A few new, cheap outfits every season may sound nice, but the fast fashion industry is very polluting. Student Annika Schewitz decided to come up with a solution and founded a rental company for sustainable fashion. She’s even writing her thesis on it.
In between studying and attending classes, Annika Schewitz has a busy day answering questions from customers, organising her clothing storage, delivering orders, and adjusting her business plan.
The German student, who’s doing a master in sustainable entrepreneurship, has been living like this for over a year, ever since she founded Restyle, a ‘fashion library’ for students.
The idea: to offer them the opportunity to rent clothes through a monthly subscription, so they can simply change out their clothing every month. They can choose from vintage or out-of-season clothes from sustainable brands and whenever they really like something, they can buy it at a reduced price.
Disappointed
Annika came up with the plan for Restyle in 2021, when she was in Groningen for a semester on exchange and had to look into the fashion industry for a branding assignment. ‘The more I found out about it, the more disappointed I was’, she says.
The fast fashion industry, with big names like Zara and H&M, is all about selling cheaply made items that often only last a season before being thrown out. It may be cheap for consumers, says Annika, ‘but the industry is over-producing and polluting’.
When she discussed her findings with friends, they pointed her to VentureLab, a coaching and networking platform for entrepreneurs in Groningen. ‘That’s when I figured I could help the environment by founding a sustainable business.’
Renting clothes is not a new concept when it comes to an alternative for the fast fashion industry. But Restyle’s unique selling point, explains Annika, is that it targets international students. ‘They don’t have enough space in their suitcase to bring all of their clothes.’ Since there are thousands of internationals in Groningen who are only here temporarily, that means all of them are potential clients.
Work in progress
Because Restyle is an online company, Annika can keep her costs low. ‘My room is both the storage and the fitting room.’ Customers can come to her to try on clothes, or she delivers them. Although she has the help of three volunteers, she does most of the work herself, she says, because the company doesn’t make much money yet. ‘The revenue is all reinvested into the business.’
The business plan is still a work in progress as well. ‘The idea I started out with is very different from the concept I have right now, I didn’t expect that’, she says. ‘At first, I thought it was all about marketing.’ But while her number of Instagram followers grew, she didn’t actually get more customers. In fact, they started walking away.
To find out why, she talked to them and found out they felt the subscription wasn’t flexible enough, or the clothing wasn’t attractive, or they just weren’t ready to spend the money on a subscription. ‘I was surprised, but I took a step back and rethought the concept.’
Good entrepreneur
That’s exactly what makes her a good entrepreneur, according to Cees-Jan Groen, who was Annika’s coach at VentureLab when she started out. ‘She always listens, absorbs, and changes her ideas accordingly. A common reason great ideas fail is if entrepreneurs don’t learn from what their customers or other people are telling them.’
Groen also points out that passion motivates entrepreneurs to keep working. ‘This enables them to stay the course and not be distracted by setbacks.’
Annika even decided to use her experiences with Restyle as the basis for her thesis. She’s trying to find out what it is that makes people willing to switch from buying fast fashion to more circular fashion.
She moved away from cheap clothing two years ago herself, when she found out about the pollution of the fashion industry. ‘That’s my story, but I want to know what inspired other people to make the switch.’ To that end, she’s interviewing her own customers about why they’re making certain choices and what affects their buying behaviour.
Engaged
Writing your thesis on your own business is pretty unique, according to Annika’s thesis supervisor Niels Faber, an assistant professor of sustainable entrepreneurship at Campus Fryslân. ‘She’s the only student in her class who’s doing that.’
Annika is representative of the new generation of students, though, he feels. ‘They are much more engaged with the problems of the world and questioning the role that businesses play in all of that.’
As for Annika herself, she believes that sustainable entrepreneurship is vital for a livable future. ‘As a society, we need to make smarter use of our resources.’