I’m Sidharth Das. My co-founder Stefania Daranco and I are launching (https://www.getkiki.com) – A marketplace that helps women buy sustainable activewear.

Stefania and I met 3 years ago in Glasgow and we have been married for 2 years. Since then we’ve been looking for ways to work together. I quit my banking job early this year and teamed up with Stefania to build a food pre-order. However, 3 months into building the product and onboarding 12 restaurants, everything collapsed due to COVID-19.

Living a minimalist life opened up our world to sustainability. However, every time I opened our wardrobe, I was overwhelmed with numerous fast fashion choices. After digging in, we found out a lot of local brands sell sustainably made clothes without exploiting animals, humans, and natural resources. However, they lack technology, time, and money to piece together a system to reach out more conscious buyers.

On the buyer side, a survey by KPMG in 2019 revealed that 33% of people in London and 22% people in NYC find it difficult to buy sustainable clothing. It requires significant amount of time and effort to find sustainable fashion apparel.

We started with the whiteboard idea on June with Y Combinator’s Startup School. So far, we’ve partnered with 7 brands and included 110 product listings. Even including commission, we are 15% cheaper than Shopify. Our vendors initially joined for the free tool and they stayed with us for the network effect. Our aim is to make vendor experience frictionless than competing CMS tools.

If you have experience or if you have close friends, relatives, or colleagues who are into sustainable clothing, please reach out! We're keen to get the community's input. You can get in touch via the comments below or at [email protected].

Thanks so much, and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts!