A teacher on maternity leave built Russia's largest online shop
In 2004 a 28-year-old English teacher on maternity leave in Moscow found it nearly impossible to shop for clothes with a newborn at home. Tatyana Kim started selling them online from her apartment. Fifteen years later her company, Wildberries, was Russia's biggest online retailer and she was a billionaire.
Kim's idea came from her own frustration and that of other young mothers stuck at home. Before long Vladislav Bakalchuk, her husband and a computer technician by trade, came on board as well. It found an early break after the 2008 financial crisis, when foreign brands were eager to dump surplus stock at steep discounts, giving the young retailer cheap inventory to sell.
Growth was steep. In 2017 Wildberries overtook Ulmart to become the country's largest online retailer, and a year later it moved from Milkovo in the Moscow region into the capital. In 2018 it drew 2 million visitors a day and sold 1.9 billion dollars of goods. Revenue reached 3 billion dollars in 2019, and Forbes named Kim among the ten most notable new billionaires of that year, worth about a billion dollars. The pandemic then doubled sales to 6 billion dollars in 2020.
By then it was often called Russia's Amazon. It carried 37,000 brands, from clothes and cosmetics to electronics and food, employed 48,000 people and handled around 750,000 orders a day. Kim bought a small bank in 2021 to settle with suppliers and later rebranded it as Wildberries Bank. The company also offered instalment sales, travel bookings and, from 2022, kits for Russian Premier League clubs such as Spartak and Zenit.
Scale brought its own hazards. In January 2024 a fire at its 70,000 square metre warehouse near St Petersburg took 30 hours to put out and caused about 11 billion roubles of damage. The building had been running without construction approval and had never been checked by fire inspectors.
Source: Wildberries
