Meet Global | Resolving fast fashion issues with rental service

Meet Global | April 08, 2021

Summary: With the boom in fast fashion, there is also serious environmental issue. TAELOR, a men's clothing rental brand, is solving this problem with shared fashion.

Sharing economy is booming. Anya Cheng, former eBay & Facebook's head of product, with strong e-commerce experience, established Taelor to provide a subscription service for people to receive new clothes every month.

With the booming of fast fashion these years, international clothing brands like Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo open more and more stores all over the world, and people start getting used to buying lots of clothes and only wearing them once. The pile of discarded clothes has become a serious environmental problem.

Experienced entrepreneur Anya Cheng, who has led eBay and Facebook product teams to expand overseas consumers' market successfully, spotted the problem fast fashion caused, and she thought the sharing economy was the answer to solve it.

She established Taelor, a clothing rental subscription service, with her University of Chicago MBA classmate Phoebe Tan. Both of them had served at big enterprises for many years, and they built strong connections between experts from different industries, so they put together a strong team quickly. They went to compete at the new venture challenge held by the University of Chicago, which is for supporting all University of Chicago alumni who are in the process of launching early-stage ventures. They have advanced to the final round on the west coast team and will continue to compete for the championship.

In the early stages of Taelor, Anya Cheng plans to focus on styling men's clothing first.

For providing the trendiest clothes to the users, Taelor hired former Le tote and Stitch Fix designers as Chief Stylist. When they have accumulated more and more users and data, they will start leveraging the power of AI to pick the clothes for users.

The monthly subscription fee for Taelor is $109 USD per month, and users would receive 8 stylist-picked or AI-picked clothes. They do not charge additional transportation fees and dry cleaning costs.

Taelor aims to break even within 3 years. They plan to invest more in inventory and customer acquisition at their early stage. Once they get enough traction, they will be able to expand consignment partnerships with clothing brands and begin to launch into other markets and enterprise sales.

"Although we are at the beginning stage of the business, we believe we are a top contender thanks to our team's 15 years of Fortune 100 company experience in technology, AI, operations, sourcing, marketing, and eCommerce; consumer trends in the sharing economy; and our solid Silicon Valley and Big Ten school connections and network. "Anya Cheng said.

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