Cut Costs, Dress Designer
Sarah Perkins, age 27, lives in Lakeview, IL. She got her marketing degree from Santa Clara University, her masters in Journalism from DePaul University, and worked as a lifestyle journalist and editor before co-founding her fashion start-up company DesignerShare. Yes, Chicagoans, this is what we’ve all been waiting for.
Two years ago, Sarah Perkins and family friend Bill Meyers began a mission. Sarah, with the goal of starting a company to streamline the exchange of clothing and accessories which she had encountered among her fashionably, and economically, conscious college peers, and Bill, with the foresight to conquer the fashion sharing economy in Chicago. And thus, DesignerShare was born.
For around 9 months, Sarah and Bill worked part-time as co-founders of the company until September 1, 2016, when they took the leap to full-time. In March 2017, the “first truly peer-to-peer marketplace for women to rent their designer clothing and accessories to one another” was live. Now, if you live within the 35 mile radius in Chicagoland, you can begin your DesignerShare experience as either a renter or lender of their designer brands. As a lender, clients can list their designer pieces on the site or approve requests from other parties. DesignerShare then picks up the piece at the door, delivers it to the renter, and puts it through a dry-cleaning service before delivering it back to closet. As a renter, DesignerShare’s website allows clients to browse designer pieces, request for a range of dates, and receive pieces directly to their door. However, that is not the extent of DesignerShare’s ingenuity.
Like their competitors, DesignerShare allows for the technological feat of renting and lending clothes through an online portal. However, unlike Rent the Runway, DesignerShare doesn’t “house any of these pieces,” instead “they get to stay in your closet until they are used and cleaned.” In an interview with Sarah, she described the painstaking process of diversifying her plan for DesignerShare from that of other companies. “It really just took a lot of looking at our competitors or anyone who could be considered a competitor, and saying, how would we do this process better?” For Sarah and Bill, that became the incorporation of a free dry cleaning service, door-to-door delivery, and partnership with trusted brands to gain credibility. Since they began, DesignerShare has partnered with Tide Spin, Proctor and Gamble’s dry cleaning service in Chicago, as well as Lyft to produce this customer service feat.
However, as with any budding company, there were several complications. The first, to find out how to truly make DesignerShare, involved finding the right UX designer and developer. According to Sarah, “luckily we went through the goldilocks process, and came upon LimeRed Studio,” located in Ravenswood, IL. “They’re not just designers to us. They are our advisors, investors, and now our office landlords in a sense. So we’re very close to them.” Sarah even calls the owner and founder of LimeRed Studio, Emily Lonigro Boylan, one of her biggest inspirations as a female entrepreneur. “Emily has been an amazing mentor to me. I met her, and off the bat she was so friendly and willing to work with me, be encouraging, and to have her and her team believe in us as much as they do is great.” After having worked on DesignerShare for two years, Sarah mentions “it’s cliche to say it’s a rollercoaster, but it really is.”
“You feel the the highest of highs, and then, ‘What am I doing? What is my body doing? What is happening to me?” Thankfully, from Sarah’s experience she’s found “there’s just the best community of female entrepreneurs in Chicago, and it seems here that everyone is very focused on collaboration over competition, and that’s how we like to work too, figuring out how we can do win-win situations.”
Since not everyone has the same craving for fashion or appetite for high-end designers, the next step in the process, finding the right audience, was slightly more difficult. Sarah’s experience sharing clothing in college is one I specifically connect to, as well as many other young and fashionable women, but the individual archetype is harder to pin down. “She loves fashion, but she covets or has this high-end lifestyle. She loves instagram, and showing off her outfits. She feels a little bit more pressure to be wearing brand names than maybe another woman. She’s someone who’s really trying to tackle her goals socially and professionally, and get herself on the even playing ground of a man who can wear the same suit all the time.” For many hard-working women, keeping up with trends, diversifying day-to-day outfits, and looking professional all the time is a great tribulation— mainly on the wallet. Most modern men simply purchase a few expensive designer suits, and are able to vary their appearance with slight changes in the significantly less expensive shoes or ties. However for women, a different dress is a different dress. It’s noticeable. And although outfit-repeating is not a condemnable offense, many women struggle with their desire to keep switching it up. This sentiment has prompted Sarah and Bill to coin their mission “Fashion Feminism.”
“We coined the term Fashion feminism as a way to promote gender equality.” Seeing as Sarah’s co-founder is Bill Meyers, a man almost 25 years her elder, Sarah struggles with the many adversities of other young, ambitious female entrepreneurs, which her partner does not. “Off the bat, [Sarah and Bill have] actually got a lot of crazy accusations, where people assume certain things, and it’s very disheartening, but it’s the world we’re in, and we have to just keep educating people otherwise.” When Sarah developed DesignerShare, it was hard to ignore the upsetting fact that less than 8 percent of Venture funding goes towards women. “They claim it’s because it’s easier for them to connect with [men] on a personal level, so therefore they’d love to invest in their companies more. Instead of looking at the problem that you’re solving or even your market potential, they look to the person a lot. It makes you say it’s going to be that much sweeter when we’ve got this under way, and are able to secure that.” Despite having to face the reality of the industry they’re in together, Sarah and Bill have succeeded nonetheless, with a difficult but inspiring philosophy on sexism in the investing world. “To the people who have been not as encouraging to us so far, we just figure that’s not the right fit. That’s not someone who is going to work well with us. Even if they’re kind of a huge name in the space, I just try to keep that in mind that it is not for everyone.”
Together, Bill and Sarah have put together a company which believes in size inclusion, gender equality, and environmental justice. “We have a very socially-conscious mission.” When I asked Sarah what she believes to be the biggest problem in the fashion world, she responded clearly and succinctly, “diversity.” “It’s something we even try to work on ourselves, and saying ‘How can we bring more diversity to every single image we’re putting out there?’ From different backgrounds to size inclusivity.” Sarah praised Tim Gunn and Christian Siriano for their work on the issue, and their ability to speak out and leave behind the negative aspects of the industry for progress. “One of the biggest problems in behind the fashion industry is that these bigger designers don’t make plus size clothing or even proper clothing for women that are the average size in America now.”
“To not be able to find something that looks great on you because of a certain sizing or how it’s even crafted for different sizes, I think is very disheartening. We have to ask, what is the culture that's shaping the fashion industry, and what messages are they trying to send?”
Aside from diversity issues, Sarah also cited the calamity of clothing, and fast fashion industries, as being the second largest pollutant in the world behind oil. “The fast fashion industry continues to contribute to this on a regular basis by churning out trends at a higher and higher rate than ever before. It's either low quality, and ending up directly in your trash after being worn a few times because a hole came in or it’s just falling apart, or you’re giving it away to a second hand store or to a charity organization, and they’re actually running out of room, so they’re just throwing everything out.” However, DesignerShare’s platform, in allowing people to actually profit off of their currently unworn clothes, as opposed to making them waste, creates an economically-feasible way of recycling or renewing clothing.
As a lover of fashion, and a feminist, DesignerShare’s brand and dedication to different societal iniquities makes me excited. No longer will I break my monthly allowance splurging on that cute formal dress. No longer will I do another load of laundry after a night of lending out all my adorable sweaters to friends. DesignerShare is here to solve my fashion problems, as well as work on the grander ones. Sarah Perkins, from all of us poor and desperate college students here at Northwestern, thank you.
