“We’ve learned so much in the couple of months that we’ve been working on [ShopRagHouse], and we think that we’d be able to offer them a lot of insight into the fashion industry,” Florez said.
VALTI
Valti—a business that allows women to rent dresses from one another for formal events—started as a CS50 final project last fall.
“At the [CS50] fair there was interest from a lot of people so I thought, hey, maybe I’ll continue this after class and see how it goes,” founder Laura A. Evans ’13 said.
Working with Ethan P. Barhydt ’14, she submitted the business plan to the I3 challenge after last winter break, ended up being a finalist, and was granted advising resources that allowed her to advance her business. After working on it over the summer at the Harvard I-lab and the HSA innovation space, Evans, Barhydt, and two others launched the business this fall.
All the dresses that are being rented out on Valti are stored in a vault at HSA cleaners, with which Valti has a partnership. This makes it easier for women to pick the dresses up and ensures that each dress is dry-cleaned upon its return, Evans said.
Evans was inspired to create Valti when she transferred to Harvard from UC Berkeley and was overwhelmed with “an insane number of formal events” that required many more dresses than she owned.
“I was just repeating the same dresses over and over and I didn’t have the money to buy new ones, so I figured...it would be cool if I could rent dresses from fellow students,” she said. The people behind Valti are also on a social mission to promote women’s empowerment and size acceptance, “which are not always seen in the fashion industry,” she said.
“For every photoshoot we have real women as our models. So far they have all been Harvard students,” said Evans. “We’re trying to emphasize diversity.”
I LIKE FALL
Marjorie Lacombe ’13, founder and president of i like fall, started the company last October as a personal endeavor to get rid of leftover clothes.“They were great clothes that other people would wear,” Lacombe said. To display the clothing to potential buyers, she made a website.
After putting up 40 items the first week and selling them quickly, she realized that a lot of other students could benefit from this, by both selling and buying clothing.
After working on the business over the summer and this semester, Lacombe has resold over 200 garments, shoes, and accessories through i like fall. The sellers get 90 percent of the profit.“We’ve also expanded to focus on improving local community initiatives,” Lacombe said.The organization has partnered with Rosie’s Lace, a women’s shelter in Boston, and donates all unsold items at the end of the semester. Like Valti, i like fall also challenges the beauty standards set by the fashion industry, through photography and media campaigns, LaCombe said.
“We have women of different colors, of different shapes, and different sizes…who are modeling our clothes and our items just to question how fashion is portraying women.”