When founder Shanya Suppasiritad started out in fashion, it was over fifteen years ago. She got her start as a stylist, which, in her words, “was one of the best jobs she ever had, spending other people’s money on taking them shopping”. One Friday night, she was mulling over what to watch with a bottle of wine, and she came across True Cost—an exposé on the hidden environmental and social impact of the fast fashion industry. For one, new apparel contributes to 10% of global emissions and 20% of global waste water. Another, according to the Australia Institute: for every person in our country, 54 new garments are purchased annually.
The scales flaked from her eyes, and Suppasiritad found herself at a crossroads with everything that she knew about the industry she worked in. “Do you wait for someone else to make the solution? Or will you be a part of the solution?” she muses. “I’m taking advantage of people on the other side of the world, while I inflate and help people on this side of the world.”
Suppasiritad knew she wanted to stay within the fashion industry, but her participation had to shift. She developed Tumnus, an enterprise which enabled circular wardrobe loaning within her community: “It was kind of like Tinder, where if you like someone else’s wardrobe, you borrow it for five weeks at a time.” She identified an uneven skew and distribution with the business model; people loaned a lot, and people borrowed a lot. The two camps were siloed, with little overlap.
Then Coclo was born. The peer-to-peer fashion rental service was introduced with five-piece capsule wardrobes, with the ability to be mixed and matched to create up to 20 outfits in 2019. Thousands of signups were registered—consumers, it seemed, were also ready to welcome the secondhand market. “We were growing very quickly and reactively, and clearly answering what the community was asking for me,” Suppasiritad explains. “But I was thinking if this was still what I initially set out to do. I discovered there was a disconnect between the secondary market and the industry, and brand behaviour in itself.”
Revibe arrived as a natural evolution of what the founder was grappling with: the creation of a new category. This was a domain which could combat the existing model of e-commerce and fashion as it stood. “A brand will produce knowing they will sell 30 per cent of the item they produce. That is the problem within itself,” the founder notes. “People try to do better by buying better, but every single season, you still need to produce more and more to keep up. Retail sales are broken. I don’t think anyone is brave enough to reinvent the model.”
Pushing through in that space and innovating meant competing with the existing order. Revibe, which has been in circulation since 2019, has made significant mileage. The most significant changes? Local brands are beginning to rally around re-commerce. 63% of customers shopped secondhand in 2023, a 17% uptick from 2022.
"A brand will produce knowing they will sell 30 per cent of the item they produce. That is the problem in itself ... People try to do better by buying better, but every single season, you will still need to produce more and more to keep up. Retail sales are broken. I don't think anyone is brave enough to reinvent the model."
~ Shanya Suppasiritad
Brand experience, customer lifetime value and sustainability were the tentpoles Suppasiritad vouched for and expanded on. With the business, labels were supported to seize control of their rental efforts, cultivating a circular economy which led to a more sustainable future for fashion. It wasn’t easy to pitch. “It’s almost like creating a new category and validating its existence,” Suppasiritad says of her initial start. “Though brands are more interested now, she still has to change the minds of one or two people within the company—-and usually it’s the CFO. But people are interacting with or without you, and you may as well take control of that customer cycle.”
Revibe signed on with brands like Oroton, Alemais, and Madre Natura, and partnered with smaller, emerging labels like X Nihilo and Autark. The most significant partnership to date, according to the founder, was a partnership with natural conglomerate shopping destination The Iconic. The process took over 24 months of work to pull together. With such a large quantity of apparel, there’s a fraction of items that are faulty—-which means the retailer cannot put them up for sale online. Suppasiritad and her team came in to recoup, reclean and repattern sites like this one, facilitating a process of reselling for up to 30% off.
It makes sense that AI is quite crucial for their operative infrastructure: “We’re in one of those industries where the margin is so razor-thin, if you were to list an item for e-commerce, you could spend half an hour doing the listing—and we can’t afford that,” confirms Suppasiritad. “Everything we do has to roll out at the highest efficiency.”
"I only lead by example, and it's served me well so far. If you tell me the result you're after and where you want to go, I'll help you get from A to B. That's how I work with the team: this is the result we're after, we can get there by our own means and methods, but there's malleability. Transparency from an entire team fosters a leadership that looks differently and exists within purpose."
~ Shanya Suppasiritad
The team still hires photographers for their flat lays and for imagery, but the automation and visual discrepancies are all trimmed and corrected with generative AI. Creating social media content, as well. The Revibe syntax and tone of voice was something that the team automated with prompts online, and the generative hardware grabs all the information it needs from the imagery of the stock in order to create an automatic listing. When asked if the listings go online straight from the mouth of the machine, Suppasiritad laughs. “We always have people to check everything before it goes live. We’re not at that point yet.”
From speaking with her, it’s palpable that Suppasiritad’s journey has been one that has been questioned. “When people see women, they often see a challenge, before they see potential,” she notes. “Where will people go first? Will they go race first, or sex first? People like myself have been doing what we do for whatever amount of time, and they will still be spoken to like they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Even outside of sustainability, Suppasiritad represents a generation of leadership that works from the ground up. “I don’t even know if I’m the best leader. I only lead by example, and it’s served me well so far. If you tell me the result you’re after and where you want to go, I’ll help you get from A to B. That’s how I work with the team: this is the result we’re after, we can get there by our own means and methods, but there’s a malleability. Transparency from an entire team fosters a leadership that looks differently and exists within purpose.”
Profile by Karen Leong
Photography by Maya Pratt
