Entrepreneur Aisling Byrne is taking on fast fashion — one garment swap at a time
Launched in 2018, Nuw is a digital platform for exchanging items of clothing that have no value in the resale or rental markets.
Exchange app Nuw leverages clothes as currency and its founder, Dubliner Aisling Byrne, has been recognised as a rising star in fashion retail. She tells Marie Kelly about her plans to disrupt the fashion industry.
Malahide native Aisling Byrne speaks of seed rounds, angel investors and venture capital like a seasoned entrepreneur, not a 28-year-old music graduate of Trinity College. The London-based founder of clothing exchange app Nuw landed herself on the 2022 Drapers 30 Under 30 list, a globally respected edit of the “rising stars” of fashion retail in the UK and Ireland. Previous alumni include Hannah Coffin, founder of the hugely successful red carpet-favourite Needle & Thread, and Grace Beverley, creator of Tala, the overnight success sustainable fitness brand. Byrne considers the listing significant. “For Nuw to have caught the attention of a publication that predicts the future of fashion is amazing. It’s an acknowledgement of the app as an industry-defining concept,” she says.
Launched in 2018, Nuw is a digital platform for exchanging items of clothing that have no value in the resale or rental markets. Essentially, it’s a secondhand marketplace for fast fashion. Upload a cared-for item you’ve grown tired of at a cost of 99 cent, then use the silver coin you’re awarded to spend on any other new-to-you piece on the site. The app leverages clothes as currency, imbuing fast-fashion items with a value in the Nuw economy that they don’t have outside of it.
It was The New York Times that coined the term “fast fashion” when Zara opened its first store in the US in 1990. It wasn’t intended as a pejorative then, but as a reference to the retail behemoth’s boast that it took only 15 days to translate a design from rough sketch to hanging rail. Now, more than 30 years later, the phrase has come to represent the shady underbelly of the fashion industry. The ‘stack ‘em high, sell ‘em low’ mentality, coupled with the rise in popularity of influencer outfit changes on Instagram — which have always relied heavily on quantity, not quality — have seen clothes become as disposable as chewing gum. According to Anne-Marie Tomchak, Irish founder and CEO of sustainability company DesignTracker, fast fashion is still on the rise despite an increased interest, and efforts, in sustainability and transparency. She cites Chinese fast-fashion ecommerce site SHEIN — which recently pushed into the Irish market, hosting a pop-up shop in Dublin — as an indicator. “In 2021, it surpassed Amazon as the most used shopping app in the US,” says Tomchak.
Byrne believes the Nuw app offers a first-of-its-kind solution to the 54 billion items of clothing sent to landfill each year; 33pc of them in the first 12 months of purchase. “I want every one of those pieces to wind up on Nuw.”
The site currently has 17,000 registered users and 2,000 active members. In 2021, the latter exchanged more than 20,000 pieces. “Inexpensive high-street clothes have a short life cycle with one individual, but they can be enjoyed by multiple owners before they reach the end of their lifespan,” she explains. Certainly, this is borne out by the platform’s performance so far, with 83pc of pieces uploaded to the site ‘bought’, and an enormous 50pc of Nuw’s stock snapped up within the first 24 hours. “In charity shops, on average, only 10pc of stock is purchased.”
The platform has attracted a highly-engaged community of enthusiastic ‘shoppers’ of which Byrne and the four women she employs are a part. There’s one man on the team too, but Byrne says she’s found no appetite for menswear on the platform. “Men tend to wear their clothes until they’re actually worn out and only shop a couple of times a year, as needed.” Byrne tells me that everything she owns is from Nuw. “At the moment, the UK and Ireland platforms are separate, so when I moved to the UK, I had an entirely new community to exchange with. All of the women on the team are users, which means we can see any problems and fix them quickly.”
The wider community feeds back continuously, and it’s helping to shape the user experience. For instance, the app will notify a user when someone they follow (similar to Instagram, you can follow those whose style you enjoy) uploads a new item. “When you’re trying to define a new behaviour as we are with this kind of exchange model, you have to learn as much as you can from your community.” Byrne believes people feel powerless to effect positive climate change. “Nuw affords everyone an opportunity to be part of the solution.” Volume is key to the app’s success, and the average user exchanges between five and seven pieces per month. The user demographic is 18-45, but Byrne cites a piece of research from Fashion Revolution, the world’s largest fashion activism movement, which maintains that the most likely adopters of this kind of swapping model are, in fact, the over 50s. “This generation grew up in a sharing economy before fast fashion, so this is not a new idea to them.”
The app founder wants to broaden Nuw’s demographic as much as possible. “Sustainable solutions have to involve everyone.” With this in mind, the “tech for good” entrepreneur reveals that the next evolution of the app will involve partnering with high-street brands. “When a customer purchases an item of clothing from a participating brand, they will have the opportunity to immediately list it on their Nuw account. Once they are ready to pass on that item, they can set the listing live on the app, and the brand will receive a percentage of the Nuw service fee each time that item is exchanged.” This will allow Nuw to track clothes from a brand through multiple owners to its end of life, as well as the environmental impact of the pieces over their lifecycle, while examining how different products perform during the recirculation phase. Byrne is as passionate about the social enterprise aspect of Nuw as she is about the business potential. “Businesses should be good. It’s time we started ‘othering’ organisations that don’t operate ethically rather than singling out those that do.”
The millennial was volunteering in India at the time of the Rana Plaza disaster — an eight-storey garment factory in Bangladesh, which collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers — when she became frustrated at being complicit in an industry that caused so much harm. “I’ve always loved fashion, but I was a broke student so a lot of sustainable options weren’t open to me. Rental and resale sites can be pricey, and even a lot of charity shops have become gentrified. There didn’t seem to be any equality in access to sustainable clothing, plus none of these options were tackling the problem of fast fashion.”
As a student in Dublin, Byrne had regularly run Saturday swap shops in a venue on Abbey Street, where people traded their clothes using a similar coin system. “All the learnings for the app were there.” The concept has struck a chord with investors as much as fashion lovers. Byrne is currently seeking another round of funding and has met £700,000 of her £1.5m target. It was the network of female founders she discovered in the UK that made all the difference, she explains. “All you need starting out are a few key female founders who are a couple of steps ahead of you. They were all so helpful to me.”
Byrne’s ambitious aim is to recirculate one billion items of fast fashion on the Nuw platform each year within the next 10 years. “I want Nuw to be the marketplace through which all of the fast fashion bought runs through for its second life. I’m going to disrupt this industry,” she says determinedly. I’ve no doubt.
Originally published in The Sunday Independent Life magazine, April 2022