Marley Ares started in accounting.
She thought it was her dream to work for a large company. “And then I got there and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it?'” she told TechCrunch.
Alles started developing other passions and realized he was interested in the startup world. She listened to every podcast, read each book, and took notes on topics that interested her.
She didn’t think much of it until one summer when she noticed that many of her friends were getting married and spending thousands of dollars on bridesmaid dresses and bachelorette looks. One day someone approached her and asked to borrow her dress. “I was like, ‘Yeah, of course I’ll take it,'” she recalls. “And we thought, ‘How can we do this on a larger scale?'”
Ares kept all these expensive dresses in his closet. She didn’t want to sell them, but she knew she would probably never wear the gowns again. “That, in a nutshell, is what inspired me to create Rax,” she said.
Alles launched Rax as a peer-to-peer clothing rental company earlier this year. Currently functioning as a marketplace (it doesn’t hold any clothing inventory), users can scroll through the list and connect with people who have the clothing they want to rent.
She started her own company and has enough experience to fully code and officially release an app. The first few customers were her friends and family, and the rest came by word of mouth. Ares said he leaned into the idea of ”building in public,” posting online about his adventures in creating the product to gather an enthusiastic audience of potential customers. Currently, her app has around 5,000 users.
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Rax was one of the first products of its kind to launch in Toronto. It’s like Rent-the-Runway, Pickle in the US, or By Rotation in Europe. Similar to buying second-hand clothes, the idea of renting clothes is gaining traction as it is seen as a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way of consuming fashion than buying new items for each new season.
“It’s promoting circularity in fashion,” Ares says.
But what sets Lux apart from many other companies is that we offer long-term rentals. “On our platform, you can rent for up to six months,” she said. “Competitor platforms rent by the day. So if you’re trying to rent for a multi-week vacation, it’s very expensive. Or maybe you need a winter jacket for that season.”
At TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Rax announced its first foray into the US market. Alles said he’s a big fan of TechCrunch and entered the Battlefield contest and later won the top consumer pitch in the contest.
Ares said he was surprised he won. “There were a lot of companies that had thousands, hundreds of thousands of users. There were companies that raised $20 million in my category, and one of them had (the show’s) lead actor from Silicon Valley,” she said.
Still, she found the experience “amazing.” Ares went to all the startup booths, introduced himself to other founders, attended several sessions, and participated in some networking. In fact, she says this is one of the biggest lessons she learned as a founder. It’s the importance of face-to-face interaction that helps us better connect with our community.
Now that Disrupt is over, Ares said the company wants to continue its expansion across New York and begin building a rental service platform for fashion designers and retailers who want to offer rental clothing to consumers.
“We have the technology and we have the audience,” she says, adding that brands are also looking at ways to become more sustainable, and companies like Lux are letting them do that. “I think things are getting better and people are starting to be more aware of the impact.”
This article has been updated to show that Pickle operates nationally.
