Many of my friends will have heard me raving about a sustainable app I discovered over lockdown. That app is By Rotation.

The Social Fashion Rental App is such a good idea. A massive clothes share between women around the country is not only a great way to make a bit of money and be more sustainable, but also opens conversations between women country wide. However, this can’t be without its challenges when we have nowhere to go

I was so excited to speak to the founder Eshita Kabra-Davies as we discussed sustainability in the fashion industry, the importance of building a community and friendships made online. 

In your own words, what is By Rotation?

Eshita: By Rotation is a social, fashion rental app, where users can lend and rent their wardrobes with each other - saving the planet, saving money and also looking good at the same time.

The cherry on top is building new friendships with people who have the same style as you, same size as you, people you might not actually know in real life. We all sort of share our love for fashion and also sustainability. 

People have likened us to AirBnB of designer fashion, or Depop and most recently we were also called the Instagram of fashion rental, which is super exciting. It sort of reiterates our focus on being very social

How do you go about encouraging social interaction when so many people are missing out on social interaction at the moment?

Eshita: We had this article that came out last July on the business insider where essentially we were compared to Rent the Runway, about how we were doing so well in building our community and building all these connections among women. It’s predominantly women at the moment.

What we really want in this very isolated world is a new friendship as opposed to new clothes. We really kept a focus on our community which makes sense commercially as well, cause we are market place model. At the end of the day it’s the users on the app who really dictate the fashion that you see on it.

An app around sharing clothes and sharing friendship, how did that idea come to you?

Eshita: It came from a very first world problem. I was planning my honeymoon, I was going back to Rajasthan, where I was born, with my husband. He’s Indian and I really wanted to show him my roots and where I come from.

I was planning my holidays, my outfits, where we were going to stay and I turned to Instagram and I noticed how many women tend to not wear the same outfit again on their profiles. The whole outfit of the day, OOTD sort of mindset.

I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a fashion rental service in the UK and I noticed that there really was no major player that I was aware of.

It wasn’t until my honeymoon when I went back to my hometown, which is like a really suburban part of Rajasthan that I noticed a lot of textile waste. This goes beyond the well documented landfills that we know outside metropolitan cities like Delhi and Bombay. This is a suburban hometown where there is a very small population.

That’s when I started looking inwards and realising that my own fashion habits were to blame. I also engaged in the model of buy, wear less than 10 times, 20 times and then donate.

A lot of these donations actually end up in landfill, like 90% actually go back to African and Asian countries. I felt like, not only was I part of the problem, I was also affecting my own people adversely. 

I thought this idea that I had for fashion rental could actually go a step further. you could maybe rent from the woman that you saw on the Instagram square. So that’s how the idea for a self-sustaining community that shares fashion with each other came about. 

Do you think people’s mindsets are changing to think about more sustainable consumption?

Eshita: I think since lockdown, people have been consuming a lot of digital content and they’ve been shopping less, because we’re not going anywhere. They’ve actually started educating themselves on the problems within the fashion industry. 

We’ve seen a lot of news come out. Whether that’s the garment workers plight in Asian countries, or whether its modern slavery happening even in the UK. We’ve seen designers also changing their schedule and their number of collections per year.

I feel like there has been a lot of resources out there to educate yourself and people have been looking into them finally. The other thing, while we’ve all been stuck at home we’ve all been left looking at these materialistic things that we’ve amassed over the years and realising if we really need most of them and the answer is no.

I think people have realised that there are solutions when it comes to having a more conscious approach to fashion consumption. That’s how I would say we have been able to spread our message as well of By Rotation. We grew our community by six times despite no one really needing to rent clothes.

As well cause By Rotation focuses on premium brands, do you think you have made those brands more accessible?

Eshita: Definitely, the price points that you see on By Rotation are about 10% of the retail price for a weekend, 20% of the retail price for an entire week if you’re going on holiday with it.

it’s allowed people to dabble in fashion trends without buying new products. I do think we have tried to make it as accessible as possible, as inclusive as possible and we’ve also made it fun and sexy to rent clothes and share clothes.

People are very proud to have rented from our community. They like to even tag us and they don’t need to tag us. They’ve paid for product. They tag us because they love being part of the rotating revolution, so I love seeing that. 

“new doesn’t necessarily mean a completely new product, it just needs to be a new feeling to you.” - Eshita Kabra-Davies, By Rotation

There’s been a lot of celebrities like Stacey Dooley and Aisling Bea rotating too, what has it been like to have their support for By Rotation?

Eshita: it’s been really great because obviously they have a lot of mainstream eyes on them across the country and that’s what we want. We want people to know that there’s an alternative to shopping on the high street.

You can just share higher quality pieces with each other and still have access to wearing new things. Because new doesn’t necessarily mean a completely new product, it just needs to be a new feeling to you.

We also have a few well known fashion personalities, so whether that’s influencers like Jessie Bush off WeThePeopleStyle, or Monique, Camille Charriere, even very recently we had Lady Amelia Windsor who’s lending out her wardrobe to raise funds for the Henry Dickens Community Centre.

It’s been really great to have a variety of women who are lending out their wardrobes in support of people knowing there are alternatives to buying products all the time. 

You launched By Rotation in 2019, just before the lockdown. What were your aims for By Rotation before lockdown and how do you think you’ve adapted?

Eshita: We launched in October 2019. We were operating for about 5 months and then the lockdown hit.

We knew that unfortunately the pandemic would be around for a long time. We knew that there was no use in pushing messages that were like rent a ballgown for your zoom meeting – no! We thought that was very insensitive.

We didn’t want to do any of that because the whole premise of By Rotation is to not consume more than you already need to.

We decided we would keep the focus on growing the community, spreading the awareness of renting within a community, sharing fashion, rotating your wardrobe. As I mentioned we grew our community by over 6-fold, we do have over 40,000 users in the UK now and we also grew our listings.

We told people if you’re stuck at home and you have some time, you can list your wardrobe and start monetising your belongings. Quite a lot of people were furloughed, they lost their jobs. There was a lot of economic hardship going on so we just looked at it with a very long term approach. I think that earned the respect and loyalty of our community.

We started running a series in April which is still live now, called ‘A Glass of Wine With’, which is an IG live series which we post live on the feed as an IGTV. 

We’ve had people from all kinds of backgrounds founders of other tech companies, fashion designers, journalists, celebrities, we’ve had all kinds of people come on there to have a conversation with me to talk about how they got to where they are. Our community really resonated with that. They loved seeing our community in action that goes beyond fashion.

I wanted to ask about “A Glass of Wine With’ do you think these conversations have been more important when we can’t have face-to-face interactions right now?

Eshita:  You’re absolutely right. We’ve kept a very varied group of people on their and they tend to be rotators on our app, I think it’s really brought to light to our community that you get to hear the stories of these rotators and you can kind of see yourselves in them.

Whether it’s a corporate lawyer, a student, a home maker, an entrepreneur - it’s just nice seeing this variety of people on the app and thinking yeah, I get it. I belong to this community and I am kind of like them. You see yourselves with in the community. I think we’ve created a very safe space within that live series.

On a personal level, it’s been a great way for me to network with a lot of incredible people. A lot of face to face to meetings are not happening at the moment. I am essentially having a face-to-face meeting with someone where other people can be the audience. I feel like it’s added tremendous value to my network as well I would say. 

And as a founder how have you found the balance between work and switching off right now?

Eshita: I mean I think it’s hard, as I was telling you I’m going to be working this weekend as well. I don’t know, it’s kind of different.

I used to work in finance for 6 and a half years in the city and on the weekends you’d have your plans to go to the barre studio, to meet your friends for brunch, then you’ll be going out for dinner, drinks, dancing. 

With the pandemic, I think it’s easier – I guess the silver lining is I don’t feel FOMO.I know that if life was normal I wouldn’t be able to hang out with my friends and have a social life. In a way the pandemic has kind of instilled a kind of diligence.

We only launched in October 2019, so it’s been about 18 months. We do really need to be really focused and work extremely hard. It’s always very high pressure in the first few years,

The way I try to step back and reflect a bit is going for walks with my dog in the park nearby. Trying to do a bit of yoga, although it upsets me that we can’t go back into the studio. I think it sounds a bit negative, but I think as a founder you really do have to give our company your all in the first few years cause it’s make or break really.

What are you proudest of achieving with By Rotation this year?

Eshita: It was really exciting and something that completely took us by surprise when we were featured as app of the day in July last year. That’s less than a year since our app launched. You never get told by apple when you’re featured. You know I was told by a friend. I totally freaked out.

It’s very hard to be featured as app of the day. Usually, you need to be a very well known, established company or you need to have some connections and we’re neither of those. I don’t have any connections or insides. It was really nice to be recognised and also to be taken very seriously by such a large tech giant.

It’s really important to me that we’re taken seriously as a tech company cause at the end of the day our product is the tech platform. That’s what we have built.

There’s been other highlights, I won a £25,000 cash prize from Accelerate Her. It was really great to be awarded at a pitch competition and be given actual money, which is very rare. We’ve done a really big partnership with Bumble. Bumble is one of the companies I really admire. 

And what are you most looking forward to when lockdown is over?

Eshita: I’m really looking forward to people going all out. Everyone keeps talking about The Great Gatsby or The Roaring Twenties. I’m just really looking forward to people going back to normal life and really just celebrating all these social connections that we’ve missed on for more than a year.

It’s kind of a year that’s been lost for quite a lot of people, so I hope we’ll go all out and celebrate and be much more grateful for everything we have now. 

I love the idea of going Great Gatsby. Finally, there’s been conversations about the benefits of dressing up, what do you think of this?

Eshita: I think we talked about it a little bit in a telegraph article, this concept of dopamine dressing. 

Even though we’ve all been stuck at home I definitely notice a difference in my mood when I’ve showered, when I’m wearing something that I like. I feel different, I feel like there is some purpose that I need to achieve for the day.

I really like to think that there is a huge benefit in getting dressed and our relationship with fashion and the way we carry ourselves, it’s a way to express ourselves and show to ourselves: who we are. What we’re capable of and who we want to be. 

To sign up to By Rotation simply download the app from the App store or Play store. For more information about the brand, check out their Instagram.

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Written by Lauren Waugh

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