9 November/10 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 7Y
ou want Chanel? There’s a
woman n our site who haso
everything. Any bag you
want, you name it — she has
it.”Victoria Prew, 26, is tell-
ing me about her company Hurr Collec-
tive, the UK’s firstpeer-to-peer rental
website for women’s fashion, which she
co-founded and co-coded from scratch.
Seated on a sofa in an ankle-length
floral dress (rented, of course) and
suede boots, Prew looks incredibly
relaxed despite managing a rapidly
growing business. She only launched
Hurr in February but is already in the
middle of her first investment round,
hiring more employees, and last week
she opened the UK’s first peer-to-peer
rental pop-up shop here in London.
“It’s similar to Airbnb but with cloth-
ing,” says Prew of the concept behind
Hurr. Unlike most fashion rental com-
panies, individual users can sign up and
rent their clothes to others on the plat-
form. Not only does it enable people to
rent clothes without a long-term com-
mitment, those loaning their clothes
can profit (in some cases greatly) from
their wardrobes. On the site at the
moment is a floral Kitri dress, perfect
for weddings, which can be rented for
£61; an Isabel Marant embellished
jacket going for £52; and a Saint Laurent
check cape, which usually retails for
£1,530, available for £297. Prew herself
owns a Ganni dress that she bought from
luxury second-hand fashion website
Vestiare Collective for £150, and now
rents out for £80 a week. “I don’t like
calling it a side hustle,” says Prew, “but if
you are savvy and buy an expensive
item and rent for the right price, you can
make a real profit.”
To give the process a more curated,
glossy twist, there are also features on
the website giving advice on what to
wear for brunch, date nights, weekends
away and summer holidays. There is a“
lot going on,’’ Prew admits, “but the
appetite for rented fashion is massive,
especially among young women — a typ-
ical Hurr girl is aged between 25 and 35
— and it’s only gaining momentum”.
The sharing economy for rented
fashion has been growing for some
time. US website Rent the Runway
launched in 2009 and was one of the
first sites that allowed fashion consum-
ers to borrow high-end luxury clothing:
in March this year it was valued at $1bn.
In Australia and Asia, too, the industry
is booming. Rental website YCloset,
founded in Beijing in 2015, received
$50min a series C fundraising round led
by Alibaba Innovation Ventures, Soft-
Bank China and Sequoia China in 2017.
China’s market for womenswear rentals
is predicted to be worth more than
Rmb100bn n the coming years.i
According to a study by London shop-
ping centre Westfield, 59 per cent of
Londoners who consider themselves
“fashion forward”would spend £200 or
more on a monthly unlimited subscrip-
tion to a rental website. This appetite
seems to be reflected in the take-up for
Hurr; between March and September,
10,000users signed up to the platform,
which has seen month-on-month
growth of 120 per cent in listings.
Prew attributes some of the enthusi-well,” explains Prew. “When you buy US
labels you pay shipping costs; of course
with us there is none of that. I particu-
larly love the fact Reformation is up
there, s they are a sustainable brand. Ita
is great to see sustainable clothing being
used in a circular way.”
In keeping with her eco ethos, Prew
has tried to make sureevery aspect of
the business is as green as possible.
Delivering clothes often entails a lot of
excess plastic, as well as exhaust emis-
sions, so items of clothing can be
exchangedthrough Geo-tag meetups
(an application on the website that
allows you to see where other members
of Hurr are geographically) or via Royal
Mail or the cycling courier service Ped-
als. Sustainable packaging company
RePack provides bags that can fit
through a letterbox, can be used about
20 times, and when worn out can be sent
to the RePack HQ, repurposed andsent
back outagain. “They’re completely cir-
cular, it’s really cool,” says Prew. “We’ve
just pushed that out to our users.” For
those renting out their clothes, Hurr
also workwith Blanc, an eco-friendly
dry cleaning service that does not use
harmful chemicals.
Competition from other peer-to-peer
rental companies is already emerging in
the UK, such as websites On Loan and
Girl Meets Dress. By Rotation, the brain-
child of former credit investment ana-
lyst Eshita Kabra-Davies, launched last
month as the UK’s first fashion rental
app for all genders. (Hurr is a website,
not an app). Within weeks of By Rota-
tion launching, they had 2,000 sign-ups.
The competition doesn’t seem to worry
Prew, as there is another element to
Hurr thatshe is particularly excited
about — a blossoming community. “Our
messaging system has just completely
boomed, and percentage-wise most
users message each other before they
put through transactions, which is quite
interesting,” says Prew.
“For us, it’s fascinating because it’s abit like Airbnb; you would probably
message the host before you booked it,
asking any questions; it’s exactly the
same thing. Users are nurturing their
relationships.” Prew has particularly
noticed that users are sharing fashion
advice. “They might ask, ‘do you think a
nude heel would look better with that?
Do you think it could look cool in the
daytime with trainers?’ Peoplesendimages to each other of how they have
worn the dress, or send images to give
others inspiration.” She has also seen
increasing numbers of users meeting up
to swap clothing and then in turn
becoming friends. “It’s very real life, and
I guess, for me, this is what I alwayshoped it would be, that people would
actually connect through the platform
with each other.”
The high level of engagement on-site
is part of the reason Prew decided to cre-
ate the pop-up, the first of its kind in the
UK. Now open for a month in London’s
Belgravia, it will feature urated itemsc
from some of Hurr’s top lenders. People
canrent items directly from the pop-up,
sign up tothe website, meetfellowusers
in the in-house café or take part in a
range ofactivities. There are upcycling
and embroidery workshops, meditation
sessions,and a roundtable discussion
with the “Junior Network” (an event for
young fashion professionals to discuss
their xperiences within the industry).e
With such rapid growth, what does
the future hold? “We have had a
demand from menswear,” says Prew,
“particularly for those hype collabora-
tion pieces. So we will add that. But also
maternity wear is really interesting, and
childrenswear... Our idea is to focus, for
now, on one thing and really nail it, and
then, once we’ve got all of the data, and
we’ve built the best product, we can
scale it up to include, well, everything.”RE; CODE
Founded in 2012,
RE; CODE is
taking a stand
against the
industry’s cavalier
attitude towards
unsold clothes,
known as dead
stock. Instead of
incinerating
discarded
merchandise — as so many major
brands do — the Korean label
repurposes unwanted garments and
miscellaneous fabrics into entirely new
products with a futuristic aesthetic,
without the waste. Each collection is
limited edition, although the scope for
what can be salvaged is apparently
limitless. A man’s blazer is reassembled
into a skirt, and a seat cover becomes a
shirt. Upcycling, it seems, has a new
standard.
en.recode-global.comZilver
Brazilian designer Pedro Lourenço
officially launched his gender-neutral
brand Zilver in 2018. Working closely
with sustainability
consultancy Eco-
Age, Zilver
ensures that best
practice and
certification
criteria are met for
all materials, from
regenerated nylon
to a fibre sourced
from dairy
industry waste,
with a detailed
record of suppliers and sources clearly
listed on their website.
zilver.comASKET
ASKET was founded with the aim of
putting an end to fast fashion. Based in
Sweden, the brand creates seasonlessgarments that
defy shortlived
trends. At its heart
is a mission to
achieve full
traceability, an
operation that
requires tracking
downabout 400
processes and
locations.
Currently their
stock is 79 per
cent traceable. The goal is to get to 100
per cent before 2020.
asket.comKa-Sha
Since its inception,
the brand Ka-Sha,
based in Pune in
India, has enforced a
zero-waste policy.
Fabric is bought
directly from NGOs,jackets feature vegan ivory buttons, and
offcuts are reinvented as patchwork
jackets. This commitment to
sustainability has also led to the
creation of Heart To Haat, a secondary
label that focuses n giving post-o
production waste new life, and even
offers to take care of extile scrapst
discarded by other brands.
ka-sha.inLisa Folawiyo
Lisa Folawiyo has long been aware that
the issue of sustainability in the fashion
industry is about more than just fabric.
At the forefront of the Nigerian fashion
scene, olawiyo sources and producesF
her designs locally,
employing craftsmen
who are experts at
beading. Famed for her
use of the west African
printed fabric Ankara,
the designer’s creations
have been worn by the
likes of Solange Knowles
and Lucy Liu.
lisafolawiyo.comRosanna Doddsasm for renting clothes to sustainability.
“A year ago, people were like, ‘oh, sus-
tainability’s a nice trend’. But we were
like, it’s not a trend, it’s a movement.
Everyone knows how polluting the fash-
ion industry is; 11m items of clothing
end up in landfill each week in the UK
alone,”says Prew. “So renting clothing is
a great way to reduce yourfootprint and
make your clothing lifecycle entirely
circular. Fewer young people want to
buy fast fashion that will end up in land-
fill. They want to have fashion that
makes them feel good and also lasts. So
why not rent items you can wear for any
day or event, not just occasion wear?
The fact is, this is the future of fashion.”
Hurr is not just a place for high-end
fashion labels such as Gucci, Chanel and
Burberry. Prew likes the fact there are
more mid-range brands such as Ganni,
Reformation and Kitri on the site. But in
order to prevent users renting out fast-
fashion items there is a valuation proc-
ess — clothes must have a price point of
£150 or higher. Currently the most pop-
ular brandsrented and loanedare Zim-
mermann, Reformation and Retrofete.
“American designers do particularly‘A year ago, people
said, sustainability’s a
nice trend. But we
were like, it’s not a
trend, it’s a movement’
Fashion’s generation rent
NextGen
FIVE TO WATCH Eco-conscious fashion brands
Tech Don’t buy your wardrobe,|
borrow it.Flora Macdonald Johnston
meets the founder of a new website
disrupting the rental market for clothes
From main: Victoria Prew, in Hurr’s
Belgravia pop-up, photographed for
the FT by Max Miechowski; inside
the pop-up; TV presenter Laura
Whitmore wearing a dress rented
from HurrNOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20197/ - 17:40 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD7, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 7, 1