Tatyana Kim: Russia’s online retail queen

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone.

Lowe's knows Sundays are for football.

That's why we're here to help you get your next DIY project done, even when the clock isn't on your side.

Whether that's a new Filtrate filter or Bosch and Cobalt power tools, Lowe's has everything you need to feel like the MVP of DIY.

So get it done and earn your Sunday.

Shop now in store and online.

Lowe's, official partner of the NFL.

Your global campaign just launched.

But wait, the logo's cropped.

The colors are off.

And did Legal clear that image?

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through, but not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI powered by Firefly lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent.

Everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire.

Episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcast, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds.

It's the 18th of September 2024, another day of a record-breaking heat wave in Moscow.

A woman sits in her office, fanning herself.

The sound of university students leaving their morning classes drifts in through the open window, reminding her of her first career as an English teacher.

It seems a world away from her role now as the head of Russia's largest online retailer.

She tries to focus on the steady stream of emails demanding her attention, but her mind keeps returning to the growing tensions in her personal life.

For months, she's been wrangling a bitter separation from her husband of 22 years.

Then the quiet is shattered.

Doors slam open, heavy footsteps echo down the hall, and shouts erupt from the reception downstairs.

The woman's heart races.

She runs out of her office to see a group of armed men storming the building.

Sudden staccato noises fill the air, gunshots.

Two men fall to the floor.

Terrified, she scans the group, trying to work out what's going on.

A face she knows becomes clear in amongst the waving guns.

It's someone she knows only too well, her recently estranged husband.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

We take them from zero to their first million, then from a million onto a billion.

I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Singh, I'm the journalist, author, and podcaster.

And that woman caught in the gunfire is Tatiana Kim, founder of Russian company Wildberries, often referred to as Russia's Amazon.

That's right, Kim rose to fame as Russia's first self-made female billionaire.

She built Wild Berries from from scratch while on maternity leave from her job as an English teacher.

Now that shootout, which killed two men and wounded others, wasn't just a family dispute.

It was the flashpoint of some deeper political and regional power struggles within Russia.

And on one side, there's Kremlin-backed interests.

On the other side, you have allies of the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kim is a private person who has revealed few insights about herself beyond the origin story of starting wild berries from the living room of her rented flat.

But there's a twist because some people who are close to her say say that her whole rags to riches narrative is actually just a PR construction.

So who is Tatiana Kim really?

There are details about her life that we still don't know but we will dive as deep as we can to tell you about who she is and how she built her fortune.

So let's go back right to the beginning to take Tatiana Kim from zero to her first million.

Tatiana Vladimirovna Kim was born on the 16th of October 1975 in Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which was then part of the USSR.

Kim comes from a Koreo-Saram family that's Soviet Koreans, whose ancestors were among the 172,000 Koreans forcibly relocated by Stalin in 1937 from the Soviet Union's far east to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan amid fears they might be Japanese spies.

Kim's mother was born in Uzbekistan and became a kindergarten teacher, and her father was born in Kazakhstan and became an engineer.

The family moved to Moscow Oblast, a rural region of the west of Moscow when Kim was one year old after her father got a job at a subsidiary of Gazprom.

That is Russia's state energy company.

Enormous company, yes.

Kim has described her childhood as a happy one, but she said she always had a desire to break out of the environment where I lived and that she had a goal to do something big, something great.

Like a lot of our entrepreneurs have that yearning.

Exactly.

She describes herself as a good student, bordering on perfectionist, but says that her mother was quite strict, wouldn't allow her to go to discos.

Well, age 16, Kim dreamed of being a journalist and studying at Moscow State University, but her mother actually dissuaded her.

And this was around 1991?

Yes, it was.

So that is actually around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And Kim's mother actually feared that the capital would just be too dangerous for her daughter.

So instead, Kim studied languages at a state university in a small city close to home.

And after she graduated in 1997, she got a job working as an English teacher in a school before moving finally to Moscow to work as a a part-time language tutor.

The plan was to study a master's in languages, but after the ruble collapse in 1998, she could no longer afford to.

The ruble has had many collapses.

One in 1998 almost brought down a couple of investment banks, actually.

I remember it really closely.

The Russian debt crisis was a very big event on financial markets.

And there was all sorts of, it was kind of like the culmination of all this turmoil we'd seen over a decade since

there was a land grab going on.

There was the rise of all the oligarchs, some of whom we've talked about on this program.

So that was quite seismic on the international financial markets.

By 2000, when she was 25, Kim has said she experienced a deep existential crisis.

In an interview with TASS, the Russian state news agency, of course, she said, very often obedient children who excel at school grow up and then realize that the meaning of life is not about rising to somebody else's expectations.

So at some point during this time in the early 2000s, she met a guy called Vladislav Bokolchuk, a physics graduate a few years younger than Kim, who was running a business selling computers.

And the pair bonded, they said they both experienced what Kim called a soul-searching moment.

And Bokalchuk had dropped out of university to lecture German philosophy and listening to classical music, as you do, before graduating.

And just six weeks after the pair met, they got married.

Yeah.

A quarter-life crisis or a crisis bonding.

Trauma bonding, as the younger people say nowadays.

I've got a 25-year-old.

I can't work out whether she's having

a quarter-life crisis bonding moment or something.

Well, I hope she doesn't listen this far into the episode.

Well, she might well do.

So I think I'm going to keep that going.

Let's move along.

I do think it's an odd detail for this to be part of the whole PR narrative, if it is.

And also, it's the school teacher, the guy who drops out to

listen to teach German philosophy and listen to classical music.

I'd like to drop out.

and lecture German philosophy.

And still end up making billions.

And still end up rich.

Yes.

Anyway, by 2004, Kim was 29 years old.

The couple were living in a rented apartment apartment with their new baby in a working-class neighborhood in Moscow.

Kim was struggling with postnatal depression and finding it hard to get back into teaching jobs.

So she tried to think of other ways of earning money that would work around raising the kids.

And like many of our billionaires, she cycled through what problems she thought she could solve.

And soon her mind turned to the difficulties of clothes shopping in Russia.

She said she'd always felt ill at ease buying from department stores.

Staff could often be pushy.

So she wondered about, guess what?

An online clothing store.

Well, in post-Soviet Russia, reselling from German clothing catalogues like Otto or Quail was actually quite common.

But the Russian catalogue agents would translate the catalogues from German.

They'd take 10% of the cost of the item as an advance payment, with the rest paid in cash on delivery.

Their profit would therefore be a 15% commission on each sale.

So Kim wanted to undercut them, offer a better deal, and set her commission at 10%.

And she would also take no advance payment.

And to fund building this website and to place some online adverts on women's forums, she says she asked her husband to give her $700.

Kim's mission was to encourage Russian women to not just buy black clothes because they go with everything.

And she wanted to give her company a name that was beautiful and unusual.

So she chose a colourful name, Vaudberries, meaning wild berries.

And later, colleagues complained it was hard to pronounce in Russian, but Kim held her ground.

It did pretty well.

Yeah, and it did it pretty well.

And to keep running costs low, Kim says she delivered all the first parcels of clothes herself using public transport to travel across Moscow.

That sounds, I mean, traveling yourself to deliver stuff in Russia.

If you look at the map, Russia is big.

She's going to need to figure this out.

There's a lot of hours on that subway.

Yeah, she's told a version of this story to many news outlets, including to the Financial Times in 2020.

She said, I just needed something to replace my teacher's salary.

I felt like I had to find something to do quickly to make myself feel like a fully fledged member of society again, obviously battling that postnatal depression.

But just months after this interview, independent Russian media outlet The Bell reported that this rags to riches origin story might have been created or at least embellished by a PR company in 2017 because it omits that during this exact time, her husband was running an internet provider startup.

He co-founded with a friend, a provider called UTEC.

And her husband's internet business was actually relatively successful.

And according to data from 2005, UTEC's revenue was almost 11 million rubles with a net profit of 718,000.

Now, that profit is equivalent of about 25,000 US dollars at the time, which wasn't a lot, may not sound like a lot, but the average annual salary in Russia at that time was just $5,000 and the company income was growing.

By 2007, profit was up to 5.5 million rubles or $225,000.

So enough money to start seeding another company.

Yeah, and also more than enough money to replace a teacher's salary in Russia.

Now, meanwhile, the Wildberries website was designed by Kim's husband's other business, which was a web studio called UT Design, which had created sites for other Russian e-commerce stores.

And a source told The Bell that the Bukalchuks had been selling second-hand clothes from Europe in a Russian shopping center since at least 2003, although Wildberries claims that this particular store had no relation to the company itself.

So the origin story might be disputed, but whatever the roots of it, at some point in 2004, the online clothing site Wildberries launched.

And at the time in Russia, it was a pretty groundbreaking idea.

Russian e-commerce was a few years behind its Western counterparts.

For example, when Wildberries launched, the entire Russian online retail market was worth about $3.2 billion,

a fraction of what it would be in the US and Europe.

And that comprised about 1,500 small sellers of mostly things like electronics, books, and household goods.

And, you know, even selling clothes online was a relatively new frontier in the West.

You know, ASOS had only just launched in 2000.

Amazon started selling clothes in 2002.

And there were some kind of early online fashion startups like Boo.com, I don't know, I don't even remember this one, which had failed already by this point.

So customers still struggled with buying clothes online without trying them on.

And, you know, all these complicated delivery logistics really ate into the profits of anybody trying to get into that market.

I remember this period and remember thinking to myself, selling clothes online will never work.

Really?

Yes.

And how wrong I was.

I said it would never work because you want to try them on.

And can you really be bothered getting all the way, trying them on only only for the massive faff and whatever?

So the logistics, it's really interesting.

This it's this is where the logistics industry kind of reshaped itself around a different industry to try and accommodate that.

It created a problem and the entire logistics industry warped to try and solve that problem.

It pivoted to create returns and exchanges processes.

Kim says her friends tried to dissuade her from selling clothes online for some of the reasons we've discussed, but she said, I decided to take the risk.

I had no clear concept or any business plan i was acting on my own intuition and although she was excited that orders were coming in on the very same day she launched a site tatiana admits wildberries got off to a very bumpy start so she often tells the story that she initially tried to do as much as she could herself but russia's long distances it is a very big country forced her to use the unreliable russian postal system which slowed her down and soon her husband intervened saying stop fiddling with the parcels until three o'clock in the morning hire some college students to help you and many many early customers also took advantage of Kim's attempt to undercut her competition with Wildberry's no-money upfront offer by simply never paying.

This reminds me a little bit of, you know, fiddling with the parcels till three in the morning.

Remember Jeff Bezos, who's second or third richest man in the world right now, he would be there filling boxes himself when he started selling those books.

Exactly.

People who get their hands dirty when they start up their own businesses.

Anyway, in 2006, one of her key suppliers, the German catalogue Otto, we've already mentioned, launched their own online site in Russia.

So while Berry's had to search for new clothing, new suppliers to sell, they managed to strike some deals directly with smaller European clothing manufacturers.

But this meant they just had the clothing, they didn't have the promotional materials you'd get with a bigger supplier.

So Kim decided to take some of her few employees to be models.

But the photos apparently looked unprofessional, customers were put off, and she saw the DIY approach had its limits, and so spent some of her growing profits to equip a photo studio with professional lighting in the office.

Not a million miles away from what ASOS does.

I actually remember going for a job at ASOS in the 2010s and they had a floor full of photo studios with little mini catwalks for the models to come in and come out wearing the clothes.

So, you know, it does have its benefits building your photo studio in the office.

Now, Wildberry's business was growing and soon Tatiana was drafting in family members to help.

Her younger sister joined Wildberry's.

Her father came out of retirement.

Her aunt became the company's accountant and Kim started reading business literature to learn on the job but she cites her uncle as her mentor.

He told her to scale up as soon as possible.

That's interesting.

Get big quickly.

I think that was also Amazon's mantra back in the day.

But while Berrys needed an injection of cash to do that and to move to a larger warehouse, for example, improve delivery logistics, Kim told the Russian state news agency TASS that Wild Berrys did not receive money from outside investors, just three or four million rubles from the sale of her husband's internet business.

Or did she?

Or did she?

Because here again, we have the conflicting narrative.

Bloomberg reported that an acquaintance, Sergei Anufriev, invested an unknown amount in wildberries in 2006.

The Bell says he was a bodybuilder and an employee at a gym in the same shopping centre that claimed that Vladislav had a store selling second-hand clothes.

They also claim that Anufriyev had deep ties to Russians what they call grey market imports.

These are genuine goods sold through unofficial channels without the approval of the brand that owns them.

In the late 2000s, he reportedly secured a large stock of Adidas products for Wildberries, allowing them to sell up to 50% below official prices.

And this high-margin deal was a key catalyst in the company's early growth.

Well, Kim says that in 2009, Wildberries signed its first major direct contract with Adidas to sell their large stockpiles in its warehouses because there was falling demand during the 2008 financial crisis.

She says they bought 3,000 pairs of one model of trainers at a good price and they soon sold out.

How Wildberries actually sourced this Adidas stock may be disputed, but all sources agree that sales of branded products boosted Wildberries in the late 2000s.

And also, this would be a period of economic success for Russia.

So you can see why a German sports manufacturer like Adidas would want to have a close relationship with a very fast-growing retailer in Russia, because it could be a huge growth market for them.

Especially if other consumers outside of that country weren't really buying.

Correct.

So by 2010, Wildberries was doing well enough to attract outside investment.

A large investment fund asked the company to sell them a major stake in Wildberries.

Tatiana refused, but soon afterwards, seemingly without outside funding, they expanded.

So, while Tatiana's financial situation remains, let's say, somewhat opaque, 2010 seems a reasonable point to say that Tatiana is a millionaire.

Hey everyone, Ed Helms here.

And hi, I'm Cal Penn, and we're the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Garth, host of the iHeart podcast, I choose me, to discuss the new audible adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice.

This is not a trick question.

There's no wrong answer.

What role would I play?

You know what?

I can see you as Mr.

Darcy.

You got a little call in first.

Okay, that's really sweet.

I appreciate that, but are you sure I'm not the dad?

I'm not Mr.

Bennett here.

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You bring the vision, Twilio brings the platform.

Real-time messaging, AI-driven insights, personalized customer journeys, it's all here, ready for you to build with.

Twilio's customer engagement platform is flexible, open, and designed for builders who want to create unforgettable customer experiences that drive impact.

No silos, no compromises, just the freedom to build your way.

Twilio, the ultimate builder's toolbox.

Learn more at Twilio.com.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacress for Safeway.

This fall, take care of the little ones in the family with baby club savings.

Now, through November 4th, spend $25 on select baby club products and save $5.

Shop for items like Pedia Shore bottles, Pedia Light Powder Packs, Huggies Baby Wipes, Huggies Diapers, Gerber Puffs, and Gerber pouches, and save $5 when you buy $25 or more on participating products.

Offer ends November 4th.

Restrictions apply.

Offers may vary.

Visit safeway.com for more details.

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month.

But I'd like to offer one other perk.

We have no stores.

That means no small talk.

Crazy weather we're having.

No, it's not.

It says just weather.

It is an introvert's dream.

Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for the three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required.

New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra.

See mintmobile.com.

so let's take tatiana kim from her first million onto a billion so in 2010 wild berries were still grappling with the big problems that plagued really all online clothing stores the logistics of delivery alongside customers desire to try on clothes So it began by opening small pickup points with fitting rooms attached to them in Moscow and some of the regions.

Customers could go, pick up their item, try it on, and if they didn't like it return it there and then and by 2012 there are 128 of these sort of pick up and fitting points wildberries were the first online retailer to offer changing rooms at pickup points in russia and if you're thinking to yourself as a consumer this sounds amazing i'm gonna buy so many clothes and only pick one of them and return the rest you have correctly identified the problem.

Customers loved it, but Wildberries were hit by extra costs.

So in order to sell one item with a 50% refusal rate, rate, it had to be delivered to customers twice, which basically doubled the delivery costs.

So Kim said in 2012, free fitting may not be profitable, but you can't do without it.

Somehow, Wild Burrows managed to swallow these extra costs.

And by 2020, they had 7,000 fitting rooms at pickup points across Russia, often located in unpre-processing retail spots in residential districts.

It's so interesting this because this is the kind of person I am.

If I got something with a post and it fitted okay, but not great, there's no way I'm going to go through the faff of returning it or if I if I'm in a fitting room and it doesn't fit quite well enough and I can hand it right to them back right then and there then I'll do it I just think there must be millions of people like me who've got ill-fitting clothes because they can't be bothered to send it back well partly that's the reason why online retailers have done so well right if you go into a shop and you feel the material and you think this is not actually something I'd like to see on myself, you try it on and it doesn't fit quite right, you wouldn't really buy it.

But how many times have any of us bought something in the post, looked at it and thought, that'll do, because I can't be bothered to make the trip to the post office?

And there was another benefit to these pickup points, because they weren't just useful for trying on clothes.

They also work, and this is the logistics part of it, as micro-distribution centers themselves.

Other e-commerce sites collect orders in one warehouse or several warehouses, pack them all into one box, which is then sent to the buyer.

When they're returned, they have to go that journey in reverse.

They have to go back to these large warehouses and to be sorted out again.

Wildberries delivers items to the pickup points.

And if they are returned, they can be stored stored there for some time, transported to another pickup point, or back to the warehouse, which reduces returns expenses.

It gives you a much more flexible logistical network because things aren't going to have to go back immediately.

They can sit there and then you can reshuffle it.

To me, that sounds like a sensible solution.

So by 2011, a couple of European-funded players had entered the Russian online clothing market.

So this was a new competition.

They also came with pretty hefty marketing budgets compared to Wildberry's.

So in order to compete with these new guys on the scene, WildBury started to offer free delivery to customers, a classic online retailing strategy.

Now, other online companies occasionally offered free delivery for promotions, but getting rid of that fee gave Wildbury's a huge boost because nobody likes to buy something and realize they've had to pay four pounds or four dollars extra on top for shipping.

The truth is, probably the shipping cost is now just bundled into the actual sale price of the item.

There's no such thing as free anything in retail.

But by the middle of 2014, WildBury's revenue was 25 billion rubles, which is roughly 700 million dollars.

So, a pretty substantial business.

Soon, they expanded beyond clothes, and they surpassed something called Ozon, which is one of the first Russian online retailers, and then started becoming described as Russia's Amazon in terms of its popularity.

But by the end of 2014 into 2015, another financial crisis came along.

The Russian ruble fell very sharply, and this was due to the combination of Western sanctions which were imposed after Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Remember that?

And that saw a steep decline in oil prices.

What happened in Russia, you had a very sharp recession after that.

Russian living standards dropped very substantially.

So people were feeling much less well off.

You'd think less inclined to spend money, but it wasn't quite like that for Wildberries.

No, during the 2014 crisis, Wildberries pivoted to a marketplace model.

So they let third-party sellers list their own goods on the website, which is actually something that ASOS for a time did.

Yeah, and Amazon has its marketplace as well now.

Exactly.

Most Russian Russian e-commerce firms still sold things directly and for Wild Berries this actually turned out to be a good idea because online sales generally rose in Russia during the financial crisis.

And it's interesting this bit about expanding during a financial downturn because Wild Berries was growing at this moment of Russian economic crisis and Tatiana said the success was down to a slightly expanded version of something called the lipstick effect and this is something that is an economic term believe it or not which is that customers spend money on small, indulgent, pleasure-providing items.

They might hold off on big ticket items, but

little pleasures to make themselves feel better during hard times.

And if you can get that bit right, you're onto a winner.

You're not going to get people splashing out on a new kitchen or a new car.

If you get enough of them to buy a lipstick, a nice pair of earrings, you're doing well for you.

A pair of sunglasses, a nice belt, that kind of stuff.

Exactly.

So Kim explained that Wildbury's clientele started out predominantly female.

It remained that way over the years.

And she said these women wanted to, quote, afford some little joys in life.

And Wildberry's offered just that.

By the end of 2016, it ranked first in online sales in all of Russia.

But Wildberry's huge growth during this period masked some mounting problems in its supply chain.

Just a year later, they were hit with over 20 lawsuits from suppliers.

Now, these suppliers claimed they were being routinely underpaid, they were pressured into deep discounts, they faced blocked or delayed shipments if they didn't comply.

Wildboroughs won all of these lawsuits, but because of the closed nature, the slightly opaque nature of the company, these cases fueled rumours that the company had financial problems, so suppliers became wary.

Whenever a company starts having rows with its suppliers, sometimes that can mean financial distress.

The telltale sign, if you want to see if a company might go bust sometimes, is the suppliers will start saying they're lengthening my payment terms from 60 to 90 or to 120 days.

That means that financially there is stress building within the company.

It's a well-known indicator.

So that's probably why people thought that things might not be all well.

Right, because the longer it takes for someone to pay a supplier, the less money's coming in.

Well, it means they're hoarding cash and they're trying to take as long as possible to pay their bills.

And that means that they're trying to hoard what little money they have and eke it out.

And that's not a good sign.

Oh, that's interesting.

So there were also other rumours besides the suppliers.

In fact, the business community were becoming quite suspicious of Wildbury's growth in Russia, and they speculated the company must be getting some form of help.

So Wildbury's decided they needed to give more interviews to wrestle back control of their public image.

That's really interesting, isn't it?

So this is the moment when he says we need to get something out there.

We need to basically calm things down on a number of different fronts.

So Wild Burris hired a PR firm to help.

Former staff claimed that Vladislav didn't want to be the spokesman, so Tatiana stepped up.

And this is the point that some claim, as we've already discussed, that Tatiana Kim's whole rags to riches narrative, English teacher, starting a company by herself, while on maternity leave with postnatal depression, all of that was actually dreamt up.

A former Wildbury's employee who's an ally of Vladislav has said, in terms of marketing, it was a genius idea.

Kim gave interviews where she claimed she wore only coats from Wildbury's and she laughed at the idea of splashing out on designer labels.

You know, like, you can really see the public image being built here, right?

Totally.

But The Bell, that's the independent Russian news outlet, claims that this is all part of rebranding of Kim as a businesswoman from the plow, was the quote they used.

Either way, it worked.

It calmed the suppliers down and won back their loyalty.

However, Vladislav and some former employees claim that this narrative erases his role in his ownership of Wildberries.

One senior employee who's not allied with either spouse described Vladislav as the company's god and tsar.

A former head of Russia's e-commerce trade association said, I don't think anyone had any doubts that both were the co-founders who ran the business together.

But after 2017, it was reported reported that Tatiana owned 99% of Wildberries and Władysław owned 1%.

And he was referred to as an IT technician who left his job that year to join her at Wildberry's in some articles.

I wonder why this is.

Now, if the version that he's co-founder, he's co-runner, he's the god and czar of the company,

why would they put a shareholder register together which showed her as the 99% owner of Wildberries, whereas him just 1%?

And it could be like she's the mom and all that kind of stuff.

So she attracts less attention than he might from other businesses.

The truth is, we don't know, but by 2019, Wildberries was reported to be worth $1.2 billion, which made it the fourth most valuable internet company in Russia.

Tatiana Kim, as the declared now sole owner of Wildberries, was included on the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires for the first time with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

So that made Tatiana the second woman in Russia to become a billionaire.

By this point, Kim had four children with her her husband Vladislav, and they were living in a nicer part of Moscow, but still renting.

She shunned luxury and glamorous events.

You know, she told interviewers she spent most of her free time with her children, reading books and watching Lord of the Rings.

Any parent will know this story.

But she's officially made it.

She is a billionaire.

So let's go beyond a billion.

Tatiana did not waste much time celebrating her new billionaire status.

The same year she was listed on the Forbes list, Wildberries expanded into Europe.

By 2021, it launched in the US.

Then they make a big move into finance.

Now, this is quite odd to me because in February 2021, Wildberries became the owner of Standard Credit Bank and renamed it Wildberries Bank.

And by 2022, Wildberries was issuing its own bank card for buyers.

In 2023, they launched a microcredit company, VB Finance.

And this is truly quite odd to me.

You don't get Top Shop Bank, you know, or ASOS Bank.

What you do get, though, is some big finance departments of, like, for example, Marks and Spencer's, their Marks and Spencer's card.

That is quite a big finance operation.

And a lot of people joke, it's very common in the car industry.

Of course, a lot, most cars bought on finance.

There used to be something called the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, and that was the financing arm of GM.

And people used to joke that GM was basically a bank which sold a few cars on the side.

So really, it's actually not that unusual.

Well, it's yeah, but you know,

I think it's quite unusual for an internet company, unless you consider this the beginnings of a kind of Klana-type push where you're finding, you know, you're having a financing mechanism to pay for online deliveries.

That could be what they were thinking.

True.

And, you know, this was an interesting move for them, but it did.

give them some unwanted attention.

Yes, because between 2022 and 2023, while Burrows was hit by a wave of government inspections, health and safety officers visited their facilities 400 times in 2022, and in 2023, that number jumped to more than 1600.

And then in January 2024, a fire destroyed $100 million worth of supplier stock in a Wild Bury's warehouse.

They had to pay the sellers 95% of the damages.

And authorities opened a negligence case against them, blaming the company for not having up-to-date fire safety paperwork, which Wildberries denied.

Now, in other countries, this case might have resulted in some sort of fine, but in Russia, things like that fire inspections can signal what is the start of a hostile takeover and the economists suggest wild berries was under pressure to source kreisia now kreisia is a kind of

in in in china you would probably call it wanxi um yeah which is like um protection kind of political cover in the old days it would be just out and out gangster protection money which is like you know we wouldn't want something terrible to happen to your store like burned down would we now said Said wild glasses knocked off the table.

Exactly.

But it translates actually literally as roof.

But in the 90s, it referred to business paying criminal gangs for protection.

And then it became, more recently, political, influential people offer protection from regulators, for example, lawsuits, hostile takeovers.

We covered some of this in the Roman...

Abramovich episode.

You need, you basically, if you think you can run a successful business without any outside interference, you're mistaken.

You're going to need protection from someone.

And it's the from someone where this story gets really complicated.

It is, because shortly after the fire, Tatiana Kim began merger talks with a small firm called Russ Outdoor.

Now, on the face of it, this merger did not make a lot of sense commercially because Russ Outdoor was a small company.

It produced billboard ads and had no online experience.

So this was quite a mystifying turn.

Yeah, and this is David and Goliath.

Wildberry's dwarfed them.

In 2023, Wildberry's revenues were $2.7 billion.

Russ Outdoors' revenues were 300 million.

That's one ninth, you know, just around 10%.

And Vladislav's representative told The Economist magazine that Russ Outdoor had approached Tatiana with an offer to help ensure she didn't face criminal charges for the fire.

Now, Tatiana's representatives have denied this, saying she was the one who initiated discussions with Russ Outdoor.

And The Bell claimed that the head of Russ Outdoor, Mazoyan, had long been associated with Suleiman Keremov, a billionaire senator in the Russian parliament, they say is known for entering into deals with businesses facing challenging circumstances.

The Bell claim Keremov then set up a meeting between Tatiana and Mazoyan.

Mizoyan denies these claims, however.

Also, a murky one.

Tatiana denies meeting Keremov, but by June this merger was done.

Wild Berrys handed over most of its assets for just 65% of the new company.

Russ Outdoor transferred no assets into the joint company, got a 35% stake, and Russian media later confirmed that Vladimir Putin himself had signed off on the deal.

So basically, while Berry's had handed over most of its assets, it's nine times the size of the other one and gets 65% of the company.

This feels like an old-fashioned shakedown to me.

Yeah, if you're looking at it as an objective bystander, you're thinking to yourself, this looks like business suicide for the bigger company.

Anyway, it's very opaque, and we don't know all the answers to that.

We've got to be completely honest about what we don't know in the analysis of this.

Is it quite hard to do business in Russia without the state at least signing up to it?

For sure, and it is now.

I mean, there was a period when it was like the Wild West, which was after the fall of

the Berlin Wall, and you had

basically state assets, which were owned by the USSR, being divvied up by a bunch of

compals.

And yeah, so huge industries, steel, oil, aluminium, ending up in private hands.

And the numbers were big, and there were billions at stake.

And so it got quite violent at times.

It really was quite a lawless place.

Vladimir Putin, in a way, is credited with being a new sheriff in town.

And in some ways,

they all pay tribute to him, and he's the ultimate protector.

So they can go on, they can own their fancy houses all around the world until, of course, he invades Crimea and then again invades Ukraine, in which case all those fancy yachts and whatever get impounded around the world.

But yes, but it is hard to do business in Russia without the criminal.

Without some kind of protection, for sure.

But it also crucially doesn't mean that you, you know, excuse yourself from all this drama because in July 2024, a few months after Tatiana and Vladislav had separated and a month after the merger, Vladislav posted a video about it saying, My wife left me and got involved with a dodgy crowd who are raiding our business under the guise of a merger and funneling the assets.

So the head of the Chechen Republic, a key Putin ally, Ramzan Kadarov, then commented on the video.

He said he would help bring home Tatiana and protect Wildberries from the dodgy crowd, alluding to Suleiman Karimov and the head of Russ Outdoor, a guy called called Robert Mirzayan.

And friends of Vladislav were surprised to see this connection with Kadyrov.

They all thought it was just part of a bitter divorce.

And that brings us right back to that hot September day in Moscow, 18th September 2024.

Vladislav arrived at the Wildberries office with a group of men from Chechnya and Ramzam Kedarov himself.

Tatyana said that Sergei Anufiev, the bodybuilder who you remember invested in Wildberries in 2006, was also part of this group of men.

Now, inside, Kim had some security of her own.

It was made up of men from Ingushetia and Dagestan, two reasons with complex and at times pretty tense relations with neighbouring Chechnya.

And there are disputes about who shot first, but the two men shot dead were Wildberry security guards from Ingushetia.

Now Vladislav claimed he was at the offices for a pre-arranged meeting to talk about the merger.

Tatyana, on her part, said no talks were ever arranged and contacted the police saying her husband had attempted to seize the company's offices.

And just hours after the shooting, Kim posted a video on Telegram, the messaging site, addressing Vladislav directly.

She said, through tears, young guys died.

Vladislav, what are you doing?

How will you look your parents and our children in the eye?

How could you let this situation get so insanely out of hand?

And Vladislav was arrested and charged with murder a day later.

But he was pretty soon released from jail and seemingly,

as far as we can see, isn't facing charges.

He credited Ramzan Kadarov for his release, saying his team had offered help.

Thanks to this, I believe I'm still alive and not in jail.

Few weeks after that shooting, Kadyrov appeared on local TV and increased regional tensions by declaring a blood field on Keremov.

Now, many worry that this would mean more violence connected to the shootout, but at the time of recording, no further escalation appears to have taken place.

And Tatiana gave an interview about her marriage a month after the shooting, describing it as unhappy and emotionally abusive.

She said she now lives a quiet life with her seven children from her marriage of Vladislav and plans to remain single.

Now, some political analysts understandably see the wild berries feud as part of a bigger pattern of feuding in wartime Russia.

As sanctions and isolation bite as they are right now, potatoes are up 167%, just a random fact compared to a year ago.

Russia has begun reshuffling ownership of major businesses.

It's transferred control of valuable assets to individuals with closer ties to the Kremlin.

In April 2025, a Moscow court awarded Tetiana full ownership of wildberries, ruling that her ex-husband, Vladislav, must transfer his remaining stake to her.

So it's a question of who's on which side of some bitter regional conflicts within Russia at a time of financial hardship in Russia because of the sanctions.

And

actually, what's happened lately is a falling oil price.

Oil prices shot up after the invasion of Ukraine.

But as the rest of the world has pumped more oil to replace Russian oil, prices have gone down and that's been bad for the Russian economy.

But this doesn't mean that wildberries are staying static.

So in June 2025, the newly merged Wildberries and Russ Outdoor Company, which is called RVB, announced plans to expand into Africa following recent launches in Georgia, Tajikistan and the UAE.

And Robert Mirzayan is now reported as CEO of RVB, while Tatiana Kim remains CEO of Wildberries, now a subsidiary within RVB.

Interesting that expansion into Africa, because Russia has enormous influence in Africa.

If you go to East Africa, they have incredibly influential ties there.

So if you are a friend of Russia, you have an in to Africa

in many places.

So that's kind of interesting.

So what a wild story that is.

Yeah, and also a developing story because

the shooting happened in September 2024.

Yeah.

So what we do now is we go through a bunch of categories, wealth, controversy, giving back, philanthropy, power, and legacy, and give them marks out of zero to ten.

There's plenty of room for debate on these ones, and then we're going to throw it to you.

Ask you all what you think, whether they're good, bad, or just another billionaire.

So, we're going to start with wealth worth $4.6 billion,

but

the story is a rags to riches.

We don't know if we believe it.

Well, you have to, well, if you talk to independent media outlets like the Bell, you know, this is all kind of a cheerle fabrication.

Well, I don't think the rag spit is.

I don't think anyone suggests she was rich at the beginning.

True.

Right?

So it was more a kind of qualitative kind of polish to like, you know, English teacher struggling, children, living, whatever.

I don't think anyone ever thought that they

she herself didn't come from a pretty modest background.

Yeah.

And, you know, one of the things we try and judge our billionaires on in terms of wealth is whether they flash the cash.

And she definitely doesn't.

She keeps it quite low-key.

But I imagine also sometimes in Russia, it might be more sensible to keep

stump.

Exactly.

Don't flash the wealth, actually.

So you don't attract the attention of some unsavoury characters.

I think that was one of the reasons why London became such a mecca for Russian billionaires during a certain period a few years ago because this is the place where you could buy a Ferrari, where you could go and buy your diamonds, where you could have

without getting a raised eyebrow from

the local law enforcement or indeed the local politicians in Russia.

Anyway, but we should also recognise she is only the second Russian woman to be a billionaire, and she is now Russia's richest woman.

So I'm going to give her a solid

six for wealth.

I think a six out of ten is

pretty doable for her.

You know, being Russia's richest woman, that's a really, that's a good title to have.

Sure.

Controversy.

Well, there's no shortage of that.

Well, in 2021, Wildberry staff complained that their wages no longer matched the speed and pressure of their delivery targets.

By 2023, Wild Burys was fining delivery workers for damaged returns.

That sparked some strikes.

And, of course, there's a small matter of two of her security men being shot dead at their offices.

Tatiana is not implicated in those shootings.

And although Vladislav was arrested, he was released.

And at the time of recording, no one's been charged with the murder of the two men who died.

And the status of that investigation, we think, is unclear.

I still think that having a shooting, even vaguely happening on your premises, is

looking to drive that score up, I'm afraid.

And your company has become a proxy battle for Chechen versus Kremlin interest.

It's kind of interesting, isn't it?

I think this is like a nine controversy for me.

I think it's a nine for me as well.

It's not quite a ten, but I mean.

What do you need for a ten woman?

I mean, we've done gun runners and drug traffickers, and this isn't quite it, but you know, the shooting, shooting's come pretty close to it.

Okay, I was nine as well, so yeah, I think you're right.

I think we need a bit of room, but not a solid nine on controversy.

Giving back, this is about charitable work, philanthropy, stuff like that.

So Kim's actually talked about her charitable work during COVID.

She says at the start of the pandemic, they bought a million masks in China.

They chartered a flight, they brought them to Russia and distributed them to hospitals and charities for free.

But other than that, there is actually not that much information about her philanthropy.

Okay, so I think that's one to zero.

I would also say a million masks sounds impressive, but only think about the money.

What's that?

143 million, so that's only one, that's not even, that's not even one percent of the population.

Okay,

it's a zero for me.

Yeah, I mean,

a zero seems harsh, but I would give her just a one.

Okay, zero is too harsh.

I'll give a one for the effort.

Okay, all right, power and legacy.

The British tabloids have called Tatiana Kim a Putin-friendly oligarch.

Now, she denies ever actually having met Putin, but there are reports linking her to top Russian officials, including the Prime Minister.

Yeah, and Ukraine and Poland have both sanctioned her and Wildberries for alleged propaganda and ties to sanctioned banks.

So, you know, quite a politically divisive character, but you know, she has probably changed the way people in Russia shop.

Yeah, I mean, the point is, internet commerce is such a global phenomenon that someone was going to do it in Russia eventually, right?

And it was just a question of who was going to get the keys to the kingdom.

And that's why this is such an interesting one of political and regional power intrigue, because there's clearly a massive prize on offer there.

And that I don't think we can credit Tatiana Kim with single-handedly inventing internet retail in Russia.

If they hadn't done it, somebody from Germany would have done it.

But what is an achievement is that she's managed to carve out a real identity for her business in one which is dominated by real global players, so your Amazons and what have you.

In the same way that Alibaba has in China, you could argue that Wild Burris has done that in Russia.

And also impressive that a woman could do this in Russia, which is still, to my understanding, quite a patriarchal place.

I mean, you look at the other characters in this story and they are, you know, power brokers, businessmen, you know, they're all men.

But power and legacy, I'm going to give a

Russia's richest woman seven.

I would say Russia's richest woman gets an eight out of ten for me.

Okay, seven for me, eight for you.

So she comes from a very modest background.

You know, she's kind of built this website, if you believe her on PR story, out of nothing,

doing something that caters for Russian women at a time where Western companies weren't stepping up to the plate.

It is quite an interesting story.

She married her sweetheart, who at the time, though, was running a fairly successful internet business, and that may have been the source of some of the funds that we used to expand it.

But what an interesting story.

There's so much we don't know.

But what comes out of it, I think, is a really rich story in terms of the emergence of lots of trends.

And that's when I find these these episodes so interesting is that they are drawn against a canvas of changing technology in terms of internet commerce, changing political environments, changing consumer behavior.

Changing countries as well.

Borders being shifted and all that kind of stuff.

So that's when I think this show is at its best.

And I think she's a good example of that.

So we're going to have to now get your thoughts on asking whether Tatiana Kim is good, bad or just another billionaire.

Yes, that's right.

We want to hear from you as to why you think she's good, bad, or just another billionaire.

Why not email goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or just drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176.

That's goodbadbillionaire or one word at bbc.com or 001-917-686-1176.

We love getting your emails.

Here's a couple that have come in.

Hello, I joined so many people in thanking you for an outstanding podcast.

Well, thank you.

I've been a a consumer of podcasts for years, like many, starting with cereal.

My mum put me onto GBB, Good Bad Billionaire.

She lives in Devon, and I live in Dubai, and we each listen, then discuss the episode when we catch up on video calls.

I particularly enjoyed the nuanced approach, exactly as you promised, the good and the bad.

Hungry for more.

Natalie, who's a Devon mum, and Lena, who's the daughter in Dubai.

Thank you, Natalie, and thank you, Lena.

Hi, I'm enjoying the Good Bad Billionaire podcasts.

The first one I heard was Ford, and I have now started from the beginning, and I've been loving them so much.

Oh that's great.

I've been listening to two or three a day.

Oh my gosh, that's a lot.

So far my favorite is Chuck Feeney in terms of both his ability to spot the opportunity to make money and then the amazing philanthropy.

I agree.

Oprah was good but Chuck still wins out.

I am looking forward to hearing more episodes.

Best wishes from Marco.

Thanks Marco.

I think we're both agreed on Chuck Feeney.

He really was a special guy.

So who do we have on the next episode?

We have a person who pioneered the idea of the disappearing message.

Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat.

That's right.

A frat boy made good who became a billionaire in his early 20s.

Good, Bad, Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Tamzin Curry.

The editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

You bring the vision, Twilio brings the platform.

Real-time messaging, AI-driven insights, personalized customer journeys, it's all here, ready for you to build with.

Twilio's customer engagement platform is flexible, open, and designed for builders who want to create unforgettable customer experiences that drive impact.

No silos, no compromises, just the freedom to build your way.

Twilio, the ultimate builder's toolbox.

Learn more at twilio.com.