In a bid to lower the amount of single use clothing students consume, Harriet Noy, 26, founder and CEO of Hazaar, created a platform to pass the bulk around.
While studying at the University of Birmingham, Harriet, who is from Manchester, spotted a gap in the market.
‘I started Hazaar because I noticed all of my friends were always Amazon Priming fancy dress costumes every single week,’ she tells Metro.
‘When you’re a student, you have a constant need for new things, and you end up buying things you will only use once.
‘I thought there was a big opportunity to create campus based marketplaces – there would be no postage, you’d list the item and once sold just meet outside the library to hand over the item. It’s about making sustainable options available to students. I wanted it to be accessible both in price point and convenience.’
Initially starting with Facebook groups, Harriet had 20,000 students sign up thanks to her posters stuck up around campus grounds.
The year after graduating, seeing the concept work but wanting to monetise it, Harriet developed an app for the process including carbon reporting data and then sold it to universities. This way, those students could access the app and not have to pay a membership – the university covered that.
Harriet wanted to get people thinking about their impact when buying things for just one use.
‘The key thing for me is making the sustainable option the cheapest, the most affordable, the most desirable, and it just so happens to be better than buying something brand new,’ she says.
‘I interview students about what they’re wearing and why, and it’s often brands like Shein, and they always say it’s because of the price point. So, how can we have an impact to make this more sustainable?’
The trouble is, with universities tightening their pockets, it was becoming difficult to scale the business up. Successfully turning over upwards of £120,000, Harriet wondered what was next.
Then, brands started approaching Harriet, saying they had excess stock they wanted to sell to students. This gave her the idea to remodel the business, still running the campus student-to-student clothing resales, but also allowing fashion companies to list selected items for students to buy at the lowest possible price.
This is stock that would otherwise end up in landfill or at recycling centres.
‘The price point will be a lot lower than anywhere else, and students have to verify their status to be able to purchase it,’ Harriet explains of the new feature to her website which launched last month.
As the secondhand market grows, Harriet thinks it’s an exciting space to be as more people think about the impact of what they’re buying, and want to build better, more circular choices.
If students can’t afford to shop at higher end sustainable brands, this is one step closer to reducing the need for new fast fashion.
‘The rise of secondhand is great, because there’s so much excess stock from brands in the world. I want to bring that to students at secondhand prices,’ she adds. ‘I want to prevent stock from going to waste.’
Harriet has learned a lot along the way. As a young business owner, she says people ‘are rooting for you’ and that she would reach out to older and more experienced owners asking for a chat and advice when things first launched in 2020. People were often happy to help, and being targeted when networking paid off.
She’s also learned not to ‘chase’ investments over revenue. ‘Investment should only be used when you’re trying to scale in a direction that you know works,’ in Harriet’s opinion.
‘In the early days, I used investment almost as a distraction from figuring out if the business model actually works.’ Harriet received a few small investments when she first launched, which she now wishes she had used more wisely.
Harriet hopes that in the future, Hazaar will be the platform brands think of when they want to get in front of students, and that students feel there is a reliable, affordable community for them.
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