Hack your Closet — on a mission to change your closet for good
Mikaela Larsell Ayesa is the co-founder of Hack your Closet, Sweden’s largest shared closet with over 3000 items shared by 450 customers. As a customer, you receive 4 items every month based on your style preference and you can wear them as much as you like for a month before returning them.
Hi Mikaela, tell me about the purpose behind Hack your Closet
To stop buying new clothes and instead prolong the life of existing ones is one of the most efficient ways to save our planet. However, the second-hand shopping experience can be difficult for many consumers. Not everyone has the time to go through thousands of items just to get a fitted jumper. By offering a rental & personal shopping experience, Hack your closet aims to take clothes out of the waste stream and make them more accessible to everyone.
There are more second-hand clothes available today than ever before, and this means that tomorrow’s outfit doesn’t have to be bought new. In a country like Sweden (10 million people) a single charity organisation like The Red Cross gets 21 tons of clothes every day, some of it untouched. Our service can prolong the life of these items with another 2–3 years, which will make a huge difference for our environment.
How did it all start?
Mikaela’s co-founder Lisa Gautier got the original idea of a shared closet full of rescued clothes as a result of many things; being the art director behind the rebranding of Outfittery GmbH (Europe’s largest curated personal shopping experience for men), working for a fast-growing digital marketplace, and starting a venture that would help second-hand stores with their digitalization. To bring shape and maturity to her idea, she organized a “live prototype” (pilot) with 10 potential customers in June 2019 and noticed an instant interest for the service. At the same time, Lisa met Mikaela and they decided to turn the idea into a sustainable business together.
Mikaela brought an engineering mind with processes and structures to the business, which allowed the business to grow and scale in a sustainable way. Mikaela’s background is within innovation management, design and product development at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden). In her Master thesis work, Mikaela had developed a Lean circular framework for startups who want to integrate circular economy in their innovation processes. She also developed her own venture alongside her studies, a modular table concept AXXMA, where the user could replace parts of the table to upgrade the design of it instead of buying a new one, and a system for recycling or reusing the no longer desired parts.
Mikaela and Lisa met over their passion for change, entrepreneurship, and their knowledge about sustainability and circular economy. Lisa focusing “on stage” with marketing, customer experience, and branding, and Mikaela focusing on the work “behind the scenes” with processes, logistics, team, and structure. Their different perspectives and collaboration has been the key to grow the company to what it is today; a passionate team of engineers, stylists and business developers.
Where in your business journey are you right now?
Right now, we are on a scale and growth stage, parallel to understanding our customers better. We are selected as one of the 10 startups to enter the EIT Climate-KIC Nordic Accelerator. We are establishing our business in Sweden for the moment, but are aiming to make a bigger impact in the rest of Europe. We are hiring new competences to be able to extend our customer base. We are also building a community around our rotating closet where we share styling tips, histories of items and have fun getting dressed every day.
What is the potential impact of your social innovation? What will change if many people start using Hack your closet?
You can subscribe to our service for 4 years and still make less of an environmental impact than if you buy 1 pair of new jeans in a store today. Only 8% of clothes that people throw away are being reused and we would like to change that. It’s not only a beneficial environmental impact but also a social impact. We want to change the way people consume clothes, own clothes, and access clothes. We want to change people’s mindsets when it comes to trends, fashion, and style. It’s not always the newest trends that make you stylish or fashionable, it’s more about your ability to style any item.
Thank you Mikaela! 🤩
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