On reinventing the future of fashion: a conversation with Reid Moncada, CEO of Fitted
I spoke with Reid Moncada, co-founder and CEO of Fitted. Fitted provides full service laundry and dry cleaning services as well as a virtual catalog of your full closet and a platform to monetize your clothing through consignment.
Early in high school, Reid’s father lost his job, and the family consequently spent most of Reid’s high school years homeless. Through this incredibly challenging experience, Reid learned to work tremendously hard. He caddied daily to support himself and his family and was accepted to Penn State on a full ride.
At Penn State, he sought a triple major because he loved learning. In his entrepreneurship class, he developed the idea for Chute, which later became Fitted. Chute first started as a laundry pick up and delivery service, which solved a pain point Reid and his peers felt personally.
Reid shared learnings from each part of his journey from launch and marketing to fundraising to product pivots.
To launch Chute, Reid printed 100 flyers and distributed them all around campus. He texted every single one of his friends, classmates, and acquaintances and encouraged them to use the service and spread the word. He airdropped photos of the flyers on campus buses, hosted a Fortnite tournament sponsored by Chute, and distributed Chute branded ping pong balls and other college student tailored swag.
Reid called laundromats all around the US each time Chute launched at a new university. He codified this into a process and recruited the help of a great business development team.
Reid left Penn State to incubate Chute at Draper and later at XRC Labs. Two weeks before Draper started, an investor offered 100K for half the company. Although the capital was tempting, Reid ultimately turned it down to wait for more vision aligned, equitable investors and to preserve ownership for his current and future team.
At Draper University, Reid changed Chute to Fitted. He realized that beyond the first order inconvenience of laundry, people had no way to fully visualize their closets. Moreover, with the rise of companies like Rent the Runway and Stitch Fix, he realized that data was truly the new oil, especially in fashion and retail. He was also exposed to the power of computer vision and realized that there was an immense opportunity in incorporating a small step into the laundry process: automated imaging of clothing. In this way, people could better understand their clothing and more easily sell it on consignment platforms and brands could better understand what people are actually wearing (versus just what they are buying) at the most granular levels.
Reid was able to build the core of Fitted while being a non-technical founder himself. He raised $50K from friends and family, built relationships with undergraduate engineers, worked with international development shops, and used no code/low code platforms like Zapier, Squarespace, and Typeform.
To bring the company to the next level, Reid noted the most relevant areas in which they were lacking talent and formulated an advisory board accordingly.
Looking back on his journey, Reid notes that “the greatest resource is being resourceful.” Nothing can replace hard work, and with the global connectivity and knowledge technology has given us, you can learn from anyone to achieve your goals.
