Sojo: The Deliveroo of fashion repairs
It has the backing of Depop's founder and Ganni has just announced it is embedding the repair and alterations service into its e-commerce platform. We look at when, if and how London startup Sojo can scale.
By Bella Webb
Daphne Milner
Josephine Philips first recognised a lack of easy and accessible clothing repairs after she became a top seller on Depop in 2018, buying and selling one-off vintage garments. To fill this void, Philips launched Sojo, an app that has become known as the Deliveroo of clothing repairs.
"Repair is a key part of circularity that was almost totally untapped," Philips says.
What happens when clothing falls apart?
In September, 23-year-old Philips secured £300,000 in pre-seed investment, counting Depop's founder Simon Beckerman as an investor. In October, ​​Sojo won the Santander X Entrepreneurship Awards pitch competition, winning £50,000 in equity-free funding and £25,000 in business support. In the past month, Sojo has secured deals with brands to integrate its services into their e-commerce and physical retail offerings, including Instagram favourite, Ganni. Since launching in January 2021, Sojo has built a network of 10 seamsters and bicycle couriers across London. The seamsters set their own prices, and Sojo charges a 30 per cent commission to cover marketing, delivery, customer service and insurance. Five common issues make up 70 per cent of Sojo's orders: taking in the waist on trousers, fixing seam rips, shortening trouser hems and dresses and patching holes.
Sojo customers can either pin items themselves using the company's tutorial videos, or send the items to seamsters with a similar item that fits them perfectly. It currently takes five days for Sojo to fulfil orders.
Tiny Studios
Sojo follows in the footsteps of luxury repair service The Restory, which started mending shoes and handbags, before expanding into clothing earlier this year, and counts Selfridges and Farfetch among its partners. The Clothes Doctor has more than 7,500 Collect Plus drop-off points throughout the UK, but expanded during the pandemic to offer products and clothing care advice after noticing more expensive paid repair services tended to attract luxury consumers. Repair has a long history in luxury brands, where items are viewed as investments. Hermès offers repairs and Barbour is approaching 100 years of repairs, while brands including Patagonia, Toast and Levi's have opened repair stations in retail stores and run DIY workshops as community-building events. Sojo is focused on making circularity mainstream, says Philips, and is pitching its affordable services at consumers across the fashion spectrum, especially tech-savvy Gen Z shoppers who want sustainability coupled with convenience.
After securing funding, the startup has a bigger challenge on its hands: scaling quickly enough to meet growing demand.
Securing funding
Philips spent her university summers interning at Depop, and later took part in its Now/Next incubator. However, she didn't meet Beckerman until later, when she attended a panel discussion he was speaking on, and asked him to invest in her startup during the Q&A session. After a short phone call, he agreed.
"It's important to invest in a person rather than an idea, because a good idea in the wrong hands is unlikely to succeed," Beckerman explains. "A lot of Depop users buy items that are not exactly their size, because it's a rare piece, and Sojo can play a nice part in circular fashion by giving people an easier way to adapt those purchases."
After graduating in June 2020, Philips put £8,000 of her personal savings, accrued from selling clothes on Depop and waitressing, towards building the Sojo app. Over the next nine months, she received £16,000 from grant-making organisations, before turning her sights on pre-seed investment. "I was cynical about investment because I knew how little was allocated to Black female entrepreneurs," she says. According to a Palladium Impact Capital study from April 2021, less than 15 per cent of Black female entrepreneurs' capital demands are met in the US, with the figure even lower at 6 per cent in the UK.
Sojo founder Josephine Philips.
Building strong personal relationships has been crucial to Philips overcoming these barriers to entry. "I never wanted to feel patronised or like our investors didn't align with our values," she explains. Philips focused her energies on building her company rather than seeking investment. "Through posting on Linkedin and sharing press coverage of Sojo, I was able to meet a lot of inbound investors," she says. "I built a roster of people I liked and could get mentorship from. When it came to raising money, people who had been watching us grow and demonstrate the market opportunity were primed to invest." Philips opened her first funding round at £150,000, but secured double within two weeks.
The round of 16 strategic angels includes Beckerman; Impact X Capital early-stage investor Yvonne Bajela; and Founders Factory investor Saloni Bhojwani, among others. Unusually, they are 65 per cent BAME people (including 53 per cent Black) and 50 per cent women (including 35 per cent BAME women). Many invested their personal money, with a view to Sojo applying to their institutionalised funds when the app's next round opens early in 2022. Philips will be looking for between £1.5 million and £3 million.
This emphasis on community support also led her to bring on former Deliveroo analyst Ludovico Buizza as COO and co-founder. "Loneliness was something I really felt in the first nine months, because you make over 30 decisions a day as a founder and you often have no one to say them out loud to," Philips explains. "The most important trait in a co-founder is complete trust, and looking for another version of me would have been the wrong decision."
Funding has also allowed Sojo to invest in its team and tech. The direct-to-consumer app Philips launched with was in beta form, but an early wave of organic press coverage flooded the platform with more consumers and attention than anticipated. With just one developer working on Saturdays, and consumers not used to apps in their nascent stages, Philips had to accept that it wasn't a perfect iteration. "We're in a better position now," she says. Alongside Philips and her co-founder, Sojo now employs two full-time engineers and a part-time community manager, with another front-end software engineer soon to be hired.
Pivoting to B2B
After nine months as a direct-to-consumer app, Sojo is pivoting to B2B, building on partnerships with Ganni, vintage clothes dealer Beyond Retro, UK charity shop chain Traid. From 27 November, it will also be part of fashion rental platform Hurr's London pop-up store. Philips says most of these partnerships — including some billion-dollar brands in the pipeline — have been inbound requests.
"Building a community-driven direct-to-consumer brand is a slow process that doesn't allow access to scale quickly," says Philips. "A lot of money in the startup space goes to customer acquisition, but we can bypass that step by partnering with brands." From now on, Sojo will be focusing on its B2B offering and putting its direct-to-consumer app on the backburner. "If we do B2B right, the DTC element will be obsolete anyway," says Philips.
Sojo currently uses bicycles to fulfil orders in London.
Ganni customers in London will get free repairs and alterations powered by Sojo, while other brands charge a nominal fee. Traid customers can book their self-funded repairs using in-store tablets provided in changing rooms. The company hopes offering alterations will divert clothes from landfill and discourage people from viewing garments as disposable. At Beyond Retro, repairs and alterations will be available in London stores throughout the open-ended pilot programme, and managing director Kate Peters hopes to roll out Sojo online soon. She says sizing is the main reason for returns, and Sojo's services will help the retailer be more size inclusive, with up-sizing options available.
Switching to B2B means re-thinking Sojo's expansion plan — the UK rollout previously planned may now be postponed in favour of Copenhagen with Ganni on board.
Hurdles ahead
There are challenges on the horizon for Sojo, not least shifting customer behaviour towards circularity. "We'll be gathering data on uptake, doing in-store activations in changing rooms, and running education drives to make sure employees can talk about the services," says Philips. "We try to make it as simple as possible, but you can't underestimate how little people want to do things."
There are also limitations to externalising repairs, she continues, especially where brands use specialised materials or don't make spare parts easily accessible to independent seamsters. "If a customer wants a button to be replaced, luxury brands can offer the exact same button, but local tailors can't," explains Philips.
Another challenge is remote alterations. Anticipating the education gap around repairs, Sojo has published educational content around how to pin garments, and customers have the option of sending seamsters a well-fitted garment to use as a blueprint.
"With repairs, it's very easy and convenient to work remotely, but alterations are more face-to-face," says Lucinda O'Connor, founder and CEO of The Clothes Doctor, which expanded during the pandemic to offer products and clothing care advice alongside its repair services. "It can be hard to manage customer expectations remotely. There's an opportunity for someone to get that efficiency right and drive the density of supply to meet demand. The industry needs new businesses like Sojo to help it modernise, and make repairs mainstream."
The biggest hurdle will be onboarding local seamsters and creating the infrastructure to connect them with work efficiently, says Philips. "The repair sector is incredibly fragmented and inaccessible. We have a high-touch onboarding process, which can scale for a while, but will be difficult once we reach high order volumes. We only need a few good seamsters to launch in a new city, which we can achieve in two weeks, but each one can only process about 10 orders per day. And our cyclists are restricted in how much they can carry right now. We're currently exploring in-house models like dark kitchens to go alongside our community network. I'd love to create a job stream for young graduates to go into, training them in transferable craft skills."
Key takeaway: By creating an ecosystem of local seamsters, Sojo is making clothing repairs and alterations accessible and affordable to consumers, while offering brand partners, including Ganni, a shortcut to circular business models. Scaling up quickly enough to meet demand is the next hurdle.
Lush is quitting social media. The start of a trend?
Inside the agency Gucci and Fenty Beauty use to boost inclusivity
How fashion can lead on trans and non-binary inclusion
latestfashionsustainabilitycircular economy GanniHurrSojoRepairstartups
Women still struggle to access VC funds. What needs to change?
Physical retail is back. And this time it's sustainable
How Gen Z entrepreneurs cope with growing pains
The year in retail: Store openings, collaborations and consolidation
By Kati Chitrakorn