In 2021, I co-founded a peer-to-peer clothing rental marketplace called Rotate Your Closet which aims to reinvent the way we interact with fashion. Just as Airbnb transformed the hospitality industry with a peer-to-peer marketplace, Rotate aims to reshape the apparel market by letting users unlock a diverse and ever-expanding wardrobe, while simultaneously earning income from their own clothing without losing ownership.
Rotate’s Beginnings
I met my cofounder Hannah in Barcelona in summer of 2011. We immediately bonded over our shared passion for clothes, and would constantly run to each others rooms to borrow clothes (so we’ve been essentially renting our closets since 2011). We parted ways after the trip but continued to stay in touch via Instagram, DMing each other obsessing over the other’s clothes in posts and stories. Jessie was in LA, and Hannah was in Boston. In 2020 in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I DMed Hannah about one of her outfits saying I wish we could share like we used to on the trip. From that came a new business idea to build a technology platform to enable people all over the country to share each other’s closets.
Often times we found ourselves influenced by styles our peers were wearing, and not just influencers. We found ourselves stuck in the constant cycle of reaching out to friends on Instagram, asking where they got certain articles of clothing, & then buying the item ourselves. However, we started to realize that keeping up with constantly changing trends is not sustainable, does not make our bank accounts happy, and causes overflowing closets. This is why we wanted to create a platform to facilitate this exchange in a more sustainable way. Our vision for the future is simple, we want to become a one stop shop marketplace that helps users reduce, reuse, & recycle their clothing through renting, donating, selling and properly recycling.
Out Mission: Bringing Fashion to the Shared Economy
With our ever changing world, there is less desire to rewear clothing due to the rise of social media. Closets are filled with clothes that don’t get worn – people only wear 20% of the clothes in their closets regularly. A Deloitte report highlighted that consumers who are influenced by social media are 4 times more likely to spend more on purchases. Moreover, the influence can be so high that 29% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase on the same day of using social media.Today, fashion trends turnover at a rapid pace not only because of constantly changing social media trends but because of the evolution of fast fashion. This causes the rate at which we buy and discard clothes to increase too. Based on research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the average number of times garments are being worn has decreased by 36% over the past 15 years. This exacerbates existing sustainability issues in the industry, as the fashion industry generates 4% of the world’s waste each year, 92 million tons.
Rotate will help the fashion industry become more environmentally and socially conscious by enabling customers to recycle and reuse clothing, and push for brands to produce less in the first place. We’re excited to bring you on this journey!