Save Your Wardrobe has developed technology to help companies map their operations and build aftersales infrastructure to reduce returns and generate new revenue streams. Clients include LMVH, Maje and Loro Piana. The company is currently expanding from clothing to home appliances, electronics watches and jewelry, luggage, kitchens and furniture.
The London-based company won the LMVH Innovation award at VivaTechnology 2023 and was present at this year’s conference, which took place June 11-14.
“There is a lot of discussion about circularity and sustainability,” says co-founder and CEO Hasna Kourda. “What we bring to the table is the infrastructure to implement it and make it real.”
Kourda, who has a background in economics and corporate strategy, was born and raised in Tunisia, in a family that embraced circularity and zero waste. Her grandmother would upcycle garments at the end of their life to create a Kilim; a traditional handwoven rug that cools the floors of homes in Tunisia in summer. Inspired by her grandmother and a job at the French Embassy in Tunisia analyzing the financial state of manufacturing in that country and the global supply chain, Kourda’s idea for Save Your Wardrobe was born. She launched the company in 2017 along with her husband, Mehdi Doghri, with an aim of building a platform that would help companies discover the vulnerabilities that impact after sales and resilience.
Save Your Wardrobe designed a business process mapper which requires zero code that it says makes it very easy for brands to map their needs and spot gaps. If there is something missing AI will spot it, she says. “We can give companies a full view of what happens post purchase to help them understand the flow of the customer experience.”
There is a lot of friction around circularity, she says, “so we needed the tech to be seamless.” Save Your Wardrobe’s plug and play approach, can be integrated with state-of-the art systems as well as legacy systems that are decades old.
When defects in products cause consumers to return an item or demand a refund it is costly for companies. It is better to integrate repairs at fraction of the cost, Kourda says.
Some brands already have informal networks of repairers. Formalizing it brings transparency and reduces friction in invoicing. In some cases, when companies add repairers to a platform in exchange for a commission, it brings new sources of revenue.
Luxury designers are using Save Your Wardrobe to reduce churn. “They don’t produce a lot so when they get a return they lose a lot of money,” sasy Kourda. “With a simple alteration they can keep the customer.”
As Save Your Wardrobe collected feedback from clients “we realized that our system is not only easy to implement, the infrastructure can easily be adapted to help other sectors that lack an after sales component,” she says. “ We’ve been repeatedly contacted by companies who’ve seen what we do. They wanted to know whether our technology could be applied to their business — from insurance to automobiles, in B2B, B2C and for internal use as well in fields like retail. As an example, insurance wants to leverage our solutions to reduce the cost of losses, while manufacturer/retailers want to reduce the cost of inventory fails (i.e. before products even reach customers at their stores). The point is that our expansion is demand driven because it’s based on feedback we’re getting from interested customers.
In addition to the innovation award from LVMH Apple has repeatedly named Save Your Wardrobe“App of The Day” and it was awarded Greatest and Newest App of the year” in 2020. Apple support since then has been instrumental in helping Save Your Wardrobe develop core pieces of its tech such as Core machine learning- based image recognition. Kourda notes that the UK startup was selected for a one-on-one meeting with CEO Tim Cook during a UK visit, one of only three developers accorded this opportunity.”
Competitors include local digital networks of one-size-fits-all repairs. Save Your Wardrobe also considers the internal teams of brands as rivals. “They think they can do it themselves but then their IT teams realize that we are five years ahead of the curve,” says Kourda.
The company has so far raised a total of $7 million dollars and is ramping up for a series A round to meet its growth targets and expand beyond clothing into other verticals.
This article is content that would normally only be available to subscribers. Sign up for a four-week free trial to see what you have been missing.
To access more of The Innovator’s Startup Of The Week stories click here.
