Alisa Ushakova

God, I don't like whiners, to be honest. I really can't stand them.

That decision, and the decade that followed it, is the story of a co-founder who built the thing that makes the brand possible: the operational architecture, the financial discipline, the scaling infrastructure, and — eventually — the willingness to hire someone better at expansion than she was. The lawyer who chose the spreadsheet did not do so reluctantly for long.

The law school and the fashion bet #

Ushakova’s route into law was, by her own account, shaped by a film. She told Forbes Russia in 2025 that Legally Blonde had given her the idea that “despite all the stereotypes, you can do what you want if you really want it.” Her father, who was self-employed in contrast to her mother’s institutional salary, supported the choice and hoped she might become a prosecutor. A mandatory work placement rotating through a court, a prosecutor’s office, and a police department closed that door decisively. “After my work placement,” she said, “I realized I don’t want to be connected to this on either side.”

By 2014 she was finishing a law degree at the Ural State Law University (Уральский государственный юридический университет им. В. Ф. Яковлева) in Yekaterinburg while taking private pattern-cutting and sewing lessons with Shamatava — two tracks pointing in entirely different directions and narrowing toward a forced choice. The sewing was not recreational. The founders had identified a gap in the market with a precision that only comes from personal frustration: the clothes they wanted to wear did not exist in the places they could afford to find them, and they had begun to make their own. Ushakova’s origin moment, as she told it, was an organza dress improvised from a bolt of fabric bought at a Yekaterinburg textile shop for a friend’s birthday. “From about ten meters away it probably looked good.” The requests that followed the dress were the first market signal.

The founding decision was not a business plan. It was a threshold crossed while an examination was still in progress.

Building the machine #

USHATÁVA launched in 2015 from a sublet beauty studio in Yekaterinburg on roughly ₽200,000–250,000 in seed capital — drawn from the founders’ own savings, sourced through a friend in food delivery who believed in them before the brand existed. No industry contacts, no fashion training beyond what they had taught themselves, no Moscow address. The brand recouped the seed before the end of the year. That speed of recoupment was not luck; it was evidence that the gap they had identified was real.

The division of labour that would define the partnership for the next decade was not formally set at the beginning. Both women designed in the early years. But as the brand grew and the creative function consolidated under Shamatava — particularly after designer Sanan Gasanov joined in 2020 — Ushakova’s role shifted toward its natural home: operations, finance, legal structure, the machinery that makes a creative business function. The pandemic forced what informal drift had suggested. By 2022 the role split was formalized in corporate registry: from 25 February 2022, Ushakova became “управляющий ИП” — managing individual entrepreneur — for both operating entities. “I perform the role of general director and handle all administrative matters,” she told SETTERS Media. “Everything the creative director doesn’t do, I do.”

The description is deceptively modest. What it covers is the full operational load of a fashion business that by then had boutiques in four cities, a newsletter that generated nearly a third of its online revenue, and a supply chain complex enough to require a dedicated finance function. Her first significant failure in that role had come earlier: in 2016, she ordered roughly ₽1 million of artificial fur for a new collection without clearing the financing with Shamatava in time. The bill came due before the revenue arrived. “It was my stupid mistake,” she said at Fuckup Nights Yekaterinburg three years later — the first time she accounted for it publicly. They borrowed ₽500,000 from a private individual and repaid it within weeks. For seven years after that, debt was a closed topic.

The 2022 restructuring #

The year 2022 was the hardest year for the brand by nearly every measure, and it was the year that tested Ushakova’s capacity to lead rather than manage. Revenue fell 36 percent — to ₽229M from a pre-pandemic high of ₽435M — as a consequence of the strategic decision to stage the memorial show for art director Dachi Zukhbaia, who had died of COVID in 2022. The show was the right decision aesthetically; it was expensive operationally. The cost fell on Ushakova.

It also coincided with the formalization of her CEO role and a period of significant personnel change. “It seemed to me that I was ready for it,” she told SETTERS, “but it still turned out to be harder.” That admission — characteristically measured, without self-dramatization — is the closest she comes on the record to articulating the weight of the role. Shamatava’s account of the same period is more visceral; for Ushakova, the register is operational. She was, she said, responsible for conveying that “a bright future lies ahead of us” to a team that had just lost a colleague and watched the revenue line go the wrong way. The difficulty was not personal doubt in the existential sense. It was the specific difficulty of holding a team’s confidence while managing a crisis she had inherited and a role she was formalizing simultaneously.

The debt reversal that followed was, in its own way, a more significant decision than the restructuring. The founders’ categorical opposition to credit — held since the 2016 fur episode — had been a source of operational constraint and, in a secondary sense, a point of pride. In 2022 and 2023 they reconsidered. Ushakova’s account of the shift reveals the fear that had been underneath the rule: “Before, we were afraid of loans because we didn’t know how it works and were afraid we wouldn’t be able to repay the funds. Now there is both understanding and a plan.” A founder who can name what she was afraid of, and then change the rule accordingly, is a different kind of operator from one who simply followed a rule that happened to work.

The Letushev hire #

The clearest signal that Ushakova had built the company beyond her own executive capacity — and recognized it — came in October 2024, when she brought in Anton Letushev as executive director. Letushev had been CEO of LIMÉ for much of the previous decade, overseeing a business that reached ₽34 billion in revenue under his leadership. His brief at USHATÁVA was explicit: develop strategy, raise profit and profitability, manage operational processes, improve efficiency, and grow sales across all channels — with network expansion and entry into new countries named specifically.

Hiring a ₽34-billion-scale operator as executive director before the brand has taken its first external investment is not a defensive move. It is an engineering decision: building the infrastructure that makes the investment conversation possible on terms the founder controls. Ushakova’s stated position on investors confirms the logic. She has been publicly clear that she wants capital and fashion-sector expertise — not capital alone. She does not yet know how to enter international markets, she told Forbes in 2025, and therefore wants investors who have already done it. The Letushev hire is the same principle applied one step earlier: identify what the company lacks, find the person who has done it at scale, and create the conditions for it to happen before the pressure is existential.

The Ural version of building a fashion house #

Ushakova consistently frames her operating philosophy through a regional register that her Moscow-centric industry does not quite know how to categorize. She invokes Ural bluntness — “telling the truth in your face, Ural-style, without Moscow coquetry” — as both a personal trait and a strategic stance. The company’s headquarters have remained in Yekaterinburg even as Moscow became its largest retail market. That is a choice that communicates something about how the brand understands itself: not a Moscow brand with Ural origins, but a brand that built the case for Yekaterinburg from Yekaterinburg.

This matters operationally as well as symbolically. Fashion industry infrastructure in Russia is concentrated in Moscow — showroom space, press access, wholesale buyers, the full apparatus of visibility. Building a designer brand outside that apparatus, and refusing to move the operational base even as boutiques opened in the capital, forced USHATÁVA to develop distribution and marketing disciplines that Moscow-anchored brands never needed. The newsletter that generated 31.7 percent of online revenue was not an accident; it was the product of a brand that could not rely on foot traffic past the right street at the right moment.

Ushakova’s public register across interviews reinforces the same logic. Asked by Forbes in 2025 whether she dwells on the difficulties of operating in the current Russian business environment, she was direct: “God, I don’t like whiners, to be honest. I really can’t stand them. So if we make a great product, we’ll find a way to survive and we’ll find our customer, and the customer will find us.” The defiance is not bravado; it is a statement of operational confidence that the product does the work if the operations support it.

By 2025, at the brand’s tenth anniversary, that confidence had produced measurable results. Revenue stood at ₽786.4M, net profit at ₽141.8M, and the Letushev hire had positioned the brand for a scale it had not yet reached but had demonstrably prepared for. The terms on which Ushakova was willing to consider outside investment — strategic fashion expertise required alongside capital — were the same terms she had applied to every significant decision she had made since walking away from a law exam. Not what is available. What is right.

The rules she had set herself — no debt, no investors, no Moscow address — were not ideology. They were the training ground for knowing when to break them.

For an investor, the decade reads as a qualification. A fashion brand that built operational architecture from ₽200,000 to ₽786M without external capital, that reversed its own financial rules under documented pressure, and that hired scale expertise before the capital arrived is not asking for a rescue. It is offering a partnership with someone who has already proven she can build the machine.

Last updated: June 15, 2026