It began with a charity store off London’s Portobello Street, and the right pinstripe go well with. Properly, nearly excellent. “I completely cherished it, nevertheless it didn’t match me. So I had the thought for constructing an app,” explains Josephine Philips, the founding father of Sojo, a startup that desires to carry tailoring “into the fashionable age.”
Nicknamed “the Deliveroo of vogue 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 % payment. That exact same pinstripe go well with 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 is not an exercise that’s frequent, and we wish to make it frequent. We would like each younger individual to be engaged with repairs and alterations.” It’s a problem made all the more serious by the truth that two thirds of fixable garments are thrown away.
Eighteen months after launch, Sojo is a unique 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 workers. 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 alternate Depop.
For these first few months, Sojo was a one-woman present, powered largely by a mix of time beyond regulation and youthful ardour to vary the “tradition of waste” and “exploitation” that defines the quick vogue trade, from which Philips constructed up her preliminary, restricted community of couriers and seamsters.
“That youth meant I noticed the way in which the system was working and was like, ‘I can truly change that’ … That sort of outlook was positively a superpower,” says Philips. “However there was loads happening. By no means having completed 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 trade the place women-led startups account for solely 2.8 % of VC funding. The truth is, in response to one report, between 2009 and 2019, just one Black feminine founder within the UK raised any Collection A funding in any respect.
“Everybody is aware of what the enterprise capital house is for under-represented founders … The numbers communicate for themselves,” Philips says, explaining she would usually get rejected by traders, solely to see white male counterparts with little greater than “a PowerPoint” making pitches and “getting thousands and thousands 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 traders, together with Depop founder Simon Beckerman. The most recent Collection 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 corresponding to Ganni (alongside seven different partnerships within the pipeline) to be the supplier of alterations for its hundreds of consumers. These offers will permit prospects to simply request clothes repairs and alterations from Sojo’s seamsters, and helpfully go some approach to altering the way in which they see tailoring.
“I spotted that by shifting our enterprise mannequin into working with manufacturers, we’d have the ability to truly attain scale and make an influence loads sooner,” Philips explains. “Considered one of our traders mentioned you’ll be able to both spend £10 million attempting to accumulate 10 million direct prospects over a interval of 10 years. Or you’ll be able to 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 business seamster workshops that may give it the dimensions to work on hundreds of alterations regionally, unexpectedly.
Philips hopes Sojo will change shopper attitudes towards clothes at a time when quick vogue is within the highlight for its environmental influence. “Finally, we dwell in a tradition of hyper-disposability,” she says. “Clothes has not been thought of one thing of worth.”
This text was initially revealed within the November/December 2022 challenge of Startup UK journal.