SwapUp

Hi everyone, thank you for visiting our SwapUp page on IndieHackers. As a business whose activities are predominantly online, we are grateful for the opportunity to join the community here on our journey to grow and make shopping secondhand fashion mainstream.

Look forward to staying connected, working together, and sharing many more positive stories to come. 🌱

We were aware that over 80-85% of clothing that are donated to charities in Australia do not end up resold, creating a issue of disposal and costing charities in some cases millions of Dollars to dump them. A bulk of these clothes end up in landfill, where these fashion items remain pollutants for decades.

Arguably worse yet, is that some of these borderline (in some cases are) no longer wearable items end up getting shipped to countries such as Ghana or other countries where the clothes were made in the first place. Not only does this cost us all unnecessary carbon emissions, the clothes actually create many other social, commercial and environmental problems in the destination countries.

We won't spoil the doco for you, but if you are curious about what problems can a seemingly unharmful act of 'giving' can create, you can check out the program on ABC iview for free. We need to ask the question: where do my items actually end up.

We signed up to be a participant of the United Nations Global Compact. Our mission is to make secondhand-shopping mainstream. SwapUp is official a social venture.

According to Wikipedia, A social venture (also called a social enterprise) is undertaking by a firm or organization established by a social entrepreneur that seeks to provide systemic solutions to achieve a sustainable, social objective.

That's it. There is no going back!

We learnt that many of our customers, who are women, would be very happy to send their unused but like-new clothes in, in exchange for store credit.

Well, we thought of doing MVP of many things. In some ways, kids clothes are a mini-mum / MVP version of adult clothes. Why don't we sell women's clothes and accessories too then!

As part of our advocacy program, we launched the school visit program intended for students aged 5-15 years. The first school we attended was Victoria Avenue Public School (VAPS) in Concord West. We ran a workshop on sustainable fashion as part of the Festival of Innovative Ideas which the school has been running since 2017. The festival aims to provide an opportunity for students to showcase their innovations as well as be inspired by experts in a range of fields who 'bring creative ideas to life every day'. Through the school visit, SwapUp hope to instil the importance of 'reduce and reuse' to school students from a young age.

We couldn't believe it. We'd just finished putting together an MVP for the webstore days ago. Build it and they will come, so they say! Well, it's really NOT like that, but it can and did feel like it at the time.

We started to wonder, who this customer might be. A friend of a friend? How did she even get to find our store? Is this a fluke... how long will we have to wait until the next one?

We saw Craig Reucassel star on an ABC documentary and was deeply moved. Never did we realise how big is this fashion waste problem. Australia is the second-largest textile polluters globally, just behind the US.

We also saw friends at the end of the first lockdowns here in Sydney, and many of them who'd recently just had a baby seem to be struggling to prevent the overflow of baby clothes and other items. We really need to do something about this...