#Interview
“Sally is an app that gives your clothes a second life,” says founder Paolo Coda. “In the long term, we see the greatest potential in the B2B sector: brands can use Sally as a SaaS solution to offer their customers after-sales services,” the Cologne native continues.
The Cologne startup Sacred Valley Techfounded by Paolo Coda, Luca Urlacher and Santhoshkumar Sundararaj, would like to join Sally establish a circular fashion platform. “Sally allows users to have clothing items analyzed using AI and find suitable exchange partners,” explains founder Paolo Coda, explaining the idea behind Sally.
“The long-term goal is an all-in-one platform for circular fashion – exchange, resale, repair, recycling, upcycling, donation. For the first time, we are enabling fashion brands to directly monetize after-sale services via Digital Product Passports,” the young entrepreneur continues.
In an interview with deutsche-startups.de he introduces Sally in detail.
How would you explain Sally to your grandmother?
Sally is an app that gives your clothes a second life. No matter whether you want to get rid of a piece or keep it, whether it is still like new or has lost a button – Sally will show you the best way to prevent it from gathering dust in the closet or ending up in the trash. Swap, sell, repair, donate, recycle: all in one place, in a few clicks.
How do you want to make money, so how exactly does your business model work?
You get started using our swap function: If you want to swap regularly, you pay an annual membership of 29.90 euros – with one month free to try out. In a second step, we will also monetize the other features such as sales, repairs and recycling. In the long term, we see the greatest potential in the B2B sector: brands can use Sally as a SaaS solution to offer their customers after-sales services – and thus earn money from the circular economy.
How did the idea for Sally come about?
I come from Peru, studied fashion design and then worked in textile factories in Italy – for houses whose names everyone knows. What I saw there stuck with me: mountains of overproduction, waste on an industrial scale. The realization was brutally simple: There is already enough clothing in the world. The problem is not production – it is circulation. Then when we realized that 99.9% of the people we spoke to had the same problem – clothes at home that no one wears anymore, with no clear path forward – we knew: This is our market.
What were the biggest challenges you have had to overcome so far?
Honestly: fundraising before launch. Almost all investors wanted to see traction – i.e. real users and transactions – before they got involved. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem for pre-launch startups: to grow, you need capital. But in order to get capital, you have to have already grown. We therefore decided to take the first steps on our own and work with real beta users to create evidence that speaks for itself.
Where will Sally be in a year?
We are now officially getting started – and in a year Sally should be firmly established in Germany: with a growing community, active exchange and sales activities on the platform and the first brand partnerships that show that circular economy can also be a real business model for companies. And yes: We plan to close a financing round during this period to accelerate growth.
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