Mona Bijoor
Founder of the wholesale platform JOOR
Mona Bijoor is the founder of JOOR, the online wholesale platform launched in 2010 that connects fashion brands with retail buyers. A former senior buyer at Ann Taylor, she helped move the traditional market-week ordering process online, and JOOR now connects more than 14,000 brands with over 700,000 buyers.
| Role | Founder of JOOR |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2010 |
| Also | Partner, Kings Circle Capital (since 2015) |
| Previously | Senior buyer, Ann Taylor (2007 to 2009) |
| Education | MBA, Wharton School |
Who is Mona Bijoor?
Mona Bijoor is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder and first chief executive of JOOR, a digital wholesale platform that lets brands present collections and take orders from retailers online. She founded the company in 2010 out of her own experience as a buyer, and it became one of the reference platforms for business-to-business fashion trade. Since 2015 she has also been a partner at Kings Circle Capital.
Career
Bijoor studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BA in human biology, and completed an MBA at the Wharton School in 2005 with a focus on marketing and operations. She then worked on the retail side of fashion:
- Senior buyer at Ann Taylor from 2007 to 2009
- Brand consultant for Chanel and Elie Tahari
Drawing on that buying experience, she launched JOOR in 2010 as an online marketplace that directly connects brands and retailers. Early clients included Diane von Furstenberg, Current/Elliott and rag and bone. She has spoken at industry events such as Shoptalk.
Influence on the fashion business
JOOR helped make digital wholesale a normal part of how collections are sold. According to the company, the platform now connects more than 14,000 brands with over 700,000 buyers in 150 countries. In practical terms this means that:
- Brands can present their collections to buyers online
- Retail buyers can review collections and place orders digitally
- Brands and retailers in different countries can trade without meeting in person
By bringing these steps onto one platform, JOOR made the wholesale relationship between brands and stores easier to manage at international scale.
Mona Bijoor and technology
Bijoor's contribution was to apply marketplace and software thinking to a part of fashion that had remained largely offline. By capturing wholesale orders digitally, platforms like JOOR also created structured data on what buyers order, which brands can use for planning and which is a foundation for analytics and AI in wholesale.
Why it matters
Wholesale still accounts for a large share of revenue for many fashion brands. Bijoor's work showed that this channel could be digitised without removing the relationship between brand and buyer, and it set expectations for the B2B ordering experience that the industry continues to build on.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Mona Bijoor?
Mona Bijoor is the founder of JOOR, the online wholesale marketplace launched in 2010 that connects fashion brands and retail buyers. She was previously a senior buyer at Ann Taylor and has been a partner at Kings Circle Capital since 2015.
What is JOOR?
JOOR is a digital wholesale platform on which brands present collections and retailers place orders online. The company says it connects more than 14,000 brands with over 700,000 buyers in 150 countries.