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It began with a charity store off London’s Portobello Street, and the proper pinstripe swimsuit. Effectively, nearly excellent. “I completely liked it, however it didn’t match me. So I had the concept for constructing an app,” explains Josephine Philips, the founding father of Sojo, a startup that wishes to convey tailoring “into the fashionable age.”
Nicknamed “the Deliveroo of fashion repairs,” Sojo was launched in January 2021, and connects customers with close by seamsters whereas facilitating the pickup and return of garments utilizing a community of couriers. Unbiased seamsters register on the app and set their very own worth for his or her work, from fixing holes to altering sizes, with Sojo taking a 30 p.c charge. That exact same pinstripe swimsuit ended up being one of many app’s first orders.
“I skilled going to a tailor, and it was so archaic, it was actually backward,” says Philips. “It isn’t an exercise that’s frequent, and we wish to make it frequent. We would like each younger particular person to be engaged with repairs and alterations.” It’s a difficulty made all the more serious by the truth that two thirds of fixable clothes are thrown away.
Eighteen months after launch, Sojo is a distinct beast, contemporary from a brand new $2.4 million funding spherical, a partnership with Scandinavian vogue model Ganni, and a hiring push that ought to see it attain 16 employees. It’s additionally been a seismic change for Philips. The 24-year-old began engaged on Sojo full-time straight after graduating from college—her solely earlier jobs being as a waitress and as a summer season intern at second-hand clothes change Depop.
For these first few months, Sojo was a one-woman present, powered principally by a combination of additional time and youthful ardour to alter the “tradition of waste” and “exploitation” that defines the quick vogue business, from which Philips constructed up her preliminary, restricted community of couriers and seamsters.
“That youth meant I noticed the best way the system was working and was like, ‘I can really change that’ … That form of outlook was positively a superpower,” says Philips. “However there was quite a bit happening. By no means having performed one thing like this earlier than meant I used to be studying and doing concurrently.”
As a Black feminine founder, Philips discovered herself in an business the place women-led startups account for solely 2.8 percent of VC funding. Actually, according to one report, between 2009 and 2019, just one Black feminine founder within the UK raised any Sequence A funding in any respect.
“Everybody is aware of what the enterprise capital area is for under-represented founders … The numbers converse for themselves,” Philips says, explaining she would recurrently get rejected by buyers, solely to see white male counterparts with little greater than “a PowerPoint” making pitches and “getting tens of millions straight off the bat.”
Ultimately, Sojo was in a position to safe backers, initially by means of an angel spherical with an array of big-name buyers, together with Depop founder Simon Beckerman. The most recent Sequence A spherical was led by female-directed VC agency CapitalT.
Outdoors funding has additionally prompted a change of focus—a extra pragmatic, however no much less efficient model of Philips’ imaginative and prescient. As an alternative of its direct-to-consumer operations, Sojo is more and more specializing in business-to-business—making offers with main vogue manufacturers akin to Ganni (alongside seven different partnerships within the pipeline) to be the supplier of alterations for its 1000’s of shoppers. These offers will permit prospects to simply request clothes repairs and alterations from Sojo’s seamsters, and helpfully go some solution to altering the best way they see tailoring.
“I noticed that by shifting our enterprise mannequin into working with manufacturers, we’d be capable to really attain scale and make an impression quite a bit quicker,” Philips explains. “Certainly one of our buyers mentioned you may both spend £10 million attempting to amass 10 million direct prospects over a interval of 10 years. Or you may have one B2B associate and also you entry 10 million prospects in a single day.”
Philips can be within the technique of outsourcing Sojo’s courier community whereas hiring in-house seamsters. She has even explored increasing Sojo into offering its personal “darkish kitchen” equivalents; a community of commercial seamster workshops that might give it the dimensions to work on 1000’s of alterations regionally, abruptly.
Philips hopes Sojo will change shopper attitudes towards clothes at a time when quick vogue is within the highlight for its environmental impression. “In the end, we stay in a tradition of hyper-disposability,” she says. “Clothes has not been thought of one thing of worth.”
This text was initially printed within the November/December 2022 situation of WIRED UK journal.
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