Top Women Founders Who Switched Careers to Build Iconic Businesses

By: Ayushi Dutta, Senior Correspondent

Ghazal Alagh, Co-founder & CIO, Mamaearth: From Corporate Trainer to Personal Care Innovator

Ghazal Alagh's entrepreneurial journey began far away from the FMCG industry. She worked as a corporate trainer and was involved in fitness and wellness before entering consumer products. Motherhood changed that trajectory. After struggling to find skincare products that she considered safe and suitable for her newborn, Alagh identified a gap in India's rapidly growing personal-care market. What began as a personal problem became the foundation for Mamaearth, which she co-founded with her husband, Varun Alagh, in 2016 under Honasa Consumer.

The company positioned itself around products marketed with a focus on toxin-free and safer ingredient choices, responding to growing consumer interest in conscious personal care. Ghazal subsequently took on a broader role in brand innovation as Mamaearth expanded beyond its initial product categories. Honasa Consumer recorded consolidated annual revenue of more than ₹2,500 crore, with revenue crossing ₹755 crore in the first quarter of FY27. Her transition demonstrates how an everyday personal frustration can become the starting point for a scalable consumer business.

Richa Kar, Founder, Zivame: From Software Engineer to Lingerie E-commerce Pioneer

Before becoming associated with India's online lingerie market, Richa Kar worked as a software engineer at SAP and later gained experience in retail supply chain analytics. It was that exposure to retail that helped her identify a problem that went beyond technology. Richa noticed how uncomfortable many Indian women felt while shopping for lingerie in conventional stores, where privacy was limited, and male sales staff were often involved. At a time when intimate-wear shopping remained heavily influenced by social stigma, she saw an opportunity to use technology to create a more discreet buying experience.

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In 2011, she left her corporate career and founded Zivame. The move took Richa from enterprise software and analytics into fashion and e-commerce, with no conventional background in lingerie retail. Zivame subsequently became one of India's best-known online intimate-wear platforms, helping normalise online lingerie shopping while giving women greater privacy and choice. Richa's career pivot illustrates an important entrepreneurial principle: sometimes the strongest business opportunity lies not in inventing a new product, but in redesigning an uncomfortable consumer experience.