Lucy Hall is the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, an online fashion rental platform and community that allows users to loan inclusive, diverse, and creative styles for an affordable price.
Chad talks with Lucy about being a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, building a community, and reducing the impacts of the fashion industry on the planet and people by helping to create a sustainable future.
LOANHOOD (https://www.loanhood.com/)
Follow LOANHOOD on Twitter (https://twitter.com/loanhoodlondon), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/loanhood/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/loanhood), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@loanhood), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzWBlASKUfH1OsdPEJOKxg), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/loanhood/).
Follow Lucy on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-hall-616b1614/).
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Lucy Hall, the Co-Founder of LOANHOOD, who are changing the face of fashion. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me.
LUCY: Thank you so much for having me, Chad.
CHAD: How are some of the ways that LOANHOOD is changing the face of fashion?
LUCY: So we're starting off with a peer-to-peer fashion rental app, which we just launched ten days ago now.
CHAD: Congratulations on the launch.
LUCY: It's been a long time in the making. And, like I said, we're starting with a fashion rental app. But there are so many different ways that we want to change the face of fashion. It definitely needs a facelift.
CHAD: What caused you to start with the rental platform?
LUCY: It was something that we were really passionate about. So my co-founders and I actually worked in the fashion industry for the majority of our careers. So we could see first-hand how it was changing, how it's developing. And sustainability started coming into our lives, and we could see that things had to change.
And we know that the fashion industry is quite archaic. Big fashion businesses are like these huge ships. It's so hard for them to change their course and to actually implement sustainability into their supply chains or their values. And we knew that we could do it quicker and better and faster than them.
So we started testing the idea of circular fashion by doing clothes swaps which is a kind of an entry-level way to circulate fashion for free or relatively cheaply. And we started getting this amazing feedback from people like, "Oh, we would love to do this again. And have you thought about monetizing it?" And, of course, that was our...to get to scale, we knew that we had to monetize this sharing of clothes. And that's how our peer-to-peer fashion rental app grew and was born.
CHAD: That's great. So you have two co-founders.
LUCY: I do.
CHAD: Jade and Jen. Were the three of you working together at the time?
LUCY: Funny story, Jade and I are actually best friends. And Jade was my model back in the day. So Jade has been a fashion model for 12-plus years. And she was on Britain's Next Top Model. And I was a model agent. She came into my agency as one of the runner-uppers, and we forged a lifelong friendship from there. And we've both been passionate about fashion. And then, as I said, our career paths, we could see the detrimental effect of the planet.
And Jade decided to go back to university and start studying. She did her master's in fashion futures at London College of Fashion. And that's where she started seeing sustainability. And the idea of a peer-to-peer rental came from that course. She was studying the future of fashion, and she knew that this was the only way we can move forward.
And Jen was a friend of Jade and is a graphic designer by trade and is an am