Sublet Your Closet

Adarsh Alphons
Nov 6 · 4 min read

Fashion is the ultimate form of self-expression. What we wear is an extension of our identity, and defines how we want to be perceived by the world. While consumption in fashion has doubled in the past decade, the reality is, globally, billions of clothes go completely underused in our own closets every year. Studies have shown that we rarely wear 80% of the items in our closet. In the UK alone, 3.6 billion clothes were left untouched in people’s closets. The US has five times the population of the UK. It’s only natural for us to want options to wear, but what about all the clothes stowed away in our closets? What if there was a way to reach into incredible closets that aren’t our own and wear things? In a world where Airbnb books over 800,000 nights a day, aren’t we ready to wear someone else’s jacket? I think we are. Furthermore, our generation has also become acutely aware of the effects of the fashion industry on climate change. By simply doubling the use of a piece of clothing from one to two years, it reduces the items emissions by 24%. This is why I decided to start Wardrobe — to address the above realities with one seamless three-sided marketplace.

We seek variety — to have access to everything we want, any time we want, anywhere we want and not have to worry about and pay for things we don’t use or hardly use. There’s nothing wrong with that. For most of my adult life, I’ve been obsessed with the sharing economy. For Millennials and Gen Z — the idea of ownership no longer holds any allure. Prior to Wardrobe, I built an after-school art program for youth, ProjectArt — now the nation’s largest, based on repurposing space within public libraries. Wardrobe does the same by giving purpose (monetary and environmental) to your underused clothes and repurposing local establishments.

For Wardrobe, we tapped an unlikely partner: the local dry-cleaner. In December 2018, we launched our beta with a dozen dry-cleaners in NYC. During beta phase, the app showed high repeat customer usage — the average customer rented from the platform over 4 times in their first 6 months on the app. Rental orders and revenues grew close to 70% month-over-month, lenders collectively made tens of thousands in income from renting out their closets and so did dry-cleaners, who made thousands of dollars with dependable cash-flows. This was excellent, but we needed more time and attention to design and run experiments testing the core assumptions of the business. We grew our team thoughtfully and created customer-focused processes; for example, now it’s so easy to add your items to your collective closet, just fill out this form and we’ll either pick up the items from you or send you a free shipping label. An item’s safety is guaranteed and of course, you can call it back to wear it anytime.

From the start, influencers gravitated to Wardrobe and thousands of users joined organically; hundreds of influencers began sharing their closets on Wardrobe and spreading the word on Instagram about it; the more an influencer promoted, the more their fans would find them on the app and borrow their clothes, earning influencers’s rental income. For us, that meant free promotion of the app. It’s a win-win situation — exactly what Wardrobe was built to be. For the first time — their fans could look through closets of their style-icons and borrow directly. It’s surreal. Fans were over the moon. This Instagram post by fashion influencer Lusiane Tatsch and her follower comments are a perfect example of this phenomenon.

We’re thrilled to announce we’re officially launching Wardrobe (post-beta) in Manhattan with 40 hubs (dry-cleaners) and closets of incredible influencers and celebrities. With backing by investor operators such as founders of Airbnb, Coinbase, Vine, HQ Trivia, Opendoor and lead by Cyan Banister (seed investor in Uber and SpaceX, among others). Want to check-out or borrow clothes from the personal closets of Alysia Reiner (Orange Is the New Black), designer Shoshanna or Nicole Miller, or style influencer Alyssa Coscarelli? We got you.

People are drawn to people. Stepping into someone else’s clothes forges a bond of trust and yields a little vote of confidence in our fellow humanity. Our goal is to bring humanity a little closer through sharing our personal curation of fashion in a way that’s good for the planet. Through software, logistics, data science, and a healthy dose of hustle we’ve forged together a rapidly growing community of shared closets. The world is your wardrobe.