"Don't feel sorry for yourself" How Gepur, Cher17 and Katy Soho grow up during the war

The Great War changed Ukrainian fashion retail. The market is shrinking: there are fewer consumers and they are getting poorer. However, even in these conditions, new companies are emerging that not only survive but also scale up.

It was during the war that 25-year-old Kateryna Temnikova from Khmelnytskyi took her online store Katy Soho offline. In four years, she has opened 10 outlets in top locations in the capital and cities in the west of the country. Her fans come to the store openings at six in the morning.

Famo in Khmelnytskyi, Gepur in Odesa, and Cher17 in Kyiv continue to open outlets. How are they developing during the war? The most interesting of their stories at RAU Summit-2025. (Speeches edited and shortened for clarity)

Oleg Sadovsky, co-founder Gepur

The chain has 9 offline stores.

A brand starts with the owner. I take almost all the responsibility on myself. These are my principles.

[We need to work harder, not feel sorry for ourselves. I have an expression: 'Today's snot is tomorrow's tears'. If I was weak today, I know that tomorrow I will lose [more], I will have no money.

Take more risks. Now we need to take maximum risks, push ourselves as much as possible. The team will see this and join in.

In 2025, online clothing sales fell by an average of 31%. This applies to everyone – from OLX to Rozetka and to all of us. Online requests for the entire clothing group have fallen – dresses by 38%, jackets by 20%. We don't understand how the market is changing now. Therefore, we need to be different, very different. We need to be very different, to do something. The market is shrinking.

We started doing a lot of things. We have already opened four stores. Then we launched a women's conference [Divas do Business] for 1,500 people. [Gepur held a conference for women in September 2025 in Kyiv, ed]

When we were preparing for Divas do Business, which gathered 1,500 people, the whole team was talking me out of it. They said: there is a war, a missile will come, there will be an air raid. We spent more than $150,000 – it would be a pity. I said, no, let's go ahead.

And it was very cool. The team is still nervous, but this energy allows the business to move forward and show that it is necessary to take risks.

Now you need to be creative, engage the audience, and build a community. You need to look for other intersections with your audience, not just through sales.

When the first blackout started two years ago, we thought that was it. But literally on the second day, our eveningwear sales increased dramatically. We had thousands of orders.

We couldn't understand who was buying it, who needed it. Nothing was working, it was all night everywhere. We started calling our customers, and they said, 'Yes, I can't go out, and I'm so sad. I buy your dresses because they give me joy in my life. And we realized that we can inspire girls, we can give them joy.

And every time we go back to this story, we realize that we are not just clothes, we have to give a holiday. And this is how SisterClub started. We have a community of Sisters, we organize some events for them, big and small, they gather in cinemas, go to the gym together.

Yulia Tomusiak, co-founder of Famo and Pinky chains

More than 40 and 23 stores, respectively.

In 2023, we opened the first Pinky stores [cosmetics sales] As of the beginning of 2025, there were three stores. Now, at the end of 2025, there are 22 or 23. It's a completely new direction.

We do our best to be convenient for our customers. All our stores are in convenient locations. We are omni-channel, you can buy online, order from another store, and return.

Pinky was an accidental project: we just happened to have a cool location. It's not about wow, I've come up with something that no one else has.

It was just a cool location and [there was a need] to fulfill my personal basic need. I don't buy cosmetics online because I don't like direct mail. I am inspired by the concept of the store itself. You go to a place where you always go, see a beautiful store, enter, get emotions, buy what you need without waiting. You get happiness right away.

I call Pinky cosmetic stores the third wave. Like coffee shops. We react very quickly to trends and form an assortment not from what distributors offer, but from what is cool, fashionable, and goes viral on social media.

There is such a flow of information now that it is very difficult to keep people's attention if you are not a lovemark. I have noticed many times that people come into a store and they don't even pay attention to what store they are in. That's why you need to be a lovemark.

Ivan Kryshtal, co-founder of Cher17

The chain consists of 15 stores

The full-scale war has changed the Ukrainian fashion market. In any case, Inditex's exit from Ukraine made our buyer client understand who Ukrainians are [clothing manufacturers] and get to know these brands and fall in love with them. [Inditex did not operate in Ukraine in 2022-2023].

Now people can compare the customer experience of Inditex and Ukrainian brands. This is a different experience. Because it is a different service, service, individual approach. If you have a problem, you can contact them and they will solve it. They will also deliver your order to your home by taxi. This is something that big brands don't have.

This has created a love for Ukrainian brands. This allows us to work, develop, and hold on. Even if the market is shrinking.

We have always been focused on building brand awareness and have always invested there with our advertising campaigns. This is a longer, more difficult path.

[In 2023 Cher17 released a mini-movie "Chick" starring Ukrainian influencers, the video was viewed 6 million times, ed] It was difficult to invest a fairly large amount of money in a small [..video], and how it will affect sales [we didn't know] . The biggest discovery was that it did not immediately convert into sales. They didn't go up, traffic to the site didn't immediately double.

This is a job for years.

But we have always been adherents of 360-degree marketing. This is when you can knock on some doors, and you do. This includes outdoor advertising, digital performances, influencers, Instagram – everything.

We are not competing with each other, but with everyone else for attention, including Rozetka and large global companies. And in all this communication, you need to stand out somehow. With these advertising communications, we try to touch the viewer, to evoke an emotion

I also always keep the focus on the product. If before the pandemic it was possible to wrap a mediocre product in good marketing, now it's the other way around – a cool product and good marketing.

Kateryna Temnikova, Katy Soho

10 stores in the chain.

My principle is to never give up.

This is how my business started. I just believed in what I was doing. So never give up, and no matter what obstacles you have, always believe in yourself.

Before the war, we had eight people in the company, including me.

And then I pulled myself together and started to develop, started hiring a team. I realized that I couldn't do everything. I hired a photographer, a content model, and started building a company from there.

We are always moving, and I can't be without movement. If we don't have any discoveries or don't do something new, it makes me depressed. I need constant development, constant movement.

TikTok works very well for us. [in this social network at the page Katy Sohoalmost 1 millionsubscribers, edand it's very cool that my brand was very different this year on TikTok. [У Katy Sohothere were several viral campaigns]

This gave us a very cool boost. And we are now opening stores one by one at a great rate.

At TikTok, we warm up the audience for each opening. That is, I know that I have an opening date in two weeks or a week from now. We start warming up by posting some videos every day.

[We ask] At what location, in what city, can you guess? The audience responds by communicating, they are interested, they find the location. They start to mark it. And this involvement of online and offline works very well.

We do not position ourselves as a children's brand or a brand of the Alpha generation. [У Katy Soho is a large children's audience, editor's notethey sincerely loved us themselves. Some kind of magic happened, we just did what we liked, what we felt.

We were probably one of the first people who were not afraid to show their different sides, including their children's sides. That's why children just loved us. And do you know what makes them different? Children are much more loyal. Our store is their idol.

We have different generations [customers]. But if it's an opening, the child doesn't care, he or she has to come to the opening, feel the emotion, see with their own eyes how we open the store. We had an opening in Cherkasy, and children were waiting from six in the morning. Right under the shopping center. They are very loyal if they love you.

I understand how to evoke emotions in people with content. I understand how to touch them and what topics to raise.

The consumer changes not in years, but in weeks and days. We want to keep up with the consumer. We change the quality, improve it. But we want to sell it at the same price.