Part IThe Story
In September 2011 a Turkish interviewer asked Demet Mutlu which customer spent the most money on Trendyol in a given month. Most founders would have heard a softball. She heard something closer to an invitation to confess. The site was eighteen months old. It opened fifteen new "boutiques" every morning, each one a timed sale of discounted designer goods that vanished when the clock ran out, and it had already passed the revenue its founders had projected for year three before closing its first. Mutlu laughed and answered: Galiba benim! I think it's me. "I buy something every day," she said, "and I dress only from Trendyol."
She was thirty. She had been born in New York and schooled in England, Italy, and a French lycée in Turkey. She had worked in Switzerland and Japan, enrolled at Harvard Business School, and left it. The press release that accompanied the interview gave her name as Demet Mutlu Üçok, carrying the surname of the man who was then her husband and was also her co-founder. The conversation is short and mostly cheerful, and it is full of small facts that turn out to matter. The company had once tracked its best customers by name, and one of them spent 10,000 lira a month. Istanbul ordered the most, then Ankara, then İzmir, "and we have many members from the East." The cargo companies Trendyol used had opened new branches in several provinces to handle the volume and had been forced to hire people to staff them.
Then, almost in passing, came the detail this piece keeps returning to. "This summer," she said, "we kept sending orders to a boat."
She did not say whose boat it was, or where it was anchored, or how a courier in the Turkish summer gets a parcel onto a hull. The line sits in the transcript without elaboration, between a remark about customer loyalty and a question about regional demand. It is the sort of anecdote a founder tells because it is charming. It also contains, in compressed form, most of what Demet Mutlu would spend the next thirteen years building: a customer with no fixed address, a supply chain obliged to find that customer anyway, and a founder who considered herself the most demanding customer of all.
Thirteen years later she was suing her former husband and co-founder in the High Court in London, and, according to Bloomberg, setting up an investment firm in the same city to manage a fortune from a company in which she held, by one published cap table, just under seven percent. Between the boat and the courtroom lies the story of how a woman with no single hometown built the most important consumer marketplace in Turkey, sold most of it to China, and then used it to carry Turkish goods to Berlin, Baku, Bucharest, and Riyadh.
By the Numbers
The Trendyol Arc
$300KStarting capital, launched from Mutlu's home with five people
12MMonthly visitors at nineteen months old, per Fortune (2011)
$26MKleiner Perkins' first investment in Turkey, August 2011
$728MAlibaba's initial investment in Trendyol, 2018
$16.5BValuation in August 2021, making Trendyol Turkey's first decacorn
27European countries served by Trendyol's October 2020 launch
₺700MPrice of naming rights to the Süper Lig and TFF First League, July 2023
A Girl Who Was Told She Could
The family has a migration story in it, and Mutlu has told it plainly. Her father, Bilal Mutlu, came from Ankara and went to New York young. He built things for a living, construction projects in New York and in Turkey, and in an interview from around 2012 she noted that he was seventy-six and still active. A man who left the Anatolian capital for Manhattan and was still working past seventy is a particular kind of father. He was also, a few years before that interview, the man who refused to speak to his daughter for two months.
Her mother came from Adana, the cotton city on the Çukurova plain. She studied at Tarsus American College, one of the old American missionary schools on the southern coast, then in Istanbul, then in New York, where she met Bilal and went to work at Citibank. So the mother made the same crossing as the father, by a more institutional route: from a provincial Turkish city through an American school and into an American bank. Both parents, Mutlu said, had intense working lives. "They were good role models for me," she told one interviewer. "From a young age I was always told that I could do it." At a youth panel in 2012 she singled out her mother as the decisive model, and in the same talk said that not working had never been an option she considered.
The child moved before she could object. She spent three years in New York, then the family went to England, where she attended the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There was high school in Italy, and then the finish at Saint Michel, a French lycée in Turkey. She went back to New York for university, studying economics at NYU. The Turkish accounts say she graduated first in her class, the World Economic Forum's archived profile says the same in English, and Wikipedia records cum laude.
Read as a list, that is an itinerary. Read as a formation, it produces a person who belongs to every system she enters and is native to none, who learns early that the rules of a place can be absorbed quickly and then put to use. Mutlu has never described her childhood in those terms. She describes it as a sequence of schools. The pattern shows up anyway, as it tends to with people who are raised in transit.
The Shopper Who Studied the Receipt
In the five years after NYU, Mutlu worked at Procter & Gamble, Deloitte, and Altria Group, the tobacco company, in Switzerland, Japan, Turkey, and the United States. She later summed up the period in a way that sounds like a résumé and is really a curriculum: "As a business graduate I always worked at global companies. I gained experience in finance, in production, in business development, and in marketing, in all of them." She was not specializing. She was going through every function a consumer-goods company has, which happens to be the set of functions an e-commerce company needs to own.
The useful part of those years happened at home. She shopped online, constantly, because she was too busy to shop any other way. "I love shopping and fashion very much," she said in 2011. "Because I was so busy, I was shopping from the internet. So I entered this sector first as a consumer." An attendee of her 2012 panel wrote that it was during her years in Japan, one of the most advanced online retail markets in the world at the time, that she had practiced buying online herself. A 2012 Turkish press account was more pointed: she had modeled Trendyol on the American e-commerce site where she shopped most. An American profile from 2014 named the comparison directly, calling Trendyol "an online shopping site like Gilt Group in the US."
Gilt was the New York flash-sale club that turned luxury overstock into a daily event: limited-time sales, members-only access, a countdown clock. It was one of the defining consumer internet businesses of the late 2000s, and it was a model that could travel.
At Harvard, which she entered in 2008 by her World Economic Forum biography and in 2009 by Wikipedia, she was not there for the general management degree. "I decided to do an MBA at Harvard," she said, "because I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and for that I needed a good education." She sat in on sessions with visiting founders and, in her classmates' telling and her own, focused on entrepreneurship. Then came a summer back in Turkey after the first year, and with it the founding observation every account repeats: a gap in e-commerce, especially in fashion.
Not everyone agrees there was a gap. Years later, under a LinkedIn post celebrating her, a Turkish commenter named Çağdaş Keskin noted that "there wasn't actually a gap at that time." Markafoni, an earlier Turkish flash-sale site, had people "standing watch in the mornings" to catch its drops. In his view Trendyol survived because it innovated, though he preferred Markafoni's style, "which Trendyol had adopted too back then." He was right that the market was not empty. Markafoni had been acquired, and a 2011 profile listed Trendyol's funding alongside gittigidiyor.com, markafoni.com, and grupanya.com as the big Turkish e-commerce companies to be bought or funded in a few months. Mutlu had not discovered an empty field. She had discovered a field where people were already lining up in the morning, and she bet she could run it better.
That distinction matters. The founding myth is a lightning-strike insight. What the record shows is closer to a professional consumer who had studied the receipt for years and concluded she could build the store.
Two Months of Silence
— Demet Mutlu, on telling her father she was leaving Harvard Business School (Women 2.0, May 2014)He didn't talk to me for two months.
It is the most human sentence in her public record, and she says it lightly, the way people describe a wound that has since become a credential. Consider it from the father's side. A man from Ankara who had made it in New York, married to a woman who had come up through an American school and an American bank, watched his daughter finish first at NYU, collect four countries' worth of blue-chip experience, get into Harvard Business School, and then leave it to sell discounted dresses on the internet in Istanbul. For his generation of Turkish strivers, America was the destination. She was turning back.
She described the decision to Fast Company Türkiye in January 2021, in what the magazine said was the first exclusive interview she had ever given the press: "I said I would found an e-commerce company in Turkey, and I left America and came to Istanbul. I first started the business in my home. It was a place just like the offices in Silicon Valley, and we had started with only five people."
"A place just like the offices in Silicon Valley" means her living room. The English-language press later called it a kitchen table. A Turkish LinkedIn commenter, defending her against the charge that Trendyol was only money, wrote that she had built it "in the living room of her house, scratching with her fingernails." The starting capital was $300,000. Her first partners, by Turkish accounts, were Emre Kurttepeli, founder of the Turkish portal Mynet, who invested, and Sidar Şahin, an established name in Turkish e-commerce. Both were men who had already done in Turkish internet what she proposed to do in Turkish fashion.
The operating partner was Begüm Tekin. Little about Tekin appears in the public record beyond her co-founder title and a sliver of equity on later cap tables. What survives is one sentence Mutlu offered in 2011, which describes Tekin by describing herself: "My partner Begüm Tekin also loves fashion very much. She also looks at everything as a consumer." Two professional shoppers, then. A 2012 report on the company's growth credited the founding to Mutlu and Tekin together, and a 2011 profile said Mutlu "shares this success" with her. The third co-founder, Evren Üçok, would become chairman, and that story comes later.
Trendyol opened in March 2010. (One Turkish biography dates the founding to March 18, 2009, which probably reflects incorporation or the decision rather than the launch. The record is inconsistent here, and this piece follows the March 2010 opening that her own World Economic Forum profile gives.) At a panel at Yıldız Technical University in April 2012, held during a storm that kept most of the audience home, Mutlu, the youngest speaker and the first, told students something no Harvard case study would put first: "Finding the idea is the easiest part of starting a business. After that it is very hard: marketing, finance, being a manager, getting investors, being a good leader, choosing a team, developing them, training them." She added that a good and complementary partner can be very valuable, "perhaps as in her own business."
Every Day a Broadway Play
The mechanics of early Trendyol are worth describing because they explain its velocity. Each morning the site opened about fifteen boutiques, curated temporary storefronts of branded and designer goods, discounted by up to 85 percent. Each boutique lasted a short time and then disappeared. The next day there were fifteen new ones. Members, who had to sign up, came back daily because the inventory was gone tomorrow.
— Demet Mutlu, interview with SacitAslan.com, September 14, 2011 (translated from Turkish)You know how a Broadway play works: you prepare for days, then you perform, and it's over. For us, every day is a Broadway play.
The metaphor is more precise than it looks. A Broadway production runs on rehearsal that the audience never sees and a performance that cannot be paused. Opening night is fixed, and the curtain comes down whether or not the run went well. Translated to retail, that means buying, photography, copywriting, and allocation compressed into a cycle whose public deadline arrives every morning. It also means the customer's attention is spent in a single scarce window. Flash sales are retail run as theater. The daily curtain creates urgency, and urgency creates the habit of opening the site at breakfast that kept Markafoni's customers on watch and soon kept Trendyol's.
The numbers came fast. When Fortune named Mutlu to its list of the ten most powerful women entrepreneurs in October 2011, the nineteen-month-old site was drawing twelve million visitors a month, had four million members and 350 employees, and was working with a thousand brands. A Turkish rendering of the citation said she had taken multitasking to an advanced level. By April 2012 the headcount was 768 and revenue had passed $100 million in roughly two years. There were 4.5 million active members, 70 percent of them women, and the company said it sold a product every three seconds. A contemporaneous profile put the site among the hundred most-trafficked in Turkey.
Two operating ideas from this period lasted longer than the flash-sale format.
The first was that the members ran the company. "Our members are our bosses," she said in 2011. "They always want and expect better. You have to make an effort to make them happy." Founders often say things like this. Trendyol built it into the product. By 2014, members could vote on the site and on Facebook on upcoming daily deals, and Trendyol adjusted its offerings to real-time demand. Turkey ranked seventh in the world on Facebook and eighth on Twitter at the time, so social voting was a demand signal drawn from the national habit.
The second idea was Milla, the in-house label Trendyol launched early. Milla closed the loop between the store and the factory. A new Milla design was piloted in a small batch on Trendyol. If it sold, the design went to one of Turkey's many garment factories for full production. If it didn't, it died quietly. That is fast fashion with the risk taken out at the front, and it only works in a country with a large apparel manufacturing base close to the end customer. Turkey had that base. Mutlu later said, in the Fast Company Türkiye interview, that a story about Trendyol had to begin there: "Turkey has a strong ready-to-wear manufacturing..." The magazine's excerpt cuts off mid-sentence, but the industrial logic is clear.
At Davos in January 2017, she described the method in more general terms:
— Demet Mutlu, interview with Lianna Brinded, Business Insider, Davos, January 17, 2017We've made some mistakes with brands that were not successful but we have relaunched the brands in different ways, or we have tested brands along too smaller segments and small cohort of customers. So if it works well, we will scale or if it does not work, we will re-adjust. You can't expect to launch something perfectly. That is what I love about it.
That is what I love about it. The founder who called herself the top customer also enjoyed the failure rate. The two attitudes fit together. Someone who buys something every day has a high tolerance for buying the wrong thing.
The American Money Comes to Istanbul
Six months after Trendyol opened, Tiger Global invested. Tiger, the New York firm that had made its venture name backing internet companies in emerging markets, was effectively applying the same reasoning Mutlu had: a model proven in America, transplanted into a large, young, under-penetrated consumer market. According to Mutlu, investor offers had been arriving since the sixth month.
In August 2011, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led a $26 million round. The Turkish press noted proudly that it was Kleiner's first investment in Turkey and listed the papers that covered it: the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal. By October, Fortune counted $50 million raised. A 2014 profile put the Tiger-and-Kleiner total at $36 million, called Mutlu the first female founder in Turkey to raise capital at that level, and said Trendyol had become a $150 million company within two years. A Turkish account put the $150 million valuation at sixteen months. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development followed. At Davos in 2017 she gave her own total: "around $60 million from Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development."
That money carried more than capital. A Kleiner check in 2011 told every Turkish brand, supplier, cargo company, and prospective employee that a famous American firm had looked at this living-room company and decided it was real. Mutlu, raised among Americans and educated by them, knew how to read that signal and how to send it. She also knew how unusual her case was. "Only 10% of venture capital funding goes to women leading companies, this is a problem," she told Business Insider. "I was fortunate enough to raise around $60 million." In the same interview she said: "being a woman is a huge advantage in the consumer business. Women are key consumers and being one of them and understanding what the consumers want can be very impactful as a [leader], especially trying to raise capital." Her advantage, as she framed it, came from the same place as her two months of paternal silence. She was the customer.
The same year Trendyol opened, a Belgian named Barend Van den Brande registered a venture firm in his home country with little fanfare and no interest from Silicon Valley's established firms. He had worked as a financial analyst in Boston for a while and had few connections. As a boy he had found bumblebees his grandfather kept in the freezer, their stiffened bodies piled where the ice cream should have been, and he spent the rest of his life trying to understand how strangely intelligence could show itself. His firm, Hummingbird Ventures, worked out of Antwerp and, with partner Fırat İleri, became one of the more successful small funds in Europe, partly by backing a Turkish mobile-game studio called Peak Games. Hummingbird's partners came to believe that every "legendary" company goes through two or three near-death moments, a lesson they credit to Peak and its sibling Gram Games.
Mutlu was a founding partner and investor in Peak Games, alongside Evren Üçok. It became one of the largest companies in mobile gaming and was acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion. So in the same few years the same couple helped start two of the most valuable Turkish internet companies ever built, one in fashion and one in games, each financed by foreigners who had looked at Istanbul and seen what local capital mostly hadn't. Mutlu also invested in Doktorsitesi.com, a health portal, and the World Economic Forum later listed her as an angel investor in six technology companies worldwide. The shopper was becoming a buyer of companies.
From Boutique to Bazaar
The flash-sale model has a ceiling, and everyone in the business eventually hits it. Discounted overstock is finite. Brands tire of being associated with markdowns. Customers who come for 85 percent off do not stay for 10 percent off. Gilt, the American model, ended up sold for a fraction of its peak valuation. Trendyol avoided that fate by turning into a different company.
The change does not appear on any single date. You see it in the accumulated product lines. By 2014, Trendyol had more than seven million subscribers and 700 employees and was talking about widening its categories. Mutlu said then that Turkey's growing internet penetration and credit card use were "100% responsible" for scaling the business, and she meant it as a statement about infrastructure, not modesty. By the late 2010s, Trendyol described itself as "an online marketplace that enables local merchants to sell online through the platform." The boutiques had become a bazaar. The curated daily performance had become an open stage for any Turkish merchant who wanted to rent it.
The supporting businesses followed. Dolap, a second-hand fashion marketplace founded in 2016, was acquired in 2018 and later reported 1.4 million active individual sellers. Trendyol Express, its own delivery network, was founded in 2018. The 2011 detail about cargo companies opening branches and hiring staff to serve Trendyol had been a sign that the company's growth was outrunning its logistics partners. By 2018 Trendyol owned the trucks. Trendyol Tech was approved as an official research and development center by the Ministry of Industry and Technology in 2019, working on Turkish-language processing, real-time data analysis, machine learning, and image processing. Then came Trendyol Go and Food for instant grocery and meal delivery, and Trendyol Wallet for payments. In 2024 the company launched its first in-house large language model.
In April 2019, Ekonomist named her Woman Entrepreneur of the Year and ran an interview under the headline "Bölgenin en büyük platformu olacağız": We will become the region's largest platform. The goal was no longer to be Turkey's leading fashion site, as she had told a magazine in 2011. It was the region.
Some changes are visible only in the details. A LinkedIn commenter in Istanbul's Pendik district wrote around 2022 that Trendyol's parcel lockers had appeared on Reyhan Caddesi, his street. Another remarked that Mutlu had "evaluated the consumer society's supply well." A third simply asked: "Is Trendyol one person's success?!" Customers rarely ask that about a store. It's the kind of question people start asking once a company has become part of the country's daily routine.
Selling the Majority to China
In 2018, Alibaba invested $728 million in Trendyol. Turkish accounts describe it as buying 75 percent of the company. Fast Company Türkiye reported that Mutlu had publicly set a goal of making Trendyol a unicorn, and that the Alibaba deal achieved it: "one of the most successful strategic partnerships of recent times."
On paper, the founder who had once called her members her bosses had now given the majority to a company from Hangzhou. Wikipedia's article on Trendyol is careful to say there is no formal integration between Trendyol and Alibaba's other e-commerce sites, and that Trendyol goods on Alibaba's B2B platform come through third-party resellers. Trendyol remained Turkish in face and in operation. Its owner was Chinese. In April 2021, Alibaba added $350 million in a capital increase at a $9.4 billion valuation, bringing its total to $1.078 billion and its stake, by Turkish reports, to 86.5 percent. One published cap table from that period lists the founders' remaining holdings: Demet Mutlu at 6.96 percent, Evren Üçok at 5.55, Begüm Tekin at 0.78, and Zeki Güçlü Kaya at 0.21.
Then the price went up sharply. On August 9, 2021, Trendyol announced a $1.5 billion raise at a $16.5 billion valuation. The investors were General Atlantic; SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, making its first investment in Turkey; Princeville Capital; Abu Dhabi's ADQ; and the Qatar Investment Authority. Trendyol became the first Turkish company valued above $10 billion. Within four months the valuation had risen from $9.4 billion to $16.5 billion. Seven percent of $16.5 billion is a little over a billion dollars, and Bloomberg would later call her a billionaire.
The arithmetic is still striking. In 2010 Mutlu owned a large share of a company worth $300,000. In 2021 she owned a small share of a company worth $16.5 billion. Founders sometimes describe that trade as a defeat and sometimes as the whole point. Mutlu has never called it either in public. What she did say, in January 2021 to Fast Company Türkiye, after more than a decade without giving the press an exclusive interview, was that the unicorn goal was finished and the new goal was for Trendyol to become the Turkish company that creates the greatest positive impact. The magazine titled the piece "Mutlu's Big Dream." The pun works in Turkish too, since mutlu means happy.
A Turkish LinkedIn user summarized the deal flatly in a comment: "I know she sold it to the Alibaba group. Still, it's a success, I congratulate her." Another wrote two words: "Main shareholder is Alibaba. Jack Ma." Turkish public opinion did not need the cap table. It had already absorbed the fact that the country's most visible consumer company, the one whose lockers stood on Reyhan Caddesi and whose parcels went to boats, was majority foreign-owned, and that its founder, born in New York, had arranged it.
Exporting the Bazaar
Alibaba's money did not make Trendyol more Chinese. It made Trendyol more exportable, and what it exported was Turkey.
Trendyol had started a German operation in 2018. Germany has the largest Turkish diaspora in Europe, and its customers already knew the brands. On October 2, 2020, the company launched an English-language site serving 27 European countries. Wikipedia's description of the model is the most precise single line about what Trendyol became: it "enables Trendyol to promote Turkish manufacturers and brands around the world." The girl who had grown up in New York, England, and Italy and come back to Turkey had built a way for Turkish goods to go the other direction.
The first foreign office opened in Berlin in mid-2022, with plans for more than 200 employees there and further offices in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and London. The company expected around €400 million in revenue from the expansion by the end of that year. By 2024, roughly 1.5 million customers in Germany were buying from about 200 Turkish brands through Trendyol. In January 2022, Forbes Middle East reported that Trendyol was planning a dual listing once revenue from abroad reached 30 to 35 percent, which made foreign sales a condition of going public.
Then came the neighbors. In May 2023, under an agreement with Azerbaijan's PASHA Holding, Trendyol launched in Azerbaijan, its second foreign market after Germany. By October 2024 it had about two million customers there and opened an office in Baku. Its Gulf app debuted in August 2023 and was handling 30,000 orders a day by November. That month it signed a memorandum with Saudi Arabia's Cenomi to build a fashion platform for the region. Trendyol opened warehouses in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, extended service to Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar, and in 2024 released its first own-brand Ramadan womenswear collection for Gulf customers, an AI-designed collection sold exclusively in the Gulf, and a pop-up store in a Riyadh mall. It announced offices in Dubai and Riyadh that October. In late 2023 it said it would move into Eastern Europe, beginning with the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, and Romania. A warehouse in Romania opened in December 2024, and Romanian press reported 500,000 customers within eight months of the official launch.
Milla's logic was now running at continental scale: test in a small cohort, then send the design to the factory. A Ramadan collection is a pilot batch for a region. A Riyadh pop-up is a boutique that opens and then closes.
At home, Trendyol made itself part of the national calendar. It sponsored the Turkish National Olympic Committee and the five Turkish athletes at the Tokyo Games. It sponsored the national football and volleyball teams. On July 12, 2023, it paid ₺700 million for naming rights to the Süper Lig and the TFF First League, taking them over from Spor Toto, the state lottery. For the Paris Olympics it produced an Olympic-themed apparel line, the first time the International Olympic Committee had partnered with a Turkish brand on merchandise, and the goods were made in a Turkish factory. It became an official partner of UEFA Euro 2024 and, in August 2024, main sponsor of the Turkish National Paralympic Committee. In 2024 it also won the inaugural "e-export" award from the Turkish Exporters Assembly.
The country's top football league now carried the name of a company founded in a living room by a woman born in Manhattan and majority-owned by a company in China. Turkish football fans say "Trendyol Süper Lig" every weekend. Brands rarely become that embedded in national life.
What the Regulator Saw
Any marketplace large enough to define its national category eventually faces a familiar charge: that it favors itself. On October 11, 2021, two months after the decacorn round, the Turkish Competition Authority opened an investigation into Trendyol. It concluded in July 2023, and Trendyol was fined about ₺61.3 million for what the authority described as systemic algorithm manipulation and unfair use of third-party marketplace data. Put simply, the regulator found that the platform had used the merchants' own data and its ranking software against those merchants.
There is an uncomfortable continuity here. The early Trendyol was praised for responding to data: members voted, the company adjusted, Milla piloted and scaled. A founder who saw everything through the customer's eyes built a system that saw everything. Once the merchants on the platform were also its competitors, the same visibility became a weapon. The flash-sale curator decided which fifteen boutiques opened each morning, and the marketplace algorithm decided which millions of products surfaced. The regulator's finding was that this curatorial power had been used for the house.
A second episode is murkier and remains an allegation. In 2022 Turkey published a new E-Commerce Law in the Official Gazette, which took effect in January 2023 and was widely understood to restrain the largest platforms. The Cumhuriyet Newspaper Foundation later filed a criminal complaint against the paper's management of that period, alleging they had "received unregistered money," reportedly delivered in a chocolate box, in exchange for manipulative coverage against the law, and Trendyol was named as the alleged payer. The newspaper rejected the accusation, and its management issued statements that differed in tone. No court finding is recorded in the sources available here, and it should be read as an accusation and nothing more. Its existence shows what kind of company Trendyol had become: large enough that a national newspaper's own foundation thought it plausible Trendyol would try to buy coverage of a law written with Trendyol in mind.
In 2022 Trendyol also became the first Turkish e-commerce business to publish a sustainability plan covering carbon, human rights, packaging, waste, and diversity. It partnered with the UN Development Programme on "Villages of Tomorrow," digital centers in rural Turkey that teach technology and smart agriculture. In 2025 it was one of twelve signatories to the EU's voluntary Consumer Protection Commitment. These facts do not cancel the fine. They sit next to it. A company that big has both, and its founder was responsible for both.
The Partner, the Courtroom, the Family Office
At the 2012 panel at Yıldız Technical University, Mutlu talked about her husband. He had supported her enormously, she said, and she had learned a great deal from him. Success in business alone does not make people happy, she told the students, and success is incomplete without a life around it. She was thirty, signing her name Mutlu Üçok, and running a company she had co-founded with the man she was praising.
Evren Üçok was co-founder of Trendyol and of Peak Games. He served as Trendyol's chairman. In August 2023 the Turkish business daily Dünya reported that the asset manager Rota Portföy had partnered with him. He held, on that published cap table, 5.55 percent of the company to her 6.96. In the founding story he appears mostly through other facts: the name on her press release, the partner at Peak, the man who chaired the board. Public accounts of Mutlu tell her story. His does not get told.
On May 14, 2024, Mutlu filed a claim against Üçok in the High Court in London, case number KB-2024-001430. The Turkish business site Patronlar Dünyası reported in July that she had hired Charles Russell Speechlys, a London firm known for private wealth, family property, and partnership disputes. It described the case as a receivables claim against her "former husband and still partner" at Trendyol. The details of what she claims and why were not public in the sources available to me, and this piece will not guess at them. That report already referred to her as Trendyol's "former CEO." The company's leadership by then was Üçok as chairman, Erdem İnan as chief executive, and Çağlayan Çetin as president.
In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that Mutlu, 43, had set up an investment firm in London that year to manage her fortune from Trendyol and various venture bets, and placed her among a growing number of wealthy women in Europe, North America, and the Middle East running their own family offices in what has historically been a male corner of finance. A Spanish financial magazine put it more theatrically: Demet Mutlu takes the last bastion of men in finance.
So the arc runs New York, England, Italy, Istanbul, New York, Japan, Cambridge, Istanbul, and London. The founder who left America to build in Turkey had, at the peak of her wealth, moved the management of that wealth and the dispute over part of it to an English court and an English address. That doesn't need to be read as a betrayal or as a homecoming. It looks like what you'd expect from someone who has never had one fixed place. Her company spent fifteen years learning to deliver to any address, and she has kept changing hers.
Back in that September 2011 interview, before the bazaar, the Chinese money, the football league, the regulator, and the London filing, she was asked about her best customers. She said she was probably the biggest one herself. She said one woman spent 10,000 lira a month. She said the cargo companies were opening branches in the provinces and hiring to keep up. And that summer, she said, they kept sending orders to a boat. Every day a parcel left Istanbul for a place that would not stay still, and every day it got there.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to pull the operating logic out of Demet Mutlu's career. These are not her stated rules, since she has published few, but patterns visible in the decisions she made: how she found the market, ran the store, raised the money, gave up control, and turned a domestic retailer into an export channel. Some principles are admiring. One is a warning. They are ordered roughly by the stage of company building where each one matters most.
The principles
- 1.Be the most demanding customer in the building.
- 2.Import the format; localize the supply.
- 3.Run the store as a nightly performance.
- 4.Instrument the customer's vote.
- 5.Pilot in cohorts, scale on evidence.
- 6.Borrow credibility from distant capital.
- 7.Treat bottlenecks as acquisitions waiting to happen.
- 8.Trade control for velocity, and do it deliberately.
- 9.Turn the home industrial base into the export product.
- 10.Rent the national stage.
- 11.Assume the referee is watching the algorithm.
- 12.Let the founder's second act be allocation.
Principle 1
Be the most demanding customer in the building
Mutlu's answer to who spent the most on Trendyol, "I think it's me," is more than a cute line. She entered the market as a consumer, said so repeatedly, and picked a co-founder, Begüm Tekin, whom she described the same way. For a consumer marketplace, that is real expertise. The founder knows within seconds whether checkout is slow, whether photographs flatter, whether the discount is real, because she uses the product every day and has standards.
Most founders who say they are "customer-obsessed" mean they read dashboards. Mutlu was the dashboard. Her Davos remark that "being a woman is a huge advantage in the consumer business. Women are key consumers and being one of them" is the same argument applied to fundraising. Her own taste was data that venture investors, mostly men, could not get any other way. She sold it to them.
There is a limit to this, and Trendyol eventually reached it. A founder can stand in for her customers only while they look like her. Once the store served the provinces, the East, Baku, and Riyadh, the founder's taste had to give way to instrumentation. Taste starts the company. It cannot run a marketplace of millions.
Tactic: Before hiring a research team, use your own product daily for ninety days and write down every point of friction; that list is your first roadmap.
Principle 2
Import the format; localize the supply
Trendyol was not an original idea, and Mutlu never said it was. Turkish press accounts said she modeled it on the American site where she shopped most. An American profile compared it to Gilt. Markafoni already had Turkish customers waiting for its morning drops. The value she added was in where the inventory came from. Gilt's model sold overstock. Turkey had something more interesting than overstock: one of the largest garment manufacturing bases in Europe, within a few hours' drive of the warehouse.
Once the supply was local, the format could change. Flash sales of branded overstock turned into Milla, an in-house label manufactured by Turkish factories, and later into a marketplace for Turkish merchants of every kind. The format was borrowed. The supply chain was entirely Turkish, and that is where the advantage built up.
Tactic: When you copy a proven model from a larger market, spend your originality on the supply side, the part competitors abroad cannot replicate, rather than on the interface.
Principle 3
Run the store as a nightly performance
"For us, every day is a Broadway play." Fifteen new boutiques every morning, each one closing on schedule, turned shopping into a habit tied to the clock. The daily curtain did three things. It created urgency, because the goods would be gone. It created habit, because there was something new tomorrow. It gave the organization a fixed deadline that forced buying, merchandising, and content to keep a hard cadence.
That cadence is a management tool as much as a marketing one. A company that must ship a full storefront every morning cannot let decisions drift. The 768 people Trendyol employed by April 2012 were in effect a theater crew whose show opened again every day. Teams that ship daily learn faster than teams that ship quarterly, because they get more feedback cycles.
Tactic: Give your product a fixed public release rhythm (daily, weekly, whatever the market will bear) and let the deadline set the pace of everything behind it.
Principle 4
Instrument the customer's vote
"Our members are our bosses" became an actual mechanism. By 2014 members voted on daily deals through the site and through Facebook, and Trendyol adjusted its offerings to that real-time demand. Turkey was then seventh in the world on Facebook. Mutlu used an existing national habit as a free polling system instead of building one.
The lesson is about where to find demand signals. Turkish consumers were already on Facebook, so the voting happened there. Most companies build feedback forms nobody fills in. Trendyol put the ballot box where people already spent their time.
Tactic: Find the platform your customers already use compulsively and build your demand-sensing loop inside it rather than asking them to come to you.
Principle 5
Pilot in cohorts, scale on evidence
The Milla method, a small batch on the site and a factory run only if it sells, is the most transferable operating idea in Mutlu's record. She described it at Davos as a general philosophy: "we have tested brands along too smaller segments and small cohort of customers. So if it works well, we will scale or if it does not work, we will re-adjust. You can't expect to launch something perfectly."
The same method shows up a decade later at a different scale. Trendyol entered Germany, the market with the most Turkish-speaking customers, before the rest of Europe. Its Gulf push began with an app, then a Ramadan collection, then a single pop-up in one Riyadh mall, before committing to offices in Dubai and Riyadh. Each step was a small batch whose results determined the next.
M
The Milla Loop at Every Scale
The same pilot-then-scale logic applied from a single garment to an entire region.
| Scale | Pilot | Signal | Scale-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garment (c. 2011–2014) | Small Milla batch on Trendyol | Sell-through | Full run at Turkish factory |
| Brand | Test with small customer cohort | Cohort response | Relaunch or scale |
| Country (2018–2022) | German operation, diaspora-first | Customer base in Germany | 27-country site; Berlin office |
| Region (2023–2024) | Gulf app; Riyadh pop-up | 30,000 orders/day by Nov 2023 | Saudi and UAE warehouses; Dubai and Riyadh offices |
Tactic: Define, before launch, the specific signal that will trigger a full commitment and the one that will trigger a quiet retreat, then let the cohort decide.
Principle 6
Borrow credibility from distant capital
Tiger Global six months in, Kleiner Perkins' first Turkish investment in August 2011, the EBRD after that: none of these was the cheapest or the closest money available. They were the most credible. A Kleiner round reported by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal told Turkish brands, couriers, and recruits that the company would last. In a young ecosystem, foreign investors' reputations do work that the local market cannot yet do.
Mutlu understood the American signaling system because she grew up inside it, and she said plainly that it was hard to access. "Only 10% of venture capital funding goes to women leading companies," she noted, and "I was fortunate enough to raise around $60 million." Her story also includes the reverse case: Hummingbird Ventures, an unknown Belgian fund started the same year as Trendyol, backed Peak Games and built a top track record by finding outliers that brand-name firms ignored. Sometimes the credibility comes from the famous investor, and sometimes the obscure investor earns it by spotting the founder first.
Tactic: In an underdeveloped market, take your first institutional check from the investor whose name will do the most to persuade your suppliers and hires, even at a worse price.
Principle 7
Treat bottlenecks as acquisitions waiting to happen
In 2011, cargo companies were opening provincial branches and hiring staff to keep up with Trendyol. That anecdote was an early warning that the company's growth depended on someone else's capacity. By 2018 Trendyol had founded Trendyol Express, its own delivery network, and acquired Dolap, the second-hand marketplace founded only two years earlier. Payments, grocery, and in-house technology came later. Each new business took over a function Trendyol had previously had to wait on.
The opposite decision is useful for comparison. On May 4, 2023, Shopify's Tobi Lütke described four years and $2.5 billion of logistics spending as a side quest and left it. Shopify serves merchants who have their own logistics options. Trendyol served a country where the logistics market itself was struggling to keep up with demand. The right answer depends on whether the bottleneck can be bought from someone else at your scale. In Turkey in 2018, it could not.
T
From Boutique to Bazaar
Trendyol's phases, categorized by strategic posture.
| Phase | Period | Core move | Posture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flash-sale club | 2010–early 2010s | 15 daily boutiques; discounts up to 85% | Import |
| Own label | c. 2011–2014 | Milla piloted on-site, produced in Turkish factories | Localize |
| Marketplace and infrastructure | 2016–2019 | Dolap, Trendyol Express, Trendyol Tech R&D center | Platform |
| Cross-border | 2018–2025 | Germany, 27 EU countries, Azerbaijan, Gulf, Eastern Europe | Export |
| Regulatory reckoning | 2021–2023 | Competition probe; ₺61.3M fine | Risk |
Tactic: Keep a running list of every external partner that has had to expand specifically to serve you; that list is your build-or-buy agenda for the next three years.
Principle 8
Trade control for velocity, and do it deliberately
Mutlu set a public unicorn target and reached it by bringing in Alibaba in 2018. By 2021 Alibaba held, by Turkish reports, 86.5 percent, and she held under seven. In the same year the valuation went from $9.4 billion in April to $16.5 billion in August. The trade is clear: she gave up most of the ownership and got a strategic owner with deep pockets and patience, then a stronger negotiating position with SoftBank, General Atlantic, and two Gulf sovereign funds.
What makes the trade deliberate rather than desperate is that Trendyol kept its own identity. There was no formal integration with Alibaba's other marketplaces. The brand, the merchants, the logistics, and the cultural presence all stayed Turkish. Mutlu sold ownership and kept operating autonomy, which was the part that drove growth.
There is a cost. Small founder stakes in large companies can make the founder a minority voice in her own story, and the 2024 London litigation between two co-founders over what the press called a receivables claim shows that the early partnership agreements carry weight long after the company has changed shape. Whatever the merits of that case, it is a reminder that founder equity is the longest contract most people ever sign.
$
The Capital Stack
How the ownership of a living-room startup migrated across three continents.
2010
Launch with $300,000 in starting capital and five people at home; Tiger Global invests six months in.
2011
Kleiner Perkins leads a $26M round in August, its first investment in Turkey; total raised reaches $50M per Fortune.
2017
Mutlu cites around $60M raised from Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, and the EBRD.
2018
Alibaba invests $728M; Trendyol reaches unicorn status.
2021
Alibaba adds $350M at $9.4B in April; in August, $1.5B at $16.5B from General Atlantic, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Princeville, ADQ, and QIA.
2024
Mutlu files claim against co-founder Evren Üçok in London (May 14); establishes a London investment firm, per Bloomberg.
Tactic: If you sell control, put your negotiating effort into operating autonomy — brand, merchant relationships, local leadership — rather than squeezing the last point of equity.
Principle 9
Turn the home industrial base into the export product
Trendyol's international strategy was not "Turkish company opens stores abroad." It was "Turkish merchants reach foreign customers through Trendyol." By 2024 about 1.5 million German customers were buying from roughly 200 Turkish brands on the platform. The company won the Turkish Exporters Assembly's first e-export award that year. Its planned dual listing was tied to foreign revenue reaching 30 to 35 percent of the total.
This positions the platform as national infrastructure rather than as just another retailer. It aligns Trendyol with the interests of Turkish manufacturers and the Turkish state, both of which care about exports. And the international expansion runs on supply the company already has, which is cheaper than building new supply abroad.
Tactic: Before expanding internationally, ask which of your domestic suppliers foreign customers would pay a premium to reach, and lead with them.
Principle 10
Rent the national stage
The Süper Lig naming rights cost ₺700 million in July 2023. Trendyol had sponsored Olympic and Paralympic committees, national football and volleyball teams, and Euro 2024. It became the first Turkish brand to produce Olympic merchandise with the IOC. Taken together, this is more than advertising. It ties a majority-foreign-owned company to the most emotional symbols of Turkish national identity.
For any platform whose ownership could become a political liability, this is a sensible hedge. The football league, the flag, the athletes, and the stadiums carry the company's name every weekend. It is hard to cast a company as foreign when its name is attached to the national league.
Tactic: If your ownership structure could ever be used against you, invest early in institutions your country loves, so your brand is defended by people who never think about your cap table.
Principle 11
Assume the referee is watching the algorithm
The ₺61.3 million fine in July 2023 for algorithm manipulation and unfair use of third-party marketplace data is the cautionary chapter. Trendyol's early strength was its control over what customers saw, the fifteen boutiques it picked each morning. Once the platform hosted merchants who were also its competitors, the same control became exposure. The investigation began two months after the decacorn round. Regulators pay attention to valuation announcements.
The bribery allegation around the 2022 E-Commerce Law, which the newspaper rejected and which remains only an allegation, shows the other side of this risk: a dominant platform is assumed to be capable of anything. Reputation management cannot fix that. Only governance designed in advance can.
Tactic: Once third-party sellers compete with your own products, wall off their data and document your ranking logic as if a regulator will eventually read it, because one will.
Principle 12
Let the founder's second act be allocation
Even while running Trendyol, Mutlu was investing elsewhere: Peak Games, which sold to Zynga for $1.8 billion; Doktorsitesi.com; six technology companies, according to the World Economic Forum. By 2024, with the operating chapter apparently over, she had set up a London investment firm to manage her fortune. Her early professional training was in finance, business development, and marketing, the job of deciding where resources go. Allocation was where she started, and she has returned to it.
The broader point: a founder who has built a platform has learned to spot early signs of compounding, such as morning queues at Markafoni or cargo companies hiring staff. That skill carries over to choosing investments. "Entrepreneurship is all about being a lifelong student," she said at Davos, and "Each stage required different skills."
| Conventional founder wisdom | The Mutlu pattern |
|---|---|
| Find an empty market | Join a crowded market and run it better |
| Build an original product | Import a proven format; make the supply local |
| Keep control at all costs | Sell the majority; keep the operating autonomy |
| Outsource logistics | Own the bottleneck once partners can't keep pace |
| Go abroad with your brand | Go abroad with your country's suppliers |
Tactic: While still operating, make small angel investments in adjacent companies; they train your judgment and prepare your second act long before you need one.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Demet Mutlu, interview with SacitAslan.com, September 14, 2011 (translated from Turkish)Our members are our bosses. They always want and expect better. You have to make an effort to make them happy.
— Demet Mutlu, Fast Company Türkiye, January 2021 (translated from Turkish)I said I would found an e-commerce company in Turkey, and I left America and came to Istanbul. I first started the business in my home. It was a place just like the offices in Silicon Valley, and we had started with only five people.
— Demet Mutlu, interview with Business Insider, Davos, January 2017I think entrepreneurship is all about being a lifelong student. I founded it seven years ago but I am always learning and being a sponge for new experiences, which is what you need as an entrepreneur. Each stage required different skills. You cannot have an ego, you need to keep learning.
— Demet Mutlu, interview with Business Insider, Davos, January 2017Only 10% of venture capital funding goes to women leading companies, this is a problem.
— Demet Mutlu, quoted in Women 2.0, May 2014Being an entrepreneur is really fulfilling. I've always loved leading, building, creating impact.
Maxims
- Be your own best customer. If you are not the most demanding user of what you sell, someone less informed is setting your standards.
- The idea is the cheap part. Finding the opportunity is the easy step; marketing, finance, team, and capital are the work.
- A crowded market can still be a gap. People already lining up for a competitor is proof of demand, not a reason to stay out.
- Every day is opening night. A fixed public release rhythm disciplines the whole organization behind it.
- Put the ballot box where the voters live. Collect demand signals on the platforms customers already use, not on ones you have to persuade them to visit.
- Small batch first, factory second. Let a cohort's response decide what gets scaled.
- Your logistics partner's hiring spree is a warning. When a supplier grows to serve you, start planning to own that function.
- Sell ownership, keep autonomy. Control of the cap table matters less than control of the brand and the operations.
- Export your suppliers, not just your logo. The strongest international strategy carries home-country producers to foreign customers.
- Visibility is power, and power gets audited. The data that makes a marketplace smart becomes a liability once the marketplace competes with its own sellers.
