It started with a charity shop on London’s Portobello Road and the perfect pinstripe suit. Well, almost perfect. “I absolutely loved it, but it just didn’t suit me. So I had the idea of building an app,” explains Josephine Philips, the founder of Sojo, a startup that wants to bring tailoring “into the modern age”.
Launched in January 2021, Sojo, nicknamed the “Deliveroo of fashion repairs”, connects users with nearby seamstresses while facilitating the collection and return of clothing using a network of couriers. Independent sewers register on the app and set their own price for their work, from fixing holes to resizing, with Sojo charging a 30 percent fee. The same pinstripe suit ended up being one of the app’s first orders.
“I experienced going to a tailor and it was so archaic, it was really backward,” says Philips. “It’s not a common activity and we want to make it common. We want every young person to be involved in repairs and conversions.” The problem is compounded by the fact that two-thirds of repairable clothing is thrown away.
Eighteen months after launch, Sojo is a different beast, fresh from a new $2.4 million round of funding, a partnership with Scandinavian fashion brand Ganni, and a hiring boost that should reach 16 employees. It was also a seismic shift for Philips. The 24-year-old started full-time at Sojo immediately after graduating from university – so far only as a waitress and as a summer intern at the second-hand clothing exchange Depop.
For those early months, Sojo was a one-woman show, fueled primarily by a mix of overtime and youthful passion to change the “culture of waste” and “exploitation” that defines the fast fashion industry the Philips built their initial , limited network of couriers and seamstresses.
“That youth meant that I saw how the system worked and thought, ‘I can actually change that’… That kind of attitude was definitely a superpower,” says Philips. “But there was a lot going on. Having never done anything like this before meant I was learning and doing at the same time.”
As a black founder, Philips found itself in an industry where female-led startups accounted for just 2.8 percent of VC funding. In fact, according to one report, between 2009 and 2019 only one black female founder in the UK ever raised Series A funding.
“Everyone knows what the venture capital space is for underrepresented founders… The numbers speak for themselves,” says Philips, explaining that she’s regularly been turned down by investors only to see white male colleagues pitch with little more than “a PowerPoint.” made and “get millions right away”.
Eventually, Sojo was able to attract supporters, initially through a fishing round with a number of big-name investors, including Depop founder Simon Beckerman. The most recent Series A round was led by female-led VC firm CapitalT.
Third-party funding has also prompted a shift in focus—a more pragmatic, but no less effective, version of Philips’ vision. Instead of its direct-to-consumer business, Sojo is increasingly focusing on business-to-business deals with big fashion brands like Ganni (among seven other partnerships in the pipeline) to be the change provider for thousands of customers. These offerings will allow customers to request clothing repairs and alterations from Sojo’s seamstresses, and help in helpful ways to change the way they view tailoring.
“I realized that by shifting our business model to working with brands, we would be able to actually scale and make impact much faster,” explains Philips. “One of our investors said you can either spend £10m to try and get 10m direct customers over 10 years. Or you have a B2B partner and access 10 million customers overnight.”
Philips is also in the process of outsourcing Sojo’s courier network while hiring in-house seamstresses. She’s even considered expanding Sojo to offer its own “dark kitchen” equivalents; a network of industrial sewing workshops that would enable it to work locally on thousands of changes simultaneously.
Philips hopes Sojo will change consumer attitudes to clothing at a time when fast fashion is in the spotlight for its environmental impact. “Ultimately, we live in a culture of over-availability,” she says. “Clothing was not seen as something valuable.”
This article was originally published in WIRED UK Magazine November/December 2022 issue.
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