Piles of clothes packed in transparent plastic filled the sides of the room. An employee was busy organizing, sorting, and counting them.
Meanwhile, another employee stood facing a tripod-mounted cellphone. Then, he deftly offered products and answered questions from the audience.
"Again live on Shopee," said Riansyah Fikri.
He is the owner of Zenitha, a Muslim clothing brand that is currently popular on e-commerce services. Located in Pulo Gebang, East Jakarta, Fikri transforms his house into a warehouse as well as Zenitha's operational office.
In an interview with the SUAR Team on Friday (17/10/2025), Fikri's gaze did not escape the sales data displayed on his computer screen. "Today we have sold 60 pieces," he said.
Interestingly, what Fikri is doing now is exactly the opposite of what he studied in college. Born in Bandung in 1995, Fikri graduated from Materials Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Bandung Institute of Technology.
However, trading was not a foreign concept to Fikri. Both his parents had been clothing entrepreneurs. When he was in college, he and a friend also sold T-shirts. Together with his parents, Fikri also opened a meatball business.
"So I am already familiar with trading," he said.
After graduating from university, Fikri worked as a maintenance engineer at a Singapore-owned paint raw materials company in Bitung, Tangerang. But he only held the job for one year. His desire was to become a trader, a profession he had always wanted.
Fikri then started his own business. Following his parents, Fikri sold Muslim clothing.
He created six brands and sold them through distributors or resellers. At that time, Fikri admitted that he had not sold his products through the market place because he had already made a considerable profit from resellers.
Blessings of the pandemic
However, in 2020, Covid broke out. Fikri's business was also affected. Almost went bankrupt. Luckily, Fikri did not run out of ideas. He started a side business selling honey.
This business sustained his clothing business. After 3 years, Fikri re-seriousized the Muslim clothing business. He combined all the brands into one product name: Zenitha. He took the name from the Muslim clothing brand run by his parents.
Besides sounding aesthetic, the word Zenitha is taken from the word zenith which means peak.
"Hopefully, this brand can be at the peak of success," Fikri hopes.
After the entire brand was unified under the Zenitha name, Fikri began to reorganize the direction of his business. He did not reopen physical stores and shifted entirely to online sales. Since 2020, the two main channels he has managed are Shopee and TikTok, with Shopee being the strongest market for Zenitha products.
"So during the pandemic, all of my clothing brands and my parents were sluggish. When it slowly picked up again, I decided to have just one, under the same name. I chose my parents' brand name," she says.
Turning point
The big change came in early 2023, when various marketplaces launched live features. She immediately utilized the feature to boost sales that had slumped. In a short time, live broadcasts became the spearhead of Zenitha's promotions on various marketplace platforms.
The momentum of Ramadan then became an important turning point. Fikri prepares his stocks ahead of time, even willing to spend time to maintain the rhythm of the live broadcast.
"During Ramadan I can be live from twelve at night until dawn, then sleep on the sofa, wake up at eight in the morning, continue working again," he says with a laugh.
During Ramadan, Zenitha can sell 300 to 700 pieces of clothing every day.
From year to year, Zenitha's sales graph continues to climb. Fikri recorded an increase of 500% from 2022 to 2023, and again doubled in 2024 with sales of tens of thousands of pieces of clothing.
According to him, this performance is inseparable from the courage to adapt and relentless hard work in the midst of changes in people's shopping behavior.
Apart from relying on live, Fikri strengthened his digital strategy through paid advertisements on marketplaces. He allocates most of his profits to promotion, starting from small costs until he finally dares to pour in large funds. He believes that growth can only be achieved if sellers dare to actively expand their market reach.
The huge investment has proven to be effective. Every Ramadan, Zenitha's advertising budget can reach hundreds of millions of rupiah and generate billions in turnover.
"As long as you know the conversion is good, the bigger the ad, the bigger the turnover," Fikri said, adding that advertising is not a burden, but an instrument to accelerate sales.
Today, Zenitha has more than 55,000 followers on Shopee, with a team of around 30 people in Jakarta and Bandung.
Fikri considers this condition as a first step. He will continue to work on strengthening digital promotions and adding production lines so that Zenitha continues to grow amidst the increasingly fierce competition in the Muslim fashion market.
Life balancer
As a trader, Fikri has almost no fixed working hours. Since morning he has been busy monitoring sales and coordinating the team. During the day, he devises new strategies to increase sales, while at night, when he has free time, he broadcasts live on the marketplace.
Fikri admits that he needs to have a distraction in between his busy schedule to avoid the stress of being immersed in work. One of the things that keeps him calm is taking care of cats.
She feels that these simple activities can ease her mind after a long day of dealing with sales figures. When she feeds or plays with the cats, it's as if her mind is taken off business.
Fikri now has three cats that he has been taking care of for five years. The cats are of various types, and he takes care of everything himself, from feeding to cleaning the cages every day.
In his relatively large yard, Fikri provides plenty of cat food. Naturally, many stray cats around his house come to get food.
In fact, Fikri carries a jar of cat food when he goes to Friday prayers at the mosque, which is only 200 meters from his house.
"There are many cats in the mosque too, so I can feed them at the same time," he said.
For her, feeding cats is also part of caring for life. She believes such small acts of kindness can turn into a smooth sailing in her business. "Sometimes, if I just give food, the sales that day will be crowded," she said.
In the future, Fikri wants to build a cat shelter to accommodate more abandoned cats.
Apart from keeping cats, Fikri also likes to ride his sports bike, Kawasaki ZX, which he bought a year ago.
For him, motorcycles are not just a hobby, but also part of his appearance and image as a young entrepreneur. He likes motorcycles because of their look and the quiet sensation of riding, not because he wants to go fast.
Although his motorcycle is relatively fast, Fikri admits that he rarely carries the motorcycle at speeds of more than 70 kilometers per hour.
He is not interested in joining a motorcycle club because he is not comfortable with speeding and modifications that can cost a lot of money. Although he sometimes uses the ZX motorcycle to create Zenitha content on social media, Fikri considers riding to be his way of recharging his energy after hours of thinking about sales strategies.
"Motoring around the city calms my mind," he says.
