Big Sister Swap

Idea

Introduction

Big Sister Swap expects to revolutionise the traditional clothes swap by integrating bespoke software and a personalised style service.

Watch a customer's experience here:

Consumers face hurdles in accessing sustainable alternatives to fast fashion. 53% of consumers choose to shop fast-fashion to save time, whilst 40% of resale app users state communication is an issue.

We believe our unique personalised clothes swapping service alleviates these pain points from secondhand, helping people to keep clothes in circulation.

We do this with our one-stop-swap process:

1) Customers place their order on our website, selecting a swap option by weight

2) Customers print out a postage label to send us their unwanted clothes

3) Customers fill out our style form to tell us their sizes and style preferences

4) Our stylists, assisted by our bespoke technology, select clothes to send back to match the customer's individual preferences.

Clothes are kept in circulation in one effortless transaction.

Substantial accomplishments to date

· The clothes-swapping option with the largest online following, at 75,000 followers and growing

· Over 250 monthly orders

· Revenue growth of 810% in the last 6 months

· Our CEO, Hudi, has been shortlisted as the Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2023, as well as having an interview on Radio 4

· Credible board advisors with decades of experience working within AI, sustainability and start-ups.

· Saved over 50,000 items of clothing, over 108 million litres of water, and 200,000kg of CO2

· Described as a "breath of fresh air" by The Metro and an ‘innovative’ platform by Glamour

· The Evening Standard has highlighted our USP as ‘the laziness factor’ as we make swapping so effortless

All of this has been achieved without external investment until now – there is so much more that we can achieve with your investment and support.

Watch a recent influencer collaboration here:

Monetisation strategy

Customers pay for their swap process on our website. We split bundles into weight to make it as easy as possible for customers to refresh their style in one transaction.

1kg (approx. 4-5 items of clothing) - £30 + £4 postage

2kg (approx. 8-10 items of clothing) - £45 + £4 postage

5kg (approx. 20-25 items of clothing) - £97.50 + £4 postage

Customers do not pay for individual items, and instead pay for the service, which makes it an accessible and affordable service for all price points.

In order to maintain a fair swap for all, we offer quality matching where the value of a customer's clothes is matched with the clothes they sent in. This is an automated process built into our bespoke stock control system.

So far, the vast majority of our customers have come from word-of-mouth and organic social media growth. However, as we expand, we plan to utilise more paid social media marketing to reach even more swappers.

Use of proceeds

We plan on utilising this investment to scale up our service with larger premises, marketing budget and more advanced technology.

Our planned implementation of AI will allow us to increase our efficiency by streamlining our processes of tagging and matching our stock, whilst our larger premises will make it easier to store and access our thousands of items of clothing.

In doing so, we expect our capacity to process orders to vastly increase, so we will also expand our marketing strategy to reach even more customers and aim to become a household name for sustainable wardrobe refreshing.

£50,000 (31%) - AI Development

£25,000 (15%) - Increased marketing spend

£70,000 (43%) - Move to a larger premises

£15,000 (11%) - Hiring another staff member to cope with increased demand

* based on unaudited management accounts.