Canadian peer-to-peer clothing rental company Rax is expanding to the US

Marley Alles started out in accounting.

She thought that her dream was to work at a big company. “And then once I got there, I was like ‘oh, that’s it?,” she told TechCrunch.

Alles began fostering other passions and found herself curious about the world of startups. She would listen to every podcast and read each book, taking notes on topics that interested her.

She didn’t think much of it until one summer when so many of her friends got married that she found herself spending thousands of dollars on bridesmaid dresses and bachelorette looks. One day, someone approached her and asked to borrow one of her dresses. “I was like ‘yeah, for sure, take it,’” she recalled. “And then I thought, ‘how can this be done on a larger scale?’”

Alles had all these expensive dresses just sitting in her closet. She didn’t want to sell them, but she knew she probably would never wear those gowns again. “That’s what led me, long story short, to create Rax,” she said.

Alles launched Rax earlier this year as a peer-to-peer clothing rental company. It functions right now as a marketplace (it does not own any clothing inventory), where users scroll through listings and connect with people who have clothing items they want to rent.

She’s bootstrapped the company so far, enough to fully code the app and officially launch it. The first few customers were her friends and family, and the rest came by word of mouth. Alles said she leaned into the idea of “building in public,” where she posted online about her adventures creating this product in hopes of amassing an engaged audience of potential customers. She has about 5,000 users on the app right now.

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Rax is one of the first of its kind to be launched in Toronto. It’s like Rent-the-Runway, or the US’s Pickle, or Europe’s By Rotation. The idea of renting clothes — similar to buying secondhand — has been picking up steam as it is seen as a more environmentally sustainable way to consume fashion rather than buying new items for each new season.

“It’s driving the circularity of fashion,” Alles said.

But what makes Rax different from many others is that she offers long-term rentals. “On our platform, you can rent up to six months,” she said. “On competitor platforms, it’s daily rentals. So it gets really expensive if you want to rent for a couple-week vacation. Or maybe you want a winter jacket for the season.”

At TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Rax announced its first foray into the U.S. market. Alles said she had been a huge fan of TechCrunch and applied for the Battlefield competition, where she later won the top consumer pitch in the competition.

Alles said she was surprised to win. “There were so many companies that had like thousands or hundreds of thousands of users; raised [like] $20 million in my category, and one [had] the lead actors from [the show] Silicon Valley,” she said.

Still, she found the experience “awesome.” Alles went up to every startup booth to introduce herself to other founders, and also attended some sessions as well as partook in networking. Actually, that was one of the biggest lessons she said she’s learned as a founder — the importance of in-person interaction, because it helps her connect with the community better.

Now that Disrupt has passed, Alles said the company hopes to continue its expansion across New York and start building out a rental service platform to offer fashion designers and retailers looking to offer rental clothing to consumers.

“We have the technology, we have the audience,” she said, adding that brands are also looking at ways to become more sustainable, and companies like Rax let them do it. “I think things are getting better and people are becoming more aware of their impact.”

*This piece was updated to show that Pickle operates nationwide. *