Valery Kovalev

During his student years, Kovalyov organized together with his wife Svetlana wholesale and retail trade in refrigerators, having rented a part of the area in the "Svet" store for this.

In 2003, he registered the site Holodilnik.ru with a catalog of goods and began to gradually transfer trade to an online format. Two years later, the product range offered by Kovalyov's company expanded, and the website was improved: for example, consumers got the opportunity not only to use the “Order Table” section, where wishes were formed about new models, but also to see open statistics (goods in stock, in delivery service, on the way to the buyer) in real time. On the forum of the site, the founder of the company, as a rule, answered questions from users himself.

In 2014, according to Forbes, Holodilnik.ru, with a revenue of $310 million, was in sixth place among the largest online stores in Russia.