'You don't need 50 dresses, you just need 1 dress and 50 Nu friends'.
Aisling Byrne, a former student of Trinity College Dublin, has founded a new sharing platform that the world badly needs. The startup, brilliantly named Nu Wardrobe, allows women to swap their wardrobe favourites with other women to combat the problem of fast fashion and waste and to help everyday women save serious cash.
The company was founded over a year and a half ago by Aisling who studied Arts in Trinity and is turning its sights to making fashion work for Irish women rather than Irish women working for fashion. The process of Nu Wardrobe is pretty simple. You pay a €10 fee to become a member, find the items you like, request them and arrange to collect them from your lender:
Swap shops have become popular over the last number of years and the perfect way to get what you need for a debs, wedding invite or that last minute special events. Bags, jewelry, shoes, and dresses have become the staples of the swap shop world.
More than anything, this online version of a swap shop will combat a significant problem - fast fashion. Over 80 million new pieces of clothing are made annually and the fashion industry is the second biggest polluter of water. Many factory workers are not paid a living wage and work in dangerous conditions and child labour still exists in many countries around the world. In 2013 over a thousand people died when a garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh.
We all know how important affordable fashion is to our lifestyles but what if you could find the one piece to wear for one night only and hand it back instead of chucking it out. Rather than finding a new piece for every weekend and only wearing it once off, you can be consciously making a difference to the environment, taking fashion risks and saving your bank balance.
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Not only does the app give users the chance to find unique pieces, you can connect with people all over the world who are just as obsessed with fashion as you. Watch Aisling discuss how she hopes the app will make an impact on women's lives and the environment:
To find out more about Nu Wardrobe and to get started swapping click here.
