Bianca Rangecroft 0:01

We basically opened the back door, you know, when people they there's this expression that's like when your your your back is against the wall, there's always another way out, you know. And so I suppose the first thing that we did were We were really lucky with is that we flipped the influencer thing on its head. And we started to go to influencers completely organically. And our community started to share posts, and influencers would pick up the wearing app through organic channels and start to post again organically about us. And I think that made a huge difference because I want to give credit where credit is due. You know, we saw people all around the world in the US, Latin America, Mexico was huge for us, Italy and Spain predominantly were huge influences with either one or 2 million followers or, you know, half a million followers. Were posting videos about how they had actually digitized their wardrobes on wearing and use the product and how it changed their lives. Hey,

Jim Barnish 0:57

everyone, welcome to another episode of The Dirt sponsored by orchid black, where we dive into the winding journey of growing and selling your business. I'm your host, Jim barnish and today we are going to talk about a few ways to maximize the value of your business. Number one, how to go viral with your customers. And number two, how to monetize these customers without affecting their experience in a negative manner. Our guest Bianca range Croft, her company wearing a dynamic fashion tech platform breathing new life into our wardrobes. If this episode sparks a thought and idea or just any insight that you think someone in your life needs to hear, don't hesitate to share it. There's enough dirt to go around. All right, Bianca, welcome to the dirt. Hello, I'm so excited to be on. Alright, so let's start with this. Who is Bianca what is wearing and why should we all care?

Bianca Rangecroft 1:59

Love that. So hey guys, I am Bianca the founder and CEO of wearing in a past life, I used to be a banker. And I am an avid diver. Fun fact, wearing is a digital wardrobe and personal styling app. Our mission is to up end the buy use dispose model. And everyone should care about this because today we can use AI to help us make the most of what we own. And really unlock personalization in both styling, but also in our shopping journeys for people and planet.

Jim Barnish 2:34

Wow. So banker to fashion. Talk to me about that one. God, it

Bianca Rangecroft 2:41

was a very, very strange transition. And actually something that I always knew I wanted to do, and was never really allowed to like think about that was never a possibility. So I'm South African. And you know, all African families are like, Listen, you can be a banker, a doctor, a lawyer, if all else fails you an accountant. And that is the scope of your life. Good luck, go to university get the best grades and like let's start making money. So I did exactly that, obviously, what you know, what else is a girl to do? Had a really really exciting time working at Barclays and then a Goldman Sachs was super fortunate to move into the consumer division of the ladder here in London. And during that time, I covered some of the biggest family offices in Europe, I got to work directly with them, a lot of them had big fashion tag or fashion holdings, that was the beginning of the journey. And then started to work on a couple of big fashion tech IPOs did a lot of due diligence into the sector itself into the consumer journey into tech and innovation. And obviously sustainability to to to some extent. And during that time worked on the Stitch Fix IPO. And I think that's really where the penny dropped. For me. Fashion has always been something that I was really excited about on personal level. I was always that kid that was like I'm going to start a shoe business. And you know, I would dress all my friends and you know would plan and pack all my outfits before trips. I had like Excel spreadsheets like with macros, trying to like organize my clothes that I could find new ways to style my outfits. So it was really a no brainer to then move into starting my own fashion tech business.

Jim Barnish 4:19

That's so cool. Wow, a lot to unpack there. So let me let me start with this one because some of the things that you said and when I go to your website wearing I see clueless everywhere right as somebody who was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s that is like something that was just like crazy to me seeing a closet that kind of just like spoke to anything you needed right and that's what I see when I think of what you guys are building here and and the messaging and is that purposeful? You know what if so what why is it purposeful and talk to me little bit how that came about.

Bianca Rangecroft 5:01

Yeah. I mean, just a quick anecdote. You know, I was just about to get promoted to associate at Goldman, when I decided to leave and start wearing. And I remember that what did it for me out of all of the big, you know, paradigm shift kind of moments was I saw this tweet that said, you know, we've put people on the moon, and yet we've never built the coolest wardrobe app. And I think that's where I was like, Oh, my God, you're right. And Jim, I had grown up with that exact experience. I was like, surely someone's going to do this, right? Like I am the perfect target demographic. Why has tech just not gotten to the level where that's possible yet, right. Why is no one ever built a brand that espouses exactly that that LIKE, SHARE Horowitz's experience in LA. And that's when we started. And it was absolutely purposeful. We decided to ride the whole branding of wearing it wearing around the clueless wardrobe app, and the iconic kind of pop culture phenomenon of that, like, tops, buttons, shoes, like shuffle computer that she had an 80s. And yeah, it was just just incredible. Yeah,

Jim Barnish 6:10

that's, that's so cool. Yeah, a lot. A lot of stars kind of came out of that one, too. So, you know, in very influential and I'm curious is, given the industry that you're in and given what you share, it is, is influencers a big part of your strategy and your ability to get as many users as you guys have gotten?

Bianca Rangecroft 6:30

Yeah, so I think, you know, funnily enough, when we kicked off before precede, we did I bootstrap for a long, long time. And I think that, you know, created a bit of a shift in terms of my mindset as a founder. And you know, was very conscious that, whilst I would have loved to start building community, and kind of get brand out there from an influencer perspective, it just didn't work really for us, and was incredibly expensive for the return on investment on on those kinds of marketing dollars. And we made a very conscious decision to focus on a Gen Z audience, and focus on a much more authentic way of portraying the product and the app and decided to focus a lot more on tick tock, actually, in sort of organic activities, versus paid influencer marketing. And I think it's actually served us very well, in you know, the short and medium term. And I think now, that's something that we're thinking very carefully about and want to bake into our next big product launch in a in a really meaningful way. You

Jim Barnish 7:31

know, that's really interesting, because a lot of people I believe, a lot of people kind of connect virality to influencers, because it's like this, this this thing that, for some reason people have connected that just doesn't, it's not connected, right? Like, there are a lot of ways to drive virality and, and you guys have done that, without influencers and driving virality is such a great way to maximize the value of your business and your user base and, and eventually monetize. So I'm just curious, like, Can you can you walk us through how wearing tapped into its brand and community to achieve virality without hiring expensive influencers? Yeah,

Bianca Rangecroft 8:15

absolutely. We basically opened the back door, you know, when people they there's this expression that's like when your your your back is against the wall, there's always another way out, you know. And so I suppose the first thing that we did, where we were really lucky with is that we flipped the influencer thing on its head. And we started to go to influencers completely organically. And our community started to share posts, and influencers would pick up the wearing app through organic channels and start to post again, organically about us. And I think that made a huge difference, because I want to give credit where credit is due, you know, we saw people all around the world in the US, Latin America, Mexico was huge for us, Italy and Spain predominantly were huge influences with either one or 2 million followers, or you know, half a million followers, who were posting videos about how they had actually digitize their wardrobes on wearing and use the product and how it changed their lives. And I think to this day, every month, or every second month, we get viral posts from influencers. And we can pinpoint it in the analytics, we always write them a big thank you. And obviously you're hoping to collaborate with them on a paid basis in the future. But that was one of the ways that we kind of kicked off the whole community building. And actually what was really beautiful is that a lot of people were looking out for wearing because of that coolest Association, right? And I think that's why it made it so obvious to download us, you know, versus kind of competitor apps on the App Store and give us a shot because we were promising to deliver that kind of shuffle experience that you know, share has in the movie. So I think that organic kind of network communication channel word of mouth mouth was for thing that we did. And then the second thing As we hired a bunch of content interns, some of which are still in the company today, or have worked with us in the sort of long term. And we started to turn out tick tock content. We spent a lot of time making really funny videos, we wanted the brand to feel, you know, sustainability orientated. But you know, very fun, open, we could make fun of the fact that, you know, we all have a closet full of clothes, nothing to wear, we're over consuming, we're trying to do better, we're not perfect. But yet, we're trying I think a lot of that through memes, a lot of funny content actually resonated extremely well, and meant that we kind of created this brand where people would follow us on Instagram On tick tock to see the funny videos, and over time, got completely hooked into the product, and basically our DNA, what we stood for as a brand. So I think humor, using influencers through organic word of mouth, and just building a really engaged community with evangelists. We created a whole like brand, Ambassador kind of network, which did wonders for us, although sisters invited a sister, and before we knew it, you know, we had a network of 50,000 wearers in the first like, two months of, you know, launching the app. And yeah, and then tick tock and really good SEO content kind of paid off for us in the end there. Also in terms of building that kind of word of mouth, because people could find us read about this and see what the app did on tick tock, and then we're convinced it would download and retain.

Well, in the meantime, while you guys are putting together now your influencer strategy, Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, any of you guys who are listening in I'm sure you are. Come on. Just good. Yeah, keep it keep it going. Just do it for free wearing is awesome, you'll find out. Anyways, this has been a paid sponsorship by Jim barnish. Anyways, alright, so back to back to you, though. So Bianca, when you're when you were experiencing some of these surge of users or call them like a trigger point or set a trigger points? Was there anything specific that you can point to that really triggered that surge of usership?

I think a couple of things. A lot of our viral content is typically cyclical. And so what I mean by that is, you know, we'd see things like just before the holidays, you know, people are starting to digitize our wardrobe planning their Christmas outfits. We see things like you know, new year new me a lot of influences. Were trying to declutter stock, they'd received things that they were no longer wearing, but also planning their looks, trying to create new fun, engaging content, as we're private individuals, people are really excited about planning and packing ahead of the holidays in the summer. So we'd see a lot of content around that. I think the other thing is, we as a brand receive so much UGC, which is so exciting, like people posting pictures of them in their looks that they've made on the wearing app, and that they're then wearing in real life. That was really exciting. Because it would create a big spike, right? If if we would post you know, 30 kind of reshares on Instagram of what people were doing in the app and wearing, all of a sudden, all the people who were on the sidelines would download because they were like, Okay, get why this is so important. And so showcasing that benefit to the user journey was really exciting. And then I think the other the third thing really is we did some really fun marketing campaigns and like big splash initiatives, which really kind of sensationalized the brand and and made it top of mind, especially in the UK, predominantly MSA but but also kind of around the world. So you know, to it really fun examples was one of them was a public Wish List campaign, we've got public wish list so people can buy you anything that you really want. And that's available to anyone to like, surprise you by your gift. And then it digitizes straight into your app. We call that the end of shit gifts. So it was like a no landfill campaign for Christmas that went pretty viral was pretty exciting. I think people get it, when they see that without of home advertising. It's really impactful. And we also did another like tube campaign all over London subway, with like, really fun visuals. Again, the brand is very colorful. And so I guess the back of that we had a lot of viral traction, because people were like taking pictures in front of the subway being like, oh my god, I was one of the first users of this app when it came out. So there's a great connection between our community and I suppose, you know, the team and myself.

So UGC, user generated content has been a huge thing for you guys. And is this on, you know, all over platforms, or have you guys found any specific social platform Tiktok, Instagram, whatever, that was really keen for your UGC traction.

Yeah, I think that the latter two that you mentioned tick tock and Instagram. I

shouldn't mention them. They should let you do it is a fun game. It is a fun game. Alright, so I'm just just curious, you know, this is the CEO founders go through this, you know, all these cycles and and, and heartache and an excitement and all these different emotions as they're building a business and the popularity that you guys were able to reach can be overwhelming in some cases for some CEOs for some founders, how are you able to react to all of this newfound popularity? Right, all of this virality? And and can you share any strategies that you might have found, whether purposefully or accidentally, and that you use to maintain and capitalize on on some of that popularity and momentum?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, two things, I'll split it into personal answer and, you know, awaring, focused answer, I think, on the personal side, there's a, there's a huge kind of learning curve, especially if you're not necessarily from the industry, right? I'm not an influencer, I'm not a fashionista or I didn't work in a fashion house before or in that field, you know, was not used to press Q and A's once a week, or once a month, you know, really taking big photo like timeout for photo shoots, building up your personal brand, right, because as a founder, once you get that kind of traction, you want to capitalize on it from an investor POV. But also from, you know, just like building out your brand to help continue that and, you know, be present in the right, you know, events, the right discussions, the right panels. So it took me a while to kind of hone that personal brand aspect. super lucky that my CTO on the team has, you know, a lot of like PR and comms expertise. So we were really good at a kind of pushing my profile up a bit getting me in the right rooms, to be able to continuously foster those discussions and stay top of mind for, you know, I suppose key stakeholders in the industry, because you're the new kid on the block. And I think you want to convince people of why you guys and like how this is going to sustain, you know, and why we're a topic of interest in the medium to long term, certainly. So that was really helpful. I took a lot of joy and pleasure in that which I never thought I would, I really, really enjoyed doing that I still to this day, look at every single piece of feedback, you know, that that users send on a daily basis through the app or web, we also went on a show called Dragon's Den, which is a bit like Shark Tank. So there was a lot of like excitement and interest around that, that we did to kind of just keep that virality going. So I suppose the strategy there is really like founders build out your brand, as much as you're comfortable in doing and as much as you can cope with, capitalize on PR, and capitalize on any kind of events, networking, Radio TV that you can get on because, you know, for us, it meant that we got a supplemental 100k downloads from a Dragon's Den episode, you know, when I precede that, that really counts. You know, those are those are, those are important numbers. From a wearing perspective. You know, the first thing that we did was really take care of our community. So we had this network of brand ambassadors, you know, we do dinners with them, we try and host events, we did two really fun activations in person, which we never thought we do as a brand, because we're a digital app, right. But we took over to pop up spaces, six months apart, but basically, in Soho, in London, we had a whole shop, we transformed it into like, a place where people could come and discover the app, but like fun and you know, animations, there was a shopping section that was all secondhand rental, ethical, but new designers. We had, you know, talks, we screened the coolest movie, we did all these fun things that I think brands really should be doing. And we were so overwhelmed with how many people showed up. And I think that's exciting. And I miss doing that. That's something we need to get back to once this market recovers.

Yeah, yeah. And hopefully, we're not going backwards again, with the market. But that's not what this show is about. So we'll we'll stay. Anyways, um, so when you mentioned Cgo, is that Chief Chief Chief growth officer. So this new term, relatively new in some circles, not as new, but for tech companies and some others, Chief growth officers is thrown around. And I'm just curious, some people are using it a little bit differently. You know, what, what is the chief growth officer to you? And what are the metrics or measures or KPIs that, you know, really, they're really focused on for wearing?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think Listen, my case is a bit particular and that I'm a solo founder, female founder and non technical. So it's a bit of a bit of a tough position to be in, in a way. And I suppose, you know, from a technical standpoint, we have a CTO, like every other kind of tech business. But I felt that for one of a better term, I was looking for a co founder. And, you know, we went so far through the journey that it really wasn't the right fit to take a co founder on board, you know, when you were ready at that kind of stage with, you know, half a million users and it's like, you've done that so quickly. And so I basically had This advisor that I'd met at one of the big accelerators that we did, she was an absolute legend, you know, was someone that I used to confide in that I felt like was my right hand woman and, you know, like personal capacity, and decided to bring her on board, I'm so glad she came as Cgo. For us what that meant was, you know, finding someone in the context of wearing who was an expert in PR, communications, viral brand marketing growth, how could we find and exploit the right channels in the right way and in a capital efficient kind of manner. So that could be anything from like, you know, big growth activations, PR stunts, again, as I mentioned, like hiring and coaching, marketing and the right way, for us to have long lasting organic traction. And sometimes that's just being able to look at things from a non marketing perspective, but really looking at the market as a whole, in the context of wearing that also meant someone who was going to look at monetization, right, because I'm, you know, Chief Product Officer, in a way I'm doing CEO duties fundraising stuff, and I needed someone who could do you know, who was impeccable at building a sales pipeline, because of the PR, you know, background and kind of client, you know, advisory background, that whole consulting side. So we could build a sales pipeline from a b2b angle, who could build relationships with big brands, convince them to collaborate with us, and who could obviously manage the press, and kind of orality of the company and brand as a whole. And who could do a lot of our messaging in house a lot of our brand identity, visual identity, and she was exactly that person. Now, obviously, we've got a brand director who does a lot more of the visual identity piece. But in the very early days, Cgo was basically everything around growth, and virality, as well as monetization.

So you bring up a topic that I hear a lot of founders, both complaining and being excited about and, and all sorts of other emotions, which is, you know, finding ways to both convince people that user growth is the right path rather than monetization, initially, in some cases for the right companies. But also, once they begin to monetize monetizing without hurting that same flywheel that's what's made them so successful. So I didn't ask a question in there, but maybe just I know, you already have an answer. So maybe something along those lines, are there any experiences that you've had that connect to either that flywheel or that misunderstanding of user growth versus monetization?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we, I think I mentioned, you know, at precede decided, obviously, was a very different market from a fundraising perspective, but we decided to go for growth and market share at all costs, right? We are trying to build a really difficult product, a product that, you know, people have tried to do before, investors want to see huge variety before they really pay attention to this and, you know, meet you at the point at which you can really present that huge vision of building a billion dollar company. And so we decided to go for growth at all costs. And we're very conscious that, you know, a product like this, when you're building flywheels, really, there's like an underlying data component that's going to lead to insights that you can later monetize. Or there is a crowdsourcing component, ie training an AI model, in our case around styling, and so that feedback loop is so crucial to the very product that you will later capitalize on. Whether that's, you know, just getting people to upload clothes and us understanding what those clothes mean to that user in terms of how they create outfits, or giving us live feedback on styling recommendations that we're giving whatever it is, we knew from the very beginning that that was how we build a billion dollar company wasn't, hey, we've got 25,000 monthly active users behind a paywall. Because while that's amazing, it's not only going to hurt the larger vision, but it also doesn't agree with why I started the company. Though again, I think that might sound as sort of arrogant twist but it really wasn't you know, I set out on this mission to you know, basically help young women like me make the most of what they have. You know, I used to be a 25 year old I'd run to the you know, bank in the morning with like a backpack I try and pack the right clothes. I always got it wrong was never feeling right was over consuming fast fashion. I'd go out during my lunch break and buy like a $10 top that I had no business buying because you know that dopamine hit and and just not having a digital inventory of what I owned. I was just not empowered. And so I think for me, you know that the concept of trying to put that behind a paywall for a product that actually you have to get to a really high standard for people to want to pay for that you have to get As recommendations to be really, really good, was just sort of incongruent with with the brand and what we wanted to do, you

got to tell me about the place where you can find a $10 top in Manhattan or London have, but, but the rest of that, that is that is really good content. Bianca and I know it's not content to you, it's your narrative, it's your story, it's, but that's such a battle for so many founders is, you know, the mission versus pleasing investors and customers and, and, and, and yourself and your team and all this this constant, you know, concern of doing right by so many different types of stakeholders? And I'm just curious, like, so that that challenge of monetization on wearing, how did you do that in in the end game without disrupting user experience or mission or what people were used to as customers?

Yeah, so I think to be honest, the challenges is starting to be felt now. I think we were we built such an engaged community. And I think a lot of people had been waiting for a product like this for a very long time. So there was a lot of goodwill. You know, initially, I don't know if I mentioned this again. But, you know, we started out with a freemium right at the beginning, we wanted to test it because so many investors were like, you've got to do this, right? This is the way it works, like, just build a Duolingo, or a headspace, or you know what I mean, like, just just, that's just the way please hop on the bandwagon. We tried it, it was successful, but we knew it would help growth. We always had this idea that, you know, we wanted to democratize access to fashion. And so the wearing app had to be social. How can you build a social network behind a paywall super difficult? And so we completely gave that up. And we've we've put that to rest. And I think that will stay there. We explored a lot of different monetization options. And I think we now know exactly kind of where we're going. But post Dragon's Den episode, we started to get a lot of visibility from retailers, because they'd seen it, you know, it was kind of out there. And we've done those big two campaigns. And they started to come to us say, Look, you know, why don't we talk about the state of dashboard, you know, and the insight piece that you're talking about, why don't you productize, the style recommendation engine. And so we were able to really reframe that narrative to set investors look, actually, this is in pursuit of a larger goal. And I think when you can put proof to that, in terms of market demand from b2b players, such as you know, big, you know, online retailers, department stores, fat, fast fashion players, you name it, they can start to see how actually, the free flywheel will affect a whole landscape, rather than how do we monetize a subset of niche early adopters to prove the value of the digital wardrobe market, which is much smaller than that bigger pie that we're now trying to take. So luckily, I think we were able to just just shift that and sort of build that narrative around why we wanted to remain, you know, a free product, to be able to gather that data and therefore monetize it later. Yeah,

that's, that's a really cool story. Is there anything that you can share there in terms of either key learnings or what you guys have going on coming up?

Yes. I think key learnings potentially is, you know, don't waste too much time around this. I think it's it's very difficult that I'm sure you're gonna ask me a lot of questions around this later. But, you know, I think in those early days, when you're going after product market fit, you try and focus on a couple of different things to be able to prove that you've got that right, especially with a consumer product, sometimes it's really hard to have one, you know, Northstar metric. And so I think, you know, for us monetization was something that we spent so much time researching a B testing to find the right fit, you know, was it going to be charging stylists, you know, to use the platform? Was it going to be offering styling services to our users? Because we scaled so fast? How do you do that for two and a half million users it? Do you know what I mean? Like, it would take us too long to build out the API that we could charge for on a like Pay As You Go styling basis. So we explored a lot but not fast enough. I think we should have AB tested much earlier. And across a wider array of monetization options for the different personas that were using our product. We tested things too late. And what that meant was, I think we missed a lot of opportunities with investors because we were trying to figure out that story. On the flip side, we did follow growth at all costs. And we did do it in an unbeliever verbal way. The second thing that I would say is that any type of b2b activity, which is so cliche to say, but just take so long. And so I think, you know, we were really lucky to start to build a lot of relationships with those brands that I mentioned before, mostly for, you know, marketing collaborations, social media collaborations, or, you know, speaking at their panel events, or, you know, joint events, or whatever those things were to start to build a roster of, basically, you know, a sales pipeline, that we could therefore go back to and say, Hey, guys, you know, we're starting to do X, Y, Zed, and the b2b space, is this of interest, you know, can we go to lunch and kind of figure this out? So that was really, really helpful. And so I guess what I'm trying to say with that second tip is, you know, really think about where you want the company to be in five years. And what's the real potential, right, you're focusing on one metric on the consumer side, or on monetization? Where can that go? How do we push that further? Because sometimes, in our case, it's much more valuable than the former. And so it's much better for us to have started thinking about b2b really early on, because now we're in a position to capitalize on that, and show investors that we've got some people lined up that are willing to pay.

And anything going on in the future at wearing that should excite the folks listening in.

Yes, a lot. We've got two b2b POCs in the pipeline, one will be a big department store. And another will be one of the biggest retailers. So we're super excited to see what that means. Yeah,

that's, that's, that's so cool. Bianca.

Say one more thing, of course, yeah. I think that the moment the penny really dropped for me was we focused on product market fit, we focus a lot on user journey, how we could make it as easy as possible for you to digitize your wardrobe. And the b2b really came when we were thinking about how do you connect to your past purchases every time you shop? How do you digitize those things immediately, right. And so I think, if founders listening, you know, can think about the synergies for user journey that can create to a lot of value unlock. And also monetization. If you get that right, and can make a product out of it. I

will double down on that statement. That is good. We need to use that as a quote 100%. What, you know, one of the things when you get to that rapid growth, which is a great problem to have, right, like, I'm sure some folks are listening in is how do I get to the growth, you know, but but others, you know, have experienced rapid growth and not kept up quality of service or had some hard lessons on on service, or, you know, that growth actually was a detriment to the company, because they ended up losing a lot of users for whatever the other reasons were user experience, service, whatever it might be, you know, what, what, what were some of the mechanisms, we'll call them that you put in place to ensure that this rapid growth of wearing didn't compromise? Anything else?

I mean, I just want to caveat by saying that, you know, public service announcement, I'm so sorry, to all the users. We thought that that, you know, the app was lagging as a result for sure. You know, we didn't go and skate. But I think we did a lot of things right. In that, you know, we realized, as I mentioned that we started to grow organically in different regions that weren't, you know, the UK market, which was our headquarter or home, that's where we were, you know, starting out operations. And luckily, on the team, we speak a number of different languages, we've got developers who are from Latin America, and Nigeria, we've got people in the team where like, Spanish, Italian, French, etc. And so we were super lucky because we caught it quickly. And we started to what we call localize, but translate the product, the app, the notifications, or CRM and marketing activities, which is a really big task, we didn't do it quick enough, we didn't realize the, you know, the impact on retention, and how nitpicky investors would be when we eventually go back out to market. And so I think, you know, to your point about viral growth, it's so exciting, but it can get away from you. And so I think if you see that happening outside a core market, ie for us an English speaking market, you know, what can you do to double down and make sure that you don't have that leaky bucket syndrome, or simply you know, people who want to use the product desperately but but aren't aren't engaged as much as they should be? Because they don't understand the product because it's not in their language, and it's not been adapted to their market. And I think you can fix that very quickly with you know, in depth market research, talking to a lot of those users starting the whole process again, you know, when I started I did 350 focus groups in London, personally night after night after night, speaking to UK based women who wanted to use the product or you know, wanted us to build the product at the time. So if you could do that in the new markets, it sounds like a waste of time, a lot of people like, Oh, we're you know, we're past that we've got a product we've launched, we've raised a pre seed round, you know, we've got a big team, blah, blah, blah. But I actually going back to basics can be really, really helpful. The second thing that I think is really, really vital, is getting to grips on your roadmap, I think when you experienced this growth, all of a sudden, I think you can start to build too many features too quickly, because of the scale of the feedback loop that you're getting. So you know, we get, I mentioned instabug messages every single day, 10 2015 messages, whatever it is saying, Hey, can you build this, Hey, I want this to look different? Have you thought of this? What about this suggestion? Could the AI take into account like, my new location or the weather or whatever, you know, and sometimes that can get really overwhelming? And how do you effectively prioritize? And I think that is the biggest skill that we learned as a team, we also made mistakes around that. But really, if you're able to keep it really simple, keep iterating on the user journey for different locations, and market to different people in a different way that makes sense to them, then you're really winning.

Yes, you are. What what are some hype? Man, I love it. I am your hype. Man. I will take I will take that all day. One of the other things that that we talked about when we first met was, you know, market expansion. Right. And and, you know, you guys being in the UK, but you've got users all around the world, right? That localization piece of it, right? How, how did you approach global localization or regional expansion? What however you want to answer the question, but how are you able to do that? And I shouldn't say flawlessly, but do it effectively? Yeah, no, don't take off those glasses. Those are amazing glasses. I'm just gonna you can you can take

I'm new to fashion world. You see, I'm such a corporate girl. Oh, my God? No, I think that's a great question. Look, I think we would have done potentially a better job, had we been able to fundraise, as soon as we saw this happening? And effectively, again, I think timing is everything. And, you know, the biggest skill that I've learned, the hard way, is to make decisions really quick, as a founder fire quickly hire quickly focus on localization quickly. It doesn't sound glamorous, right? Because you think that you know, the product that you've built appeals to everyone? And you've got so many other priorities happening that sometimes it's very difficult to do. But I think you know, to answer your question, we started to think a lot about what the future was going to hold for us. So where do we want to be at the next fundraise the US? What type of retail clients are going to buy the data that we are honing with a product? What type of social network do we want to be? What does that look like for users in different parts of the world? What does it look like when users travel from one place to the other place? What kind of services do we want to provide an app around that? Dry cleaning, mending blah, blah, marketplace, renting, borrowing, swapping, one click resell? What's going on in this ecosystem that we can be plug and play for? And when we think about that, we think about how do we approach each market differently? And what does that market contribute to the bigger picture? And what I mean by that is, I think having a really hard look at and I'll give you a silly example, having a really hard look at what ROI am I going to get that sounds terrible. But from this market, how much investment do I want to put into it? Because of the longer term, you know, way that it's going to serve Me? And how do I get to the next inflection point, ie another fundraise, because otherwise, none of it really matters. So obviously, we started to go viral in that America, Brazil was one of our biggest markets. We had an influencer post about us with like, 3 million followers. He's incredible. was doing like a drag queen version of his looks on wearing this thing exploded. My marketing, like my head of marketing was like, Alright, I'm getting a ticket to Rio. We're going for Carnival. This is it. This is what I've always trumped up. I'm moving to Rio, and this is the new me, I'm going to be the wearing headquarters in Latin America. Well, that's super exciting, right. You know, we had to face the music and say, Look, we're not going to raise from Latin America. We don't think it's going to be from the US. We need to focus on big hubs in the US. How can we get to New York? How can we get to La San Francisco? What is it that we need to do to foster community there? And how can we make sure that again, we're getting relevant brands on the marketplace for those users? How Are we taking into account their styling preferences, the way that they dress there? How can we look at scraping data around that to also integrate that into the way that our algorithm works? etc, etc, etc? What partnerships do we want to start to build to be able to make that US expansion piece work really well for the end user? So I think it was, for me, it's really about thinking very practically, and not getting overexcited about that, that growth and being intentional with the way that you interact with new markets, because it's not easy. And it requires a lot of dedicated effort, consistency, purpose, like perseverance, because you're basically a be testing all over again. Yeah, yeah. And I think you get judged on it, you know, especially from a paid marketing perspective, from a monetization perspective, if you're monetizing. And so you know, it's really, really important to make sure that you know, what you're doing before you kind of spray and pray basically,

I've got, I've got two more questions before we hop into our founder, five, and those questions are maybe a little bit more investment or fundraising driven, because I know you've had a lot of experience going through the fundraise, and, and talking to investors and obviously had a lot of meetings across the board fundraising as a full time job as we, as we all know, especially, you know, as if you're not in the US, I've heard it's even more challenging, right. So, you know, when you look at where your success or failures of fundraising came from, and maybe connected to metrics, while while doing that, around user growth versus monetization? Where was it that you found success? And what were the most valuable conversations that you had with investors around those? Yeah,

absolutely. So look, I think are divided into two answers. I think I appreciate at the beginning, I had a lot of, I think I was very getting personal, I was very scared. Because you know, when you're coming from corporate, you, if you're a first time founder, you're coming into an industry that you really have very little context in. It's obviously a very small world. And we know that founders obsessed, and they go for it, and they hustle, and they, you know, they make connections happen, right? That's in our DNA. But I think I was very scared initially, to think you know, am I going to be perceived as founder market fit right at that precede level friends and family level, you know, who am I to be building a tech product that involves styling, I've never done anything relating to fashion before with styling, in a professional setting. But I think I was incredibly credible, because of my professional background, the deals that I'd worked on the clients that I'd worked with. And I think really that authenticity about trying to solve this problem. And I've told this story before, and I think it might resonate. But you know, when you've got no proof points, and you're trying to build a really complex product, right, and your non technical storytelling is the biggest craft that you can hone in terms of maximizing those investor conversations and getting positive outcomes. And I used to do crazy things like I would spend weeks going to people's houses myself, digitizing their clothes, taking pictures of everything that they owned, uploading them at the time to fake Instagram accounts. And then I would use PowerPoint bear with me, because I'm obviously not, you know, a social media expert. I'd never heard of Canva or like, you know, any of the software's I would put together styling collages with those, you know, clothes that have the clothes on the grid, and I use the highlights to put together their outfits for different dates of the week of what they were going to wear what they should wear out to a party. And that's how I started and telling that story. People are amazed because you can give all of this insight around what the product could do, what it looks like, what the people who are going to become your customers want from you. And I think that worked incredibly well, for me at preseed. I think today, you know, what's what's really resonating is the fact that we were so laser focused on proving the veracity of the brand, and that even a brand without huge investment. You know, we didn't have any, we designed everything in house. We don't have, you know, huge fancy budget for videos and, you know, web development, and, you know, all of the kind of shoots and all the stuff that we know we should be doing as a brand. We've done all of that in house relying on our own creativity, and our own messaging that we know really resonated, and showcasing that today with a variety and the tight knit community and the routine users that we have is super exciting. So I think those that really has resonated and we really proved you know that we could put our heads down for 12 plus months and get to a point where actually we're selling a really capital efficient growth story. And that's what matters, right? If you say to investors, my CAC is below $1 They fall off their chair, you know, 80% of my traction is organic. That's incredible. So no matter what their doubts around monetization, you we've proved that there's something there. And I think that's what resonates.

Prove it. I love it. All right. So last question before we hop in, so the whether it's investors or yourself, or just anyone in the fashion tech industry, where are things headed? You know, what, like, what what what should we all be on the lookout for? What should we be pacing ourselves towards? Just really curious around like, what does the next few years look like from your perspective?

Yeah, super interesting. So I was just reading our investment memo for our data room. And thinking a lot about this. So I think for me, there are a couple of big key themes. The first for me is really the ability for Gen Z to herald in new and innovative products that changed the way that they live their lives. There was a at the time millennial fund at Goldman that invested only in like things that millennials were excited about, I would be looking out for what's hot in the Gen Z community. I think there's so many super exciting products being built at that level, companies that are trying to rethink, and basically create paradigm shifts from everyday things that we do and use, I find super exciting. And I think very groundbreaking. The second thing for me is is obviously a buzzword, but you know, it's really looking at how AI can change the way that we shop and the personalization around e commerce obviously supervised because that's what I'm building. But I think there's so much happening around, you know, how can we basically share insights, at every step of the way to make sure that you know, you're getting served the right ads, the right products, that you're buying things that are going to fit you that when you're walking into a store, you could snap anything and start to style it immediately. Which I think is super, super exciting. So I'm expecting a lot of like smart mirror integrations, a lot more kind of brand activations that are leveraging technology to make that, you know, shopping experience, super exciting and super gamified. You know, really taking that to the next level. And then I think the last thing is really around, you know, social kind of networks, I think there's going to be so much done at that level. And I think potentially disrupting some of the big incumbents at the moment, obviously hoping to be one of those. But I think there's a lot happening, you know, in the resale community that's trying to reinvent itself, the rental community, borrowing and swapping styling games, whether that touches the metaverse or not, I think there's some really, really exciting gamified ways for us to interact with our shopping or fashion experience as a whole.

Excellent. All right. Look, look out for wearing. Alright, let's hop on to our founder, five real quick hit questions five of them to roll through about you and your growth. You ready? All right, number one is the top metric or KPI that you are relentlessly focused on

to one user feedback every single day. And the second one for me are daily active users.

Excellent. All right. Second, one top tip for growth stage founders like yourself.

I would say focus on the bigger picture every single day. And work backwards for that from that to create the future that you want. Don't get bogged down in the every day. It's so easy to so

easy to write a favorite book or podcast that has helped you to grow as a founder.

I have to say Thinking Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman. I know it's a bit cliche, but it's helped me reframe the way my brain works.

You know, we've had about 100 of these I think, and we've never had that answer. So it's not too cliche. So that's thank God. There you go. All right piece of advice that counters what one would consider traditional wisdom.

Really easy for me, which I've done my whole life and I hope it's worked out. It's not to learn to fight your weaknesses, ie improve them. But it is doubling down on your superpower being the best at what you are already the best at and continuing to grow that.

Well said Alright, last one. What is going to be the title of your auto biography?

I love this so much. She changed the world one outfit at a time. Oh,

hell yeah. That is awesome. I Oh, that's good. In fact, I actually have a bonus for you, Bianca. Because I promised you that I would end this episode with a dad joke. I've got one for you. And if you've got one for me, I'll take it. So my for you is, what was that? Please start because I don't have like, Oh, you got you got it. You got it. All right. How do fashion designers Stay cool? I don't know. They have a lot of fans.

I love it so much. Can I say that at our next board meeting, please? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. Amazing. No worries. You gotta shoot me one later when you think of it.

I will absolutely do I have one but it's so silly. All right. Wait, one sec is here. So I tell dad jokes, but I don't have any kids. I'm a faux PA. That is I like that.

I like that one. Yeah, yeah. That's good. For those of you listening, if you don't know already, I'm about to be a dad. So this might be my last episode before being a dad. So if you love the dad joke, I'll keep going if you want to. But if you didn't just let me know either way. Either way.

You're amazing. And congrats. We're so excited for you.

Thank you very much. All right. So Bianca, you've given a ton to our listeners today. So I always allow for a little bit of self promotion here at the end how can those listening help you out?

Guys please first thing download the wearing app get involved in our mission. We're super exciting about super excited about ending the by use dispose model and getting a soul to interact with what we have much better. And you can find me on LinkedIn, my emails there if anyone wants to get in touch. Please follow us on tick tock to you will be titillated by a content that I promise you.

Awesome. All right. Thank you for joining us, Bianca, and thank you to our loyal listeners for dialing in. And of course, thank you to orky Black for making this show possible. Bianca, thanks for joining us on the dirt.

Thanks so much for having me too.

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