How online wedding dress marketplace Stillwhite is helping change the fashion industry for the better with its simple buy and sell model.
Photo Figtree Pictures
Stillwhite is an online marketplace bringing together brides-to-be and newlyweds from 167 countries to buy and sell their dream wedding dresses. To say it’s taken off since its launch in 2010 is an understatement, but what’s even more impressive is the company’s sustainability figures. We asked the Stillwhite team about their journey so far.
What is Stillwhite’s model and how did it begin?
The Stillwhite journey began back in 2010 after Stillwhite owners Bruno & Ingrid Szajer’s own wedding. Bruno asked Ingrid what she was going to do with her wedding dress that was stored under the bed. Unimpressed by existing services, entrepreneur Bruno decided build a dedicated platform which allowed brides to sell their wedding dress. Fast forward to today, Stillwhite.com is the world’s largest marketplace (almost at 40,000 dresses) for buying and selling designer wedding dresses. Simply, a bride sells her pre-loved dress on the site and another bride-to-be purchases the dress at a discounted rate.
Stillwhite places a major emphasis on their commitment to sustainability – what does this look like and why is this so important to the company?
At Stillwhite we believe pre-loved wedding dresses should be available to every bride. The modern day Stillwhite bride is a conscious, intelligent consumer, who cares about the environment. Bruno and Ingrid created Stillwhite to not only help brides around the world find their dream dress, but to help reduce the impact creating a single dress has on the environment. It is estimated that a single wedding dress takes 9000L of water to produce and creates 11kg of carbon emissions.
Ingrid: We are finding more and more brides really care about the environment and the impact a wedding dress may have…that’s why they turned to buying second hand or selling after their big day. So far Stillwhite has saved 216,000kg of carbon emissions and 180 million litres of water.
Consumers today are becoming a lot more aware of the waste created by the industry and there is a great demand for transparency from fashion brands and producers. What do you think the future holds for the industry and the wedding industry more specifically too?
We have seen a massive upwards trend to brides buying and selling their pre-loved dress on Stillwhite. In the last three years we have seen a 300 per cent increase in brides buying and selling on Stillwhite and we expect this trend to keep increasing as we look to 2019.
For more on Stillwhite and their sustainable practices, visit stillwhite.co.nz/sustainable
