Designer Wardrobe is well-regarded by Kiwis as the ultimate place to sell off their high-end pieces for extra cash - but the platform’s undergone a significant journey over the years.  

CEO Aidan Bartlett told Kerre Woodham on the Bosses Unfiltered podcast that Designer Wardrobe began on Facebook, where friend and business partner Donielle Brooke had to sell her clothes after falling ill with thyroid cancer.

“She had a huge love for fashion, so when you haven’t got income, you need to start liquidating things. And so, the most value that she had was in her wardrobe. So she started a Facebook group called Designer Wardrobe and she started listing her things.”

Over a decade later, the Facebook group designed for people to buy and sell fashion expanded out into a proper brand with its own community. Bartlett saw there was clear demand out there for a fashion-based online service designed to benefit buyers and sellers alike.

“We were growing as a business, but being New Zealand and being quite small, especially being venture-backed, there’s an expectation to really grow. And being very New Zealand-centric, we weren’t seeing enough growth to just be a pure-play marketplace - we had to look at where else could we grow.”

Designer Wardrobe also allows customers to rent high-end clothes - and Bartlett saw that this service had worked for similar platforms overseas. He revealed to Kerre that checking out other markets helped him figure out the next steps for the business. Designer Wardrobe’s investors were also interested in the rental idea, as it made good financial sense.

“Essentially, you could buy a dress for retail or even wholesale - by the time you’ve rented it out six times, it had paid itself off. The economics made a lot of sense. We were typically renting out a dress between 12 and 20 times, so the vast majority of dresses were paying themselves off relatively quickly.”

The physical stores were a logical next step, with the first opening in Auckland’s Grafton in 2017. Customers could try on their clothes and have an outfit ready for an event without having to worry about deliveries and couriers. The famous Newmarket flagship store opened a few years after that in early 2020, which marked a difficult period for Designer Wardrobe.

“There were these whispers of lockdowns, we thought that was just propaganda, almost, at the time. And then school balls were also coming up, which is a super important part of our business at the time and everybody was talking about how school balls might be cancelled. We just said - no way. No way are schools going to allow the flagship event of the year to be closed down. It was really scary, just so many unknowns.”

The Covid-19 pandemic was difficult for many businesses, but Bartlett was determined to make it through the rough patch and make Designer Wardrobe work through the lockdowns and restrictions. People still had free time to go through their clothes and list things, but it was still a rocky experience, as the team had to work around unexpected cancellations brought about by more lockdowns. And Bartlett revealed the experience had taken its toll.

“We did end up having to make that really tough call to essentially turn the stores off. That was one of the hardest decisions we’d ever made - at that time, we just couldn’t see any consistency in how these lockdowns were folding out, so we decided to shut the stores down….we essentially transferred our energy from stores and just made online as good as it can be.”

Designer Wardrobe’s had some tough years with the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, but Bartlett revealed things have been looking up since the brand expanded across the Tasman and started utilising AI - and he’s confirmed there’s more milestones to come.

“We’ve got a lot of room to grow in New Zealand. The resale fashion category in New Zealand is worth roughly $700 (million) to a billion dollars a year and it’s still growing 15 percent roughly - and it’s the same in Australia, it’s the same as what you’re seeing globally. So we don’t feel like we’ve hit the ceiling in New Zealand at all, we think there’s a lot of room to grow here. And also Australia, we’re seeing some green sprouts too. And that’s something we’ll continue to nurture as well.” 

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