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Rental marketplace Hurr raises $5.4m to scale up its disruptive approach to fashion

Victoria Prew

Victoria Prew

Fashion rental marketplace Hurr has raised $5.4m (£4.1m) in seed funding and says it will use it to scale up its disruption of women’s fashion.

Hurr will use the investment from Octopus Ventures to expand its operations, invest in its technology and grow both its community and the number of partners that it works with in its white-label business.

The site, launched in 2019, already works with partners from Depop to Selfridges – with a physical presence in the retailer’s Oxford Street, London, store. It runs through a hybrid business model that  supports peer-to-peer fashion rentals while working in partnership with more than 85 fashion partners. Added to that, its white label service powers Selfridges Rental among others. 

London-based Hurr already puts its turnover at $2.5m (£1.9m) a year and will now look to grow that as it disrupts the women’s fashion industry – worth an estimated $1.4 trillion (£1.1tn) a year – by offering sustainable and circular alternatives to buying. 

Victoria Prew, chief executive and founder of Hurr, says: “I am absolutely convinced that the future of fashion is circular, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this accelerating consumer shift. In the UK alone, customers spend £2.7 billion on outfits they wear just once while more than $400bn (£3.02bn) of clothing is discarded across the globe each year – another shocking statistic. As a millennial, I’m part of a generation that loves shared ownership. We’ve all witnessed the rise of disruptive tech-first businesses such as Airbnb and Uber and if we can rent our houses and cars, why not our wardrobes.”

Hurr enables its customers to wear the latest brands and fashion trends through renting rather than buying, and uses in-house technology and its own wet-cleaning operation to do that. Investor Octopus Ventures is based in London and New York and its previous investments include Depop and Cazoo. 

Matt Chandler, consumer investor at Octopus Ventures, says: “Hurr is perfectly placed to capitalise on the shift towards new models of ownership and spearhead the transition to a more climate-friendly fashion industry. By operating the critical logistics functions needed for rental, it is able to provide a full-stack rental solution to existing brands, which in turn feeds the Hurr platform with amazing breadth and depth of supply. We see a huge opportunity for scale and are excited to leverage our experience working with Depop as we partner with Victoria and her team.”

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