Two years ago, New York-based entrepreneur Adarsh Alphons was looking in his closet and started noticing all of the clothes he never wore. “I’m thinking, I’ve literally not worn these jackets once in the last two years, and they’re sitting here in impeccable condition,” he says. “And then I take them from apartment to apartment when I move.”
“People have tried this before,” says Alphons. “But there was just one big operational hurdle that no one had solved for.” In past attempts, he says, lenders and renters had to co-ordinate swaps themselves, meaning that the timing was unpredictable, and it also wasn’t necessarily clear that an item had been cleaned. By managing the process itself, along with its dry cleaning partners, Wardrobe makes the platform more appealing, especially for the people who own the clothing.
So far, early lenders to the platform tend to have very large wardrobes, consigning an average of more than US$8,000 worth of extra clothing. “Several of them have already made thousands of dollars off of those things,” he says. “And they can retain ownership of it, which means they can either sell it later on a different platform—or maybe two years from now we’ll have our own sales platform as well.”
