Canadian fashion startup eyes millennial women wardrobe-sharing market

New York – Canadian fashion startup Reheart is aiming at the untapped online wardrobe-sharing market with a platform that allows millennial women to lend their closets and rent clothes for up to 95 percent off their original price.

Launched in late 2017, REHEART aims at “formalizing” the tradition of lending to and borrowing clothes from your friends. Vasiliki Belegrinis, founder of Reheart, explains in her website how she got “distraught by the not-so-glamorous truth exposed of the fashion industry in The True Cost, I knew I had to do something. Taking a look at my overflowing closet, I tore down my bedroom closet, transformed it into an office and built REHEART.”

The young entrepreneur in Toronto believes she can build a business out of the tradition of sharing clothes with family and friends and do so in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way.

"I thought I have a large wardrobe, I know my friend has a large wardrobe and everyone around me does," said Belegrinis in a recent interview with the CBC. "We already share our clothes, but now we just formalise it."

Through Reheart, users can list clothes for hire for up to 50 percent of the profits and load their online catalog for items they may want to rent. The purpose is to help reduce the damage quickly by getting women to buy smaller clothes in total and at the same time giving them the opportunity to save money by renting and taking advantage of lending their own clothes to others, points out Reheart’s CEO and founder in the interview with Canadian news channel.

Reheart launches with approximately 2,500 registered users and an inventory of more than 1,200 entries that Belegrinis estimates have a total value of over $ 500,000. She expects the inventory to grow rapidly. According to Greenpeace, 40 percent of the clothes owned by the industrialized countries are barely used or never worn.

Business analysts quoted by the CBC report that clothing production has doubled since 2000 and in 2014, 100 million garments per year peaked for the first time. In the context it means almost 14 new garments for each person on the planet.