Canadian peer-to-peer clothing rental company Rax is expanding to the United States

Marley Alice started out 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,'” she told TechCrunch.

Alice began to pursue other interests and found herself interested in the world of startups. She listened to every podcast, read every book, and took notes on topics that interested her.

She didn’t think much about it until one summer when several of her friends were getting married, and 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 said, ‘Yes, sure, take it,'” she recalled. “Then I thought: How can this be done on a larger scale?”

Alice had all these expensive dresses in her closet. She didn’t want to sell it, but she knew she would probably never wear those gowns again. “This is what, in short, prompted me to create Rax,” she said.

Alles launched Rax earlier this year as a peer-to-peer clothing rental company. It now operates as a marketplace (it doesn’t have any clothing inventory), where users scroll through listings and connect with people who have clothing items they’d like to rent.

The company has bootstrapped so far, enough to code the entire app and officially launch it. The first few customers were her friends and family, the rest came by word of mouth. Alice said she was drawn to the idea of ​​“building in public,” posting online about her adventures creating the product in hopes of garnering an engaged audience of potential customers. It has around 5,000 users on the app at the moment.

Rex is one of the first of its kind launched in Toronto. It’s like Rent-the-Runway, or Pickle in New York, or ByRotation in Europe. The idea of ​​renting clothes – similar to buying used clothing – is starting to gain traction as it is seen as a more environmentally sustainable way to consume fashion rather than purchasing new items for each new season.

“It drives the fashion circle,” Alice said.

But what makes Rex different from many others is that they offer long-term rentals. “On our platform, you can rent up to six months,” she said. “On competing platforms, they rent by the day. So it becomes 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, Rex announced its first foray into the US market. Alles said she was a big fan of TechCrunch and applied to participate in the Battlefield contest, where she later won the contest’s highest consumer bid.

Alice said she was surprised by the win. “There were a lot of companies that had thousands or hundreds of thousands of users [like] $20 million in my category, and one [had] Main cast of [the show] “Silicon Valley,” she said.

However, I found the experience “amazing.” Alles went to each startup booth to introduce herself to other founders, and also attended some sessions and participated in networking. In fact, this was one of the biggest lessons she said she learned as a founder — the importance of personal interaction because it helps her connect with the community better.

Now that Disrupt has ended, Alles said the company hopes to continue its expansion throughout New York and begin creating a rental services platform to offer fashion designers and retailers looking to offer rented clothing to consumers.

“We have the technology, we have the audience,” she said, adding that brands are also looking for ways to become more sustainable, and companies like Rex have allowed them to do so. “I think things are improving and people are becoming more aware of its impact.”