Exchange your unwanted clothes for new outfits at a fraction of the price

Do you want to take part in the first Clotho exchange on campus? Click attending on their their Facebook event now and don't forget to bring your clothes to Sherfield lobby on Tuesday the 20th and Thursday the 22nd of January.

Our story began two months ago, when we founded our sustainable fashion business – Clotho London. The day of our graduation, swathed in black robes amongst the deep reds and grand mahogany of the Royal Albert Hall, we twitched with excitement in our seats as our phones buzzed. Each buzz signified another transacting customer, another sign of validation that all our previous efforts had not been completely crazy.

Or perhaps our story actually began five years ago, when I met my cofounder Caroline during our first week at Imperial. We studied chemistry together, and became lab partners in third year. From that moment on a dream team was born! Not for chemistry alas – our routine usually consisted of us donning our lab coats and goggles, making a cameo appearance in the lab lest the supervisors suspected us of skiving, and then sneaking off to the computer room to watch Gossip Girl.

With the end of University approaching fast, we would talk avidly about ways we could avoid applying for finance grad schemes, law conversion courses, teaching, and perhaps must of all, chemistry. All these options are great, but not suitable for us. We were told that the world is our oyster after graduating with a science degree, but none of the usually possibilities appealed.

Life really is too short to do something that doesn’t make you happy, but we didn’t even know what it was that made us happy. These rather gloomy thoughts loomed over us, growing ever stronger as each day passed. After our finals, I was poised to take a gap year, travelling aimlessly in the hope of finding that elusive aim. Caroline was prepared to enter corporate life, having accepted a position in a consultancy firm. We caught up one afternoon in the late summer sunshine, and started to daydream together again. We used to toy with the idea of starting a business, and were convinced that making cosmetics was the field for us. Caroline even bought a hundred empty lip balm containers at one point, and we set up a rudimentary kitchen laboratory. However, we realised that for two penniless graduates, it was just not feasible to start a cosmetics business without any capital. Thus it was back to the drawing board.

Almost 150 million tons of shoes and clothing are sold worldwide every year, yet only a very small part finds its way back into the production cycle – especially disappointing since textiles are in the top five landfill materials that can be either recycled or repurposed for other uses. The textiles industry is also often associated with poor working conditions in order to supply cheap fashion. We can’t ask people to stop buying new clothes – that would be like asking people to give up food in favour of soylent. No one would do it.

So we came up with Clotho London, which allows people to satisfy their materialistic wants and needs with minimal impact on the environment, lowering the demand for cheaper items that may be produced by workers in unacceptable conditions. Clotho essentially encourages women to exchange their clothing – we collect items from their homes to make it as convenient as possible. The items are then sorted, photographed and listed on our online shop.

For the items that they submit, our customers receive credit, which they can redeem for new outfits in our shop. We charge just a transaction fee for each new item that the customer purchases.

Once we had properly fleshed out our ideas for Clotho, we decided that the next step would be to test out our clothes exchange idea. So we organised a ‘Bitch ‘n’ Switch’ event – an evening chez Caroline with all of our favourite girlfriends, where we brought along our old clothes. We then swapped items with each other over nibbles, drinks and gossip. The evening was a success; our friends went home that night with completely new wardrobes, and were supportive about us taking the plunge to set up Clotho. With nothing to lose, we threw caution to the wind and got to work.

Caroline had a meeting with Alice Bentinck, the co-founder of Entrepreneur First (a start up accelerator programme), to ask if we could join this year’s cohort late with our business idea. Alice must be inundated with requests like this on a daily basis, so told us that she would consider it if we could prove that we had hundreds of transacting customers in a month’s time. We interpreted her words quite literally, and set ourselves a one-month challenge. Whilst that seemed initially to be ample time for us to achieve the goal, a quick breakdown of the month ahead revealed that we had essentially a week to persuade as many girls as possible to sign up for a trial run. We hastily cobbled together a rudimentary landing page with a signup form.

Armed with iPads, we started to roam around London, pouncing on stylish girls to persuade them to sign up. We covered most of the London universities, Westfields, High Street Kensington, and the pubs around Fulham. Persuading strangers to signup to something that essentially didn’t exist yet was more difficult than we imagined, but we gritted our teeth through all the rejections and managed to acquire a list of just over 400 girls at the end of the week. After calling everyone on our list, we assembled 50 girls who were available to take part in our pilot, and began collecting their items. We spent that week mostly on the Underground, annoying commuters by taking up too much space with our huge bags of clothes.

My bedroom was converted into our photography studio by taping white paper to the floor. With absolutely no idea as to what we were doing, we began pointing a camera at clothes and snapping photos. We thought that the clothes would look better if the items were photographed on a model, so with our limited resources we began taking it in turns to try on all the items. Caroline was responsible for sizes 4-6, whilst I handled sizes 8-16. It was a ridiculous situation and there were moments, wading knee deep through other girls’ dresses, when we did question if we had made the right decision. But we had promised our customers that the shop would open at the end of the month, and had no choice but to barrel forwards. Once all the items had been photographed, we realised that our pictures needed serious editing, so spent an intense night on Photoshop. For the online shop, we used e-commerce platform Shopify. After uploading all our products, we held our breath and launched. This was a defining moment, as we would see if customers would actually transact money. To our delight, within seconds of the launch, girls started to spend their credit. We had warned everyone in advance that they would need to be quick to snap up the best items, but we didn’t imagine that most girls were poised for attack! One customer informed us later that it had been ‘an exhilarating experience!’ And exhilarating it was us too, as we spent the rest of the night before graduation watching items being sold out, screaming with excitement at each other down the phone until we were hoarse.

Once we had dispatched all the orders, we organised another meeting with Alice and her co-founder Matt. She told us that we had taken on her challenge somewhat more literally than she was expecting, but was impressed with what we had achieved, and decided to accept us onto this year’s EF accelerator programme! The programme culminates in a Demo Day, which is a chance to raise a round of seed investment – our next challenge! We have been working with the support of EF for a month now, and have recently begun refreshing the stock in our shop once every week on Sundays at 9pm. Our working days are still very surreal – meetings with advisors interspersed with zipping around London for collections, promoting, photographing, editing etc. Life really does seem stranger than fiction now, as fiction must oblige by the rules. But we’ve found great reward by not following expectations and rules – neither of us can believe that this is our real job, and are excited to further our business. If you would like to read more about our entrepreneurial adventures around London, visit our blog at www.theclothogirls.wordpress.com.

We are now bringing Clotho to UK universities– we will be collecting and delivering clothes from central campus locations. We are kicking things off on our home turf at Imperial and will be doing our first University collection here next week. We will be collecting clothes in the Sherfield Building from 12-2pm 22nd Tuesday – 24th Thursday January.

If you are a girl then have a rummage through your wardrobe over the weekend, bring along some items that you no longer wear and get credit to spend in our online shop next Sunday!