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Lucy Pink, founder of ethical fashion app OnYou said talking to her customers was a huge driver of confidence in the early days of her business.
All Lucy Pink wanted was to find a place to buy clothes online, where she could be sure the items were not made in a sweatshop.
But after finding nothing that could help her in the way she wanted, she decided to create a solution herself.
Pink founded OnYou, an online marketplace that makes it easier to discover and buy ethically made fashion.
The focus on OnYou is to remind consumers where their clothing comes from, and to show them there are options outside fast fashion supply chains, Pink said.
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“Businesses have made us very comfortable with buying products that harm people and the planets,” she said.
“We have become completely disconnected from the reality of production.
“I think consumers have been lulled into a false sense of security that our clothes come from happy factories, when the reality is they come from anything but.
OnYou started as a side project in 2019.
An early piece of advice she received was to go and talk to potential customers.
“I ended up interviewing over 400 people. I would find them on forums, or by replying to YouTube comments, through Instagram, or joining Facebook groups,” Pink said. “I just wanted to understand what the difficulty people faced trying to find ethical brands.”
Pink found that many of the people she interviewed were confused or distrustful of the ratings systems used by many fashion retailers.
Brands could sometimes be rated highly by an ethical fashion ratings system even without doing things like paying their garment workers a living wage.
“The fashion industry is quite a complicated space, with so many moving parts. But I wanted to take all of those complexities and just have one space where people could go and find information about what companies pay their workers properly or are environmentally friendly,” Pink said.
After refining the idea, Pink had to get to work on making it a reality, despite having no training in coding or website design.
Pink taught herself how to “datascrape” (pulling product data from websites for fashion garments) and to build an application from scratch.
“That was when the momentum shifted. I sent out the prototype of the app to the 400 people I had originally surveyed but within a month without any marketing the user base grew to over 1000 people,” Pink said.
Within the first three months the app generated US$8000 in purchases for the businesses featured.
Artem Beliaikin/Unsplash
Lucy Pink started marketplace app OnYou so ethical consumers could find positive fashion brands in one place.
But Pink said that was only the beginning and OnYou had a lot of growing to do in a short space of time.
OnYou has been taken on board by the Te Ōhaka Startup Incubation Programme as well as The Golden Ticket, a programme for tech start-ups to get access to pro bono professional support, which has helped Pink accelerate growth.
“We have been working hard and got 70 ethical brands on the platform, and over 4000 customers who have requested early access to the platform, so we have never stopped building that community,” Pink said.
One of the biggest lessons she learned on her start-up journey was to always have confidence in herself as a woman in business.
“I think being a young woman in the fashion space trying to do something different you can sometimes get peoples eyes glaze over when I say I am building a fashion app,” Pink said. “But honestly that just spurs me on.”
She said that user feedback and talking to customers was the best driver of confidence for someone trying something new.
“It is so easy to base your self-esteem and confidence on what experts and investors say about your product,” Pink said.
“But to keep going back to the customer is so important, they are the ones that will use the product, and they are always on your side.”
