Just like Wildberries’ name - chosen for its evocations of color and dynamism - Bakalchuk is seen as a breath of fresh air in Russia’s business world. And it means Bakalchuk stands out from the country’s other billionaires, the majority of whom made their fortunes, directly or indirectly, from the extraction of mineral resources. This rags-to-riches origin story makes Bakalchuk highly unusual in Russia, where the state controls huge swathes of the economy, and the wealthy elite is almost entirely male. According to Bakalchuk, Wildberries has grown organically ever since. When the first orders came in, she used her apartment as a makeshift warehouse and took public transport to deliver the packages herself. “I tried to return to what I was doing previously - I was a foreign-language tutor - but it didn’t work out because, of course, my child didn’t care about my schedule.” Instead, she invested $700 in a website that sold clothes, and a little more in online advertisements. “I didn’t want to be known as just ‘someone with a child,’” she said in her first-ever video interview 14 years later. While real estate tycoon Elena Baturina officially reclaimed her title as Russia’s richest woman in 2020, Forbes magazine has suggested that Bakalchuk’s personal fortune could be as much as $10 billion.īakalchuk has described how she set up the company a month after giving birth in 2004, while still suffering from postpartum depression. With almost a million orders a day, Wildberries all but doubled its payroll last year and quadrupled the size of its supplier network to almost 80,000 firms and individuals. And the coronavirus pandemic has only strengthened its lead.
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The company has underwritten its growth by catering to low-income consumers via offline collection points, free delivery, and rolling discounts. Wildberries is comfortably ahead in the cutthroat race to become Russia’s Amazon. A Wildberries spokesperson, however, declined to answer questions for this article. In recent years, Bakalchuk has, among other things, appeared at business conferences, held public meetings with ministers, and even attended celebrity events in an attempt to boost her public profile. In her 16 years in business, Bakalchuk typically avoided media scrutiny and claimed in an interview last year that she aspired to a “quiet life.” But as Wildberries consolidates its position as Russia’s biggest online retailer - its unmissable pink-and-purple branding can be found from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean - she has stepped out of the shadows.
Such public leadership was a departure for the poetry-writing former English teacher. “We’re a great country that has more than once gotten out of the most difficult situations.” “Stay at home, and we’ll take care of you and your loved ones,” pledged the founder. Sitting alone on a large sofa with her hands clasped firmly in her lap, Bakalchuk outlined a set of rules for pandemic-era internet trading before attacking shopping malls and stores for their irresponsible approach to safety, arguing they should instead be repurposed as collection points for online orders. Newly crowned as the country’s richest woman, the owner of online retail giant Wildberries released a video statement promising that digital merchants would rise to the challenge of lockdown. Last year, as Russia faced a rising tide of coronavirus infections, Tatyana Bakalchuk stepped into the spotlight.
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