Marley Alles started in accounting.
She thought her dream was to work in a big company. “And then once I got there, I was like, ‘oh, that’s it?'” he told TechCrunch.
Alles began to cultivate other passions and found herself curious about the world of startups. She listened to every podcast and read every book, taking notes on topics that interested her.
She didn’t think much of it until one summer when so many of her friends got married that she found herself spending thousands of dollars on bridesmaid dresses and bachelorette looks. One day, someone approached her and asked to borrow one of her dresses. “I was like, ‘yeah, sure, take it,'” he recalls. “And then I thought, how can this be done on a larger scale?”
Ales had all these expensive dresses in her closet alone. She didn’t want to sell them, but she knew she would probably never wear those dresses again. “That led me, briefly, to create Rax,” he said.
Everything released Rax earlier this year as a peer-to-peer clothing rental company. It currently operates as a marketplace (it doesn’t have any inventory of clothing), where users scroll through listings and connect with people who have clothing items they want to rent.
He has bootstrapped the company so far, enough to fully code the app and officially launch it. The first customers were her friends and family and the rest came by word of mouth. Alles said she gravitated toward the idea of ”building in public spaces,” where she posted her adventures creating this product online in hopes of garnering a dedicated audience of potential customers. It currently has around 5,000 users on the app.
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Rax is one of the first of its kind to launch in Toronto. It’s like Rent-the-Runway, or America’s Pickle, or Europe’s By Rotation. The idea of renting clothes – similar to buying used – has gained steam as it is seen as a more environmentally sustainable way to consume fashion instead of buying new items for each new season.
“It drives the cyclicality of fashion,” Alles said.
But what makes Rax different from many others is that it offers long-term rentals. “On our platform, you can rent for up to six months,” he said. “On competitor platforms, it’s daily rentals. So it’s very expensive if you want to rent for a two-week vacation. Or maybe you want a winter jacket for the season.”
At TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Rax announced its first foray into the US market. Ales said she was a big fan of TechCrunch and applied for the Battlefield contest, where she later won the top consumer spot in the contest.
Ales said she was surprised to win. “There were so many companies that had like thousands or hundreds of thousands of users [like] $20 million in my category and one [had] the protagonists from [the show] Silicon Valley,” he said.
However, he found the experience “awesome”. Alles went up to each startup booth to introduce herself to other founders and also attended some sessions as well as participated in networking. In fact, that was one of the biggest lessons she said she learned as a founder — the importance of personal interaction because it helps her better connect with the community.
Now that Disrupt has passed, Alles said the company hopes to continue its expansion throughout New York and begin building a rental service platform to cater to fashion designers and retailers who want to offer rental clothing to consumers.
“We have the technology, we have the audience,” he said, adding that brands are also looking for ways to become more sustainable, and companies like Rax are letting them do that. “I think things are getting better and people are realizing their impact.”
This piece has been updated to reflect that Pickle operates nationally.
