Having been accepted into Toronto’s Fashion Zone in the autumn, Ella of Saint John is planning to launch its online marketplace for used clothes in Canada’s largest city in the spring.
Ella is a mobile app on which women can sell or buy slightly used clothes. The idea is that women who love fashion have closets full of wonderful clothes they might never wear again. They can post the merchandise on Ella and users can buy them.
Founder and CEO Kelly Lawson estimates there is $50 billion worth of slightly used fashion sitting in American closets, and she wants to help women capitalize on it.
So far, about 1,000 people have downloaded the app, with a strong geographic concentration in New Brunswick. But Lawson has been involved with the fashion incubator in Toronto and wants to make a splash in that city.
“The plan is to target Toronto in the medium term,” Lawson said in an interview Wednesday. “We’re going to start getting the right people around the table in February. We’d really like to get some penetration (in Toronto) in March … with a launch planned for sometime in the spring.”
The company’s march toward the Toronto market actually began in Moncton in September, when Ella pitched at the Propel ICT Demo Day. The company had gone through the regional tech accelerator’s Launch program and was chosen to deliver a three-minute pitch at the graduation ceremonies.
Also participating in the event was Sean Wise, a professor of entrepreneurship at Ryerson University and a consultant with CBC’s Dragons’ Den. He told Lawson about the Fashion Zone, an incubator for fashion companies affiliated with Ryerson. She applied and was accepted, and spent part of November working at the incubator.
“It’s staffed with a roster of mentors that we have complete access to,” said Lawson.
“I could sit down with any of them at any time and get their feedback and insights into our product.”
She added that discussing her project with fashion industry experts “is something that is not readily available in Atlantic Canada” and helped her business tremendously.
Based on the work at Fashion Zone and feedback from clients, Ella is continuing to develop the product. Users wanted to know more about what others were selling, and they wanted to receive notifications about recent posts. The company is also redesigning the app to place more emphasis on images.
“Esthetics are really important, maybe as important as the functionality,” said Lawson.
The team is working on algorithms that will help to identify clothes for sale that best suit individual users.
So far, about $7,000 worth of merchandise has changed hands using the app. Though that’s not enough traffic to generate money for the company, Lawson said it’s allowed the team to hone the product before it’s released in a big market.
What they’re learning is that it is becoming acceptable, even desirable, for well-dressed women to buy clothing from one another rather than purchasing new items.
“We’re coming into an era where it’s cool to do things like this to protect the environment, whereas before you might not want to wear clothes that someone else has owned.”
