Fashion site extends offer
Response to capital raising stuns founder
Online fashion marketplace Designer Wardrobe has extended its capital raising target after it passed $1.3 million in a week.
The Auckland-based peer-to-peer sales and rental business debuted this week on equity crowdfunding platform Snowball Effect.
Interested investors were given a chance to preview the offer on May 8, with $1.3m raised before the offer went live to the public.
Founder and creative designer Donielle Brooke said with such high initial interest, the company had extended the target and would accept oversubscriptions up to $1.7m.
Chief executive Aidan Bartlett said he and Brooke were thrilled with the result.
“It was pretty overwhelming to get that sort of response in such a short period of time,” he said.
Designer Wardrobe has previously focused on womenswear with Brooke saying the capital would be used to expand into menswear and kidswear, as well as funding expansion into Australia.
People can already rent clothes from other users on the platform, but Brooke said she planned to build the company’s own rental portfolio with some of the money being used to buy stock.
“The capital will be used to continue to create an even bigger and better peer-to-peer experience for our much loved members,” Brooke said. “We’re going to stick with what our customers love, which is some of the [usual] designer brands but then we’ll also look into some higher-end things like Gucci.”
Brooke founded Designer Wardrobe in 2013, originally through Facebook, as a way to pay rent after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
The page amassed several thousand followers in the first few weeks, eventually prompting Brooke to set up a business platform after recovering from her illness.
The platform now has a growing customer base of more than 87,000 members with more than 26,000 listings and about 1.2 million page views per month.
Designer Wardrobe also has a key backer in Spark chief executive Simon Moutter — an early investor and chairman of the company.
The maximum equity on offer is 29.8 per cent based on a pre-money valuation of $4m. The offer closes on June 15.