Ivan Khokhlov

I want to teach.

The question that follows him into 2025 is whether the pattern will hold one more time. In October of that year, the brand recorded its first year-on-year revenue decline. Khokhlov disclosed it publicly, before any journalist was positioned to force the issue. Whether that disclosure is the act of a founder engineering a clean exit on his own terms — or the first test that may not resolve neatly — is the open question he has placed on the record himself.

The first company #

Khokhlov grew up in Tyumen and came of age professionally in Yekaterinburg, a city that produces a particular kind of entrepreneur: pragmatic, operationally focused, unsentimental about failure. He built a construction firm from nothing, and at its peak the business turned over roughly ₽1.5 billion rubles. That is not a small company. It required vendors, financing, project management, and the ability to sustain operations across multiple contracts simultaneously.

By 2013, the business had slid to hundreds of millions and was still declining. The construction market had changed. Khokhlov was not the cause of the decline; he understood the trajectory and decided not to fight it. He enrolled at the SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management — not to rescue the first chapter, but to find what came after it.

He was not running toward fashion. He had no fashion background, no interest in clothing as an industry, no particular vision of what a Russian fashion brand should be. He was running away from a chapter that was ending and toward the space that would become the next one. At SKOLKOVO he met Irina Golomazdina and her twin sister Marina. The idea for 12 STOREEZ emerged in conversation — a brand organized around system logic rather than trend logic: one new wardrobe piece per month, twelve per year, each designed to integrate with the others. No fast fashion, no seasonal chaos. The customer would build a coherent wardrobe gradually, piece by piece, month by month.

The logic was Khokhlov’s and Irina’s together from the beginning. She brought the creative vision — the aesthetic DNA that would become the brand’s identity. He brought the operational instinct from a decade of running his own business: how to manage cash, how to build systems, how to keep a structure functioning under pressure. Marina held 12% of the founding equity. The ₽2 million founding investment was positioned internally as a side experiment — a test, not a commitment. Khokhlov still had the construction company. The bet was small enough to be survivable if it failed.

The bet that became a decision #

The brand launched from a Yekaterinburg home showroom on Instagram in early 2014. In the first month, it generated ₽650,000. By December, the year-end figure was ₽12 million.

That number changed the nature of the experiment. A side project generating ₽12 million in its first year is not a side project — it is a business that needs systems, discipline, and someone whose full attention it commands. Khokhlov left construction entirely. The decision was not celebratory; he did not describe it as a triumph in interviews. It was a recognition that one chapter had ended and the next one had a legitimate claim on everything he had.

He married Irina Golomazdina. The co-founding relationship became a marriage. Co-founders and spouses — a configuration that concentrates every decision, every stake, every bad quarter and every good one, into a single shared life. The business and the marriage would carry the same risks, the same pressures, and eventually the same fractures.

The scaling years #

From 2016 onward, 12 STOREEZ grew with the consistency of a brand that had found a formula and was applying it with discipline. Moscow expansion anchored the national story; by 2019, revenue had reached ₽2.7 billion with roughly 400 employees. The brand had become a reference point for what contemporary Russian fashion could be — premium without the artificiality of luxury, designed with system logic rather than the restless attention-seeking of fast fashion.

Khokhlov managed the operational architecture. Irina managed the creative direction. The division of labour worked because the two things the brand needed most — discipline and vision — were distributed across two people who trusted each other completely. The brand’s coherence over five years of rapid growth reflected that arrangement. There were no strategic pivots, no confused repositioning attempts, no chasing of trends. The system held because its authors held.

In 2021, Baring Vostok acquired a 12% stake. Marina Golomazdina had already sold her equity. The founding triangle had narrowed to two: a co-founder couple running a professionally structured company with institutional capital on the cap table. Khokhlov transitioned from founder-operator to founder-institutional CEO — a different role, with different obligations. External capital introduces a governance layer that changes the texture of every decision. Khokhlov had built his construction firm as the sole decision-maker, answerable to no one. The Baring Vostok relationship required a different posture.

The institutionalization was not costless, and Khokhlov did not pretend otherwise. But the company had outgrown what two people could carry without professional infrastructure.

The 2022 rupture — operational and personal #

February 2022 arrived without a playbook for anyone. For 12 STOREEZ, the immediate crisis was logistical: the company’s Portuguese bank account was deleted without notice, logistics costs rose 50–70% within weeks as established supply routes collapsed, and the entire system for operating internationally required rebuilding from first principles. Khokhlov improvised. He rerouted supply chains, renegotiated partnerships, found new banking relationships, and bet on premium positioning as the company’s insulation from the broader market collapse. The 2022 net loss was ₽53 million — real pain, but the kind a solvent company can absorb and learn from.

The bet on premium held. Consumers who remained in the market continued spending on quality. The brands that chased downmarket to protect volume found that the customers they were chasing had disappeared anyway. Khokhlov’s instinct — that 12 STOREEZ’s customers were defined by their relationship to quality, not to price points — proved correct. The brand grew through 2022 by holding its position.

What was not visible in the financial statements was what was happening personally. The marriage was fracturing. The sanctions crisis and the personal crisis were simultaneous — the company navigating an external rupture while its founders navigated an internal one. Neither fact was public yet, and neither seems to have contaminated the other. The business kept functioning because Khokhlov and Irina kept functioning together, whatever was happening between them.

His COVID response, two years earlier, had established the register. Cutting his salary to ₽1 was a public gesture, widely noted, that told employees and observers something specific about how he led: he absorbed the difficulty himself before asking anyone else to absorb it. “Последние две недели — это история выживания” (“The last two weeks are a story of survival”), he told FashionUnited in March 2020. The 2022 response was quieter, less symbolic. Operational decisions made under genuine uncertainty, without a template, without the visibility. The results were the evidence.

The announcement #

In May 2023, Khokhlov and Irina Golomazdina announced their divorce. They did not separate the business.

They continued as co-CEOs. The industry noticed and expected the conventional outcome: a divorce that fractures a co-founder partnership forces a sale, a buyout, a structural split, a leadership change, or at minimum a prolonged and visible deterioration. None of those things happened. They kept working. The announcement was public; the reasons were private; the arrangement continued.

Revenue in 2023 reached ₽10.6 billion — a 44% increase over 2022. The brand’s best year to that point came during its founders’ most personal rupture. No one in the press asked Khokhlov how this was possible, and he did not volunteer the answer. The evidence is simply: they kept working, the company kept growing, and neither the announcement nor its aftermath produced the outcome that co-founder divorces typically produce.

What held them together professionally was never stated publicly by either. The conventional explanations — shared financial interest, contractual obligations, professionalism — apply to many co-founder divorces that nevertheless end in dissolution. Something else was operating here. The most honest framing is also the most spare: both founders appear to have concluded that the brand was worth more than the rupture, and that conclusion held.

The GUM flagship #

In 2024, 12 STOREEZ opened its flagship store in GUM — the historic glass-roofed department store on Red Square — in the space formerly occupied by Hermès. The Hermès departure from Russia, like those of dozens of Western luxury brands after 2022, had created gaps in the premium retail market that Russian brands were now positioned to fill. 12 STOREEZ moved into one of the most visible gaps in the most visible building in Russian retail.

Revenue reached ₽11.9 billion. The PROfashion Brand-Legend award followed — external recognition of the capacity to grow in a market that had lost most of its external reference points over the preceding two years. The award named something the brand had been earning since 2022: genuine succession to the space Western luxury left vacant, not as a surrogate but as an independent proposition.

For Khokhlov, the GUM flagship was personal validation of a specific kind. The ₽2 million bet placed in a Yekaterinburg home showroom in 2014 had become a brand occupying a space in the most prominent retail address in the country. The construction business — the first chapter, the one that peaked and declined — was a different kind of institution: one he built, understood the limits of, and left when the trajectory became clear. 12 STOREEZ was the chapter that followed, and it had exceeded any reasonable projection of where that chapter would go.

The succession plan and the open question #

In a 2025 interview with Spletnik, Khokhlov said he wants to leave when the company turns 18 — in 2032 — and become a teacher. “Я хочу преподавать” (“I want to teach”) is a specific statement, offered without prompting, in a profile context. It is worth taking at face value. Founders who name their exit horizon in public, seven years out, are not usually fantasizing. They are telling you what the next chapter looks like from where they stand.

Then came October 2025.

Khokhlov announced publicly — before any journalist was positioned to force the disclosure — that October had produced the company’s first year-on-year revenue decline in eleven years of operation. The announcement itself was the act: taking ownership of the turn before it became someone else’s story to tell. It is the same posture he demonstrated with the COVID salary cut and, in a different way, with the divorce announcement. Absorbing the difficulty himself. Presenting it plainly. Not waiting for the question.

What October means is not yet settled. It may be a demand cycle — the macroeconomic pressure building across Russian consumer spending since 2022 finally reaching a brand that had insulated itself well but cannot insulate itself indefinitely. It may be a market adjustment as the post-2022 substitution dynamic matures and consumers recalibrate. It may be the beginning of the succession chapter the founder has already named, arriving earlier than he planned and harder to manage cleanly.

Khokhlov has built a company through two sanctions years, a net loss, a very public divorce, and a return to growth strong enough to claim the floor Hermès left behind. He has named his exit. He has disclosed his first decline before being asked. The question his own transparency has placed on the record is whether the discipline that held through every previous rupture — the improvised supply chain, the continued partnership after the divorce, the premium bet that paid off — will hold through this one too.

Last updated: June 14, 2026