After taking first place in a start-up competition, an innovative team is seeing its project forward.
The goal of Collective Closet is to provide a service to loan clothes to members, giving that new and refreshed feel but without hurting the wallet and without over-consuming.
The team members who won the Startup Weekend event at the end of October are going to carry their idea forward and see how far it will take them.
The 52-hour event was held at Quest University and hosted by Startup Squamish. It gave participants the opportunity to both brainstorm ideas for viable businesses as well as learn about the process of building one. Six teams competed to create the best ideas and business plans, and at the end of the weekend, judges voted Collective Closet as the victors.
The four members of Collective Closet had started with the idea of a clothing library for kids and by the time they presented on Sunday, it had evolved to include clothes for adults as well as additional revenue streams.
Caitlin Mooney-Fu, a Quest graduate who currently works in marketing for the Sea to Sky Gondola, initially pitched the idea. She is going to continue to work on the project with Chris Simm, who studied business at Royal Roads and who also lives in Squamish.
“Both Chris and I were interested in this idea because of the environmentally friendly aspect that combats over-consumption of cheap, poor-quality clothing which often uses or produces environmentally harmful chemicals during production,” said Mooney-Fu.
They’re going to persevere, taking their idea beyond the framework of the Startup Weekend. The other members, Vincent Chiu and Tessa McLoughlin, live in Vancouver and Victoria and may stay on with the project.
“There is still lots of work to be done on the front end before we hit the market. We have a good indication that the consumer base is open to the idea but there is more testing to be done to see if people are willing to put their money where their mouth is,” said Simm.
As a part of their prize for winning the weekend, team Collective Closet was offered a month of free office space at Startup Squamish and registration in the CORE business accelerator program, a program designed to take a business from a concept into a functional venture by way of coaching and mentorship.
“Having the CORE program and office space will help to bounce ideas off others. Hopefully we gain confidence in the idea by working out more kinks. We’ll see how far we can take it,” said Mooney-Fu.
The pair isn’t exactly sure where it will end up. They recognize that adapting and shifting ideas are a part of the process of creating a startup.
“A dream scenario would be to have the office here in Squamish and the warehouse and logistics in Vancouver,” said Simm.
