The director of Capri Sports, which owns four sports franchises including UP Warriorz, wants to build a brand identity that puts women at the front and centre
In the last semester of her undergraduate course at England’s University of Exeter, Jinisha Sharma undertook two finance classes that were polar opposites. “One focussed on traditional financial success, emphasising a language often opaque to many, while the other offered a nuanced perspective, examining finance through the lens of gender, class, race politics etc,” says Jinisha. “I found the latter to be deeply enriching.”
Through these classes, Jinisha stumbled upon concepts like impact investing that had, by then, caught on in the West and that factor in a social return besides merely financial etc. In 2018, when she returned to join Capri Global, an NBFC that was built from scratch by her father Rajesh Sharma, she started to fashion Capri’s communication around it. “Capri had a business model that prioritised social impact, particularly lending to small businesses, but the messaging did not reflect this. In my early days, I was trying to realign the communication with the company’s ethos,” says Jinisha.
In end-2022, she completed her master’s degree and returned to India and Capri for good. By then, aside from its core as a financial institution, Capri had expanded into buying sports franchises and already had three in its portfolio—Rajasthan Warriors in kho-kho, Bengal Warriors in kabaddi, and Sharjah Warriors in ILT20, the domestic cricket franchise league in the Emirates.
It was around that time that the Women’s Premier League (WPL) was formally announced by the BCCI, and amid buzz on how it would advance women’s cricket by a few light years, the 26-year-old sniffed an opportunity to put into practice her classroom learnings on social impact and gender inclusion. “I had a heart-to-heart with my dad and explained to him why this investment was essential for us,” she says. In February 2023, Capri was announced as one of the five owners of WPL franchises with a winning bid of Rs 757 crore for UP Warriorz (UPW).