It began with a charity store off London’s Portobello Street, and the easiest pinstripe go well with. Neatly, virtually easiest. “I completely cherished it, but it surely didn’t have compatibility me. So I had the theory for development an app,” explains Josephine Philips, the founding father of Sojo, a startup that desires to carry tailoring “into the fashionable age.”
Nicknamed “the Deliveroo of favor maintenance,” Sojo used to be introduced in January 2021, and connects customers with within reach seamsters whilst facilitating the pickup and go back of garments the usage of a community of couriers. Impartial seamsters sign up at the app and set their very own worth for his or her paintings, from solving holes to changing sizes, with Sojo taking a 30 % price. That exact same pinstripe go well with ended up being probably the most app’s first orders.
“I skilled going to a tailor, and it used to be so archaic, it used to be truly backward,” says Philips. “It is not an job that’s commonplace, and we wish to make it commonplace. We wish each younger particular person to be engaged with maintenance and alterations.” It’s a subject matter made the entire worse via the truth that two thirds of fixable garments are thrown away.
Eighteen months after release, Sojo is a special beast, recent from a brand new $2.4 million investment spherical, a partnership with Scandinavian type logo Ganni, and a hiring push that are supposed to see it achieve 16 workforce. It’s additionally been a seismic exchange for Philips. The 24-year-old got to work on Sojo full-time directly after graduating from college—her simplest earlier jobs being as a waitress and as a summer time intern at second-hand clothes trade Depop.
For the ones first few months, Sojo used to be a one-woman display, powered most commonly via a mix of extra time and younger pastime to switch the “tradition of waste” and “exploitation” that defines the short type trade, from which Philips constructed up her preliminary, restricted community of couriers and seamsters.
“That formative years intended I noticed the way in which the gadget used to be operating and used to be like, ‘I will be able to if truth be told exchange that’ … That more or less outlook used to be for sure a superpower,” says Philips. “However there used to be so much happening. By no means having completed one thing like this sooner than intended I used to be studying and doing concurrently.”
As a Black feminine founder, Philips discovered herself in an trade the place women-led startups account for simplest 2.8 % of VC investment. In reality, in keeping with one document, between 2009 and 2019, just one Black feminine founder in the United Kingdom raised any Collection A investment in any respect.
“We all know what the challenge capital area is for under-represented founders … The numbers discuss for themselves,” Philips says, explaining she would ceaselessly get rejected via traders, simplest to peer white male opposite numbers with little greater than “a PowerPoint” making pitches and “getting hundreds of thousands directly off the bat.”
In the end, Sojo used to be in a position to protected backers, to start with thru an angel spherical with an array of big-name traders, together with Depop founder Simon Beckerman. The most recent Collection A spherical used to be led via female-directed VC company CapitalT.
Outdoor investment has additionally triggered a transformation of center of attention—a extra pragmatic, however no much less efficient model of Philips’ imaginative and prescient. As an alternative of its direct-to-consumer operations, Sojo is an increasing number of specializing in business-to-business—making offers with primary type manufacturers comparable to Ganni (along seven different partnerships within the pipeline) to be the supplier of alterations for its hundreds of consumers. The ones offers will permit consumers to simply request clothes maintenance and alterations from Sojo’s seamsters, and helpfully cross some technique to converting the way in which they see tailoring.
“I noticed that via moving our enterprise type into operating with manufacturers, we’d be capable to if truth be told achieve scale and make an affect so much quicker,” Philips explains. “Considered one of our traders mentioned you’ll both spend £10 million looking to achieve 10 million direct consumers over a length of 10 years. Or you’ll have one B2B spouse and also you get admission to 10 million consumers in a single day.”
Philips may be within the technique of outsourcing Sojo’s courier community whilst hiring in-house seamsters. She has even explored increasing Sojo into offering its personal “darkish kitchen” equivalents; a community of commercial seamster workshops that may give it the dimensions to paintings on hundreds of alterations in the neighborhood, unexpectedly.
Philips hopes Sojo will exchange user attitudes towards clothes at a time when speedy type is within the highlight for its environmental affect. “In the long run, we are living in a tradition of hyper-disposability,” she says. “Clothes has now not been thought to be one thing of worth.”
This newsletter used to be initially printed within the November/December 2022 factor of WIRED UK mag.
