Why we are putting a personal wardrobe consultant in everyone's pocket

As a wardrobe consultant, if I do my job really well, I usually will help about one - two customers a day on average and I will charge quite steep fees because it takes a lot of time for me, a human, to give someone a full consultation and in most cases take them shopping.

I have for a long time been obsessed with figuring out how I could scale my services, to serve several people at once. The reason for this wasn't necessarily so I make more money but because I saw how much the average person agonises when it comes to their clothing. Picking the right sizes, colours, cuts but actually scratch that- most people do not care about the cut of a blouse or even know what that means but they do want to feel comfortable and confident in how they present themselves.

What usually happens when people who do not know or care about how an item is 'cut' is they will buy everything in the hopes of finding the things that will give them what they are looking for - confidence and comfort in their presentation. As you can imagine similar to dating , if you do not have a good idea of where to look, a lot of wasted time and resources will happen before you find it , if you ever do. This right here is a huge driver of waste in the clothing industry, people buying things without having the right information about how these things will fit into their lives.

German relocation company Moovinga did a study of over 18000 household in 20 countries that found people do not wear over 50% of the items in their closet. In some countries like UK, ,Denmark & Italy, it goes above 70%

Source: Consumptionandenvironment

These figures blow my mind, although I was expecting it in many ways due to the amount of my clients wardrobes I have stood in that are steeped with items they never wear (and never will) or still have tags and yet they hire me because they have 'nothing' to wear.

Knowing all this has made me question time and time again why we are so obsessed with solving the fashion waste problem exclusively at a B2B level when in fact customer behaviours are what dictate and enable the actions of businesses.

Zalando did a very interesting study that measured the gap between people's attitudes around fashion sustainability and how they actually behaved when it came time to take action. The results were staggering.

People know that environmental waste is bad. They know that fast fashion is terrible but often if you dive into why they do it anyway , you find another component that we need to address- it solves an immediate need faster and often cheaper. Here is an excerpt from a long form customer research interview we did at Kl?m with 30 year old Rachel , a physiotherapist in Dublin , Ireland

"Look, I know that I should be better with my fashion choices but I am 30, I am constantly being told to be better at many other things, to care about so many things at once. Fashion has been an escape for me and now I am being told to give it up or to totally change how I think about it but the thing is I do not think about fashion in the general sense, I like to wear clothes but I do not deeply research where they come from because this would need more brain capacity from me. I know this is bad and I try to be better but I feel like I'm constantly failing, I want to feel and look good, not guilty"

The fashion sustainability movement can sometimes take a radicalised approach similar to hardcore veganism where people are so passionate to make change that they think coercing others into it is the only way. I will not lie, I too have been passionate about this and told off my friends for buying horrible brands such as SHEIN but ultimately I know unless I find a way to address the core reason they feel the need to go to SHEIN, I can scream until the cows come home and the needle will barely move.

That is why I started Kl?m, I want to meet people where they are as opposed to sitting up on a high horse and judging them for not making better choices. Kl?m is an AI digital wardrobe consultant that create a personalised relationship with the customer and guides them through their wardrobe assisting them with creating several ways to wear what they have, helping them easily access ways to give items they love longer lives through repair, alterations or resale and if they do have to buy, Kl?m helps make sure they are addressing actual wardrobe gaps. Kl?m takes on the burden of the research so that the customer can get to their objective faster with minimal waste in time and resources.

Personal Wardrobe consultants should be something everyone has easy access to because the future of our planet depends on scaling knowledge that is crucial in empowering us to make better choices.

Luckily , we are not alone in our thinking, companies like EON have sprung to facilitate the ease at which this information will become transferable. EON is behind the technology that is creating digital identities for physical fashion products called product passports. These passports can be shared via QR code and they allow for the creation of traceability of an item and its lifecycle after it has left a store. This is ground breaking!

The founder of EON Natasha Franck also managed to bring forward a motion for the EU to make digital passports mandatory requirements for fashion brands to add on their products. It is expected that by 2030 this will be law but already brands like Mulberry, H&M , Zara are adopting this technology.

We are so excited to be creating Kl?m at a time when fashion brands are ready to accept and adopt the incredible ways technology can transform this industry.

Kl?m is currently in an incubator in Demium, Barcelona and is currently live on beta waitlist. You can email [email protected] for more information.