2016.
- Geographic reach: deliveries were claimed to cover more than 19,000 pin codes nationally, with tier-II and tier-III markets said to account for roughly half of sales (Apparel Resources, November 2018) – the surprise being that a brand built for digitally native, metro shoppers said it drew half its demand from smaller towns.
- Store footprint growth: from 0 physical stores before April 2017 to 21 outlets across 14 cities within 10 months, and 24 stores across 10 states by November 2018 (Apparel Sourcing Week; Apparel Resources, 2018) – rapid by outlet count, though outlet count is not revenue, which the company never disclosed at a per-channel level.
- Sourcing geography: roughly 50% of product by the company’s own account came from Chinese contract manufacturers and 50% from Indian ones (Apparel Resources, November 2018), tying input costs to two very different currency and logistics environments.
The risks
- Category-wide unprofitability: Inc42 Datalab’s own framing of the sector – “online lingerie etailers are struggling to breakeven and make profits” – was borne out by the leader, Zivame, posting a ₹32.11 crore loss on ₹94.25 crore of FY2017-18 revenue. A smaller player without comparable disclosed revenue faced the same structural economics with less cushion.
- Capital-intensive multichannel expansion against a small revenue base: a company reporting roughly ₹10 crore of annual revenue in FY2016-17 was simultaneously targeting 100 company or franchise stores by the end of 2018 and 300 by the end of 2019 (Apparel Resources, November 2018). Physical retail requires real estate, inventory and staff cost well ahead of revenue catching up, a mismatch the HBS teaching case on the company frames explicitly as an open strategic question rather than a solved problem.
- Financial opacity and disclosure lapse: the company’s last filed balance sheet with the Registrar of Companies covers the year ended 31 March 2018 (ZaubaCorp/MCA data, accessed September 2026), and Tracxn’s tracker lists the company’s status as “deadpooled” as of 31 August 2026 – business-database shorthand for a startup no longer operating – with no public financial disclosure bridging the gap between the two dates.
The takeaway
PrettySecrets’ history is really two pivots that cancel each other out: it left physical retail in 2011-12 because the format was too fragmented to support a lingerie brand, then re-entered physical retail in 2017 because pure e-commerce alone was not converting funded growth into profit. Both moves were reasoned responses to real, documented weaknesses in the channel the company was leaving. Neither move, on the public record, produced a disclosed profit. The lesson is not that online or offline was the wrong choice – it is that changing channels does not fix unit economics on its own, and a brand that never discloses a profit or loss figure across a decade of operation has usually not found one to disclose.
Frequently asked questions
Is PrettySecrets still operating?
The public record does not show it operating in any active form as of September 2026. Its former web address, prettysecrets.com, now redirects to an unrelated spa-products retailer (checked live in September 2026), and business tracker Tracxn lists the company’s status as “deadpooled” as of 31 August 2026. No news coverage of an official shutdown announcement was found in this research.
How much funding did PrettySecrets raise in total?
Reported figures range from $8.8 million (Inc42 Datalab) to $13.9 million across seven rounds (Tracxn’s funding history), with the difference likely explained by the timing of Inc42’s estimate relative to the 2017 and 2018 rounds. No round’s valuation was ever publicly disclosed.
Who were PrettySecrets’ main investors?
Early backers included Indian Angel Network members Rehan Yar Khan and Farooq Oomerbhoy, HBS Alumni Angels India and Orios Venture Partners from 2012. Orios Venture Partners and India Quotient led the September 2014 Series A, and Singapore-based RB Investments led the largest disclosed round, $6.13 million, in June 2016.
Why did PrettySecrets open physical stores after starting as an online brand?
Company leadership and outside analysts, including the authors of a Harvard Business School teaching case built around this exact decision, framed it as a response to the online lingerie category’s difficulty converting revenue into profit. PrettySecrets opened its first company-owned store in Mumbai in April 2017 and said it reached 21 outlets across 14 cities within ten months.
How did PrettySecrets compare to Zivame and Clovia in revenue?
In FY2016-17, PrettySecrets reported roughly ₹10 crore in revenue against Zivame’s ₹60 crore and Clovia’s ₹39 crore, according to Inc42 Datalab’s sector analysis – making it the smallest of the three main branded online lingerie players in India at the time.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42 Datalab, “What The Financials: The Indian Online Lingerie Triangle: Zivame Bumbles, PrettySecrets Fumbles, Clovia Hustles” – Inc42, accessed September 2026
- DealStreetAsia, “India: Online lingerie retailer PrettySecrets raises $6.13m from RB Investments” – DealStreetAsia, June 2016
- SiliconIndia, “PrettySecrets, an Online Lingerie Brand Receives Funding from IAN, Harvard Angels and Orios Ventures” – SiliconIndia, October 2012
- YourStory, “Indian Angel Network, Harvard Angels & Orios Ventures Invest in PrettySecrets, an Online Lingerie Brand” – YourStory, October 2012
- YourStory, “What it takes to build a successful online lingerie brand” – YourStory, June 2014
- YourStory, “Online lingerie store raises $2 million from Orios Venture…” – YourStory, September 2014
- Apparel Sourcing Week, “A ‘Pretty’ Journey from An Online to An Offline Lingerie Brand” – Apparel Sourcing Week, 2018
- Apparel Resources, “‘Pretty Secrets’ of An Ever Growing Lingerie Brand!” – Apparel Resources, November 2018
- Indian Online Seller, “PrettySecrets aims to conquer the lingerie market with offline stores & affordable products” – Indian Online Seller, April 2017
- India Retailing, “Online lingerie brand PrettySecrets to go from clicks to bricks; open first store in Mumbai” – India Retailing, April 2017
- Tracxn, “PrettySecrets – Company Profile, Funding, Competitors & Financials” – Tracxn, accessed September 2026 (status and funding data as of 31 August 2026)
- ZaubaCorp / Ministry of Corporate Affairs filing data, “MTC Ecom Private Limited” – ZaubaCorp, accessed September 2026
- Harvard Business Publishing case study, “PrettySecrets.com: Challenges of Selling Lingerie Online” by Subhadip Roy and Nikita Matta, referenced via case-summary aggregators – accessed September 2026
- Live domain check of prettysecrets.com, redirecting to an unrelated retailer – accessed September 2026
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