A shared rental closet: the startup idea I lived in college

"Fashion industry produces 150 Billion garments every year, which sums down on average of 70 garments per person every year. Over 50% of fast fashion products are disposed within a year, producing 92 Million tonnes of waste and 1.2 Billion tonnes of greenhouse gas every year. Our goal is to create a sustainable shared closet for everyone, that will promote reuse and recycle in clothing industry. Also, renting dresses instead of buying saves your time and efforts given on laundry/maintenance, and makes space in your wardrobe by removing rarely used dresses."

Two sides, one closet: people who own dresses they rarely wear, and people who need one for an occasion. The CloudClosets team sat in the middle and handled everything in between.

1. 01

   Earn from your dress

   List your dresses that you rarely wear, and when someone rents it, you get the rent paid.

2. 02

   Rent your favourite dress

   If you are looking for an expensive dress that you will wear very rarely, simply rent instead of actually buying.

3. 03

   Laundry and maintenance

   Whenever you rent a cloth, the CloudClosets team will handle laundry and maintenance, saving your time and efforts together.

4. 04

   Product delivery

   If you rent a dress, you don't have to go anywhere: that dress will be delivered and collected from your doorstep.

Five months, from a question in college to a podium at Startup Weekend, and then a pandemic.

1. 01

   Nov 2019 · The idea

   Three students and one question: why buy a dress you will wear once? CloudClosets became "an online shared rental closet for everyone", with "Why buy? Just rent!" as the promise.

2. 02

   Supply · Campus partnerships

   A rental closet is only as good as what hangs in it. We brought in dress owners through partnerships with NIFT Delhi and Miranda House, DU, and a "List your dress" form collected the listings.

3. 03

   Demand · Instagram first

   Renters came through Instagram: growing a community around the page and running early user acquisition experiments.

4. 04

   The website

   We put the idea online at cloudcloset.netlify.app: Rent Now for renters, List Your Dress for owners, and the vision and services on one page.

5. 05

   2020 · Startup Weekend

   We pitched CloudClosets at Startup Weekend (Techstars × Google) and finished 2nd Runner-Up, third among 80 competing ideas.

6. 06

   Zealicon 2020 · A launch moment

   We lined up a Zealicon Sale for Zealicon'20, the JSS Noida college fest: "It's time to revamp our wait-list to your wishlist… Stay tuned, we have got a lot coming."

7. 07

   Mar 2020 · Covid-19

   The pandemic arrived just as we were getting going. Product listing was cancelled, and CloudClosets stopped there.

• Supply acquisition: the NIFT Delhi and Miranda House, DU partnerships that brought dress owners and their wardrobes in.
• Demand generation: Instagram community growth and the early user acquisition experiments.
• In my own words on the site: "I like solving problems, and it's more exciting if it's a real life problem. CloudClosets is a solution for a genuine cause and I would love to do everything that helps it to reach its potential."

A marketplace has two starts, not one. We treated supply and demand as separate problems, campuses for the closet and Instagram for the renters, and that two-sided way of thinking is the one I use every day at Techjockey, between software buyers and the vendors who serve them.

Product screens

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