On-Demand Tailoring Brings Concert Savings to Your Wardrobe

It started with charity shop on London’s Portobello Road and the perfect pinstripe suit. Well, almost perfect. “I really liked it, but it didn’t suit me. That’s how I got the idea to create an app,” explains Josephine Philips, founder of Sojo, a startup that wants to make tailoring “modern”.

Nicknamed “Deliveroo Fashion Repair”, Sojo was launched in January 2021 and connects users with nearby seamstresses, making it easier to receive and return clothes using a network of couriers. Independent seamstresses sign up on the app and set their own prices for their work, from fixing holes to resizing, with Sojo taking a 30 percent commission. That pinstripe suit turned out to be one of the app’s first orders.

“I had the experience of going to a tailor and it was so archaic, it was really behind the times,” Philips says. “This is not an ordinary activity, and we want to make it ordinary. We want every young person to be involved in repairs and alterations.” This problem is exacerbated by the fact that two-thirds of mended clothing is thrown away.

Eighteen months after launching, Sojo is another beast, having just received a new round of $2.4 million in funding, a partnership with Scandinavian fashion brand Ganni, and a recruiting push that should reach 16 employees. It was also a seismic change for Philips. The 24-year-old began working at Sojo full-time right after graduating from university — her only previous jobs were as a waitress and a summer intern at the Depop used clothing exchange.

For the first few months, Sojo was a one-woman show based largely on a mixture of overtime and youthful passion for changing the “waste culture” and “exploitation” that define the fast fashion industry, from which Philips built its original, limited network of couriers. and seamstresses.

“This youth meant that I saw how the system worked and thought: “I can really change this” … That kind of look was definitely a superpower,” Philips says. “But there were a lot of things. I had never done anything like this before, and that meant I was learning and doing at the same time.”

As a black female founder, Philips finds itself in an industry where female-led startups make up only 2.8 percent venture funding. In fact, one reportbetween 2009 and 2019, only one black female founder in the UK raised Series A funding at all.

“Everyone knows what the venture capital space is like for underrepresented founders… The numbers speak for themselves,” says Phillips, explaining that investors routinely turned her down only to see white male colleagues with little more than a “presentation” in PowerPoint” make presentations. and “getting millions at once”.

Eventually, Sojo managed to garner support, initially through an angel round with a host of high-profile investors, including Depop founder Simon Beckerman. The latest Series A round was led by female-led venture capital firm CapitalT.

External funding has also led to a shift in focus towards a more pragmatic but equally effective version of Philips’ vision. Instead of working directly with the consumer, Sojo is increasingly focusing on business, making deals with big fashion brands such as Ganni (along with seven other partners in development) to be a mod supplier for thousands of its customers. . These deals will allow customers to easily request repairs and alterations from Sojo seamstresses, as well as contribute to changing the way they think about tailoring.

“I realized that by changing our business model to work with brands, we can actually reach scale and make an impact much faster,” Philips explains. “One of our investors said you could either spend £10m trying to get 10m direct customers over 10 years. Or you can have one B2B partner and access 10 million customers overnight.”

Philips is also in the process of outsourcing the Sojo courier network and hiring its own seamstresses. She even considered expanding Sojo into providing her own “dark kitchen” equivalents; a network of industrial sewing shops that would give the scale to work on thousands of alterations at the same time on site.

Philips hopes Sojo will change the way consumers view clothing at a time when fast fashion is in the spotlight due to its environmental impact. “After all, we live in a super-disposable culture,” she says. “Clothes were not considered something of value.”

This article was originally published in the November/December 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine.