Third Wave Fashion // AUGUST 2013 | Page 29

M OV E R S & S HA K E R S SARI AZOUT Bib + Tuck As mentioned in our Wedding Tech issue last month, recommerce startups are gaining traction and trending quickly. With a starting inventory level of zero, it's hard to go wrong. ere are, however, two major issues facing startups entering the space: community cultivation and the dumping of undesirables onto the market. Hailing from right here in New York, startup Bib + Tuck has found a way to capture the true experience of sharing clothes with a friend. Bib + Tuck is a member driven online community for fashion loving women seeking to exchange old items in for new ones. e company's philosophy is to have members post only items they themselves would exchange for, thus encouraging the creation of a high-end, fashionable marketplace. Similar to Tumblr's strategy of rewarding high quality content producers to quell the rise of junk content, the result has been extremely positive for Bib + Tuck. e company is quickly building a reputation as a bonded community of style influencers and tastemakers swapping out items from each other's closets. Intrigued by how successful and beautifully implemented the company's strategy has been, we reach out to Co-Founder Sari Azout for more information: What inspired you to start Bib + Tuck? Sari and I have been friends since preschool. We like to think that from the beginning, our love story was defined by a closeness of closets. 20+ years later, we were college grads living in the same building in NYC. As the economy took a nosedive, we began sharing clothes as a way to save time, space, and money. With small budgets, and even smaller spaces, access to each other's closets meant we suddenly had endless options. ey say necessity is the mother of invention and one day it dawned on us: what if there were a thousand more Sari's? A whole city's worth of closets to share? 200 packs of Post-Its later, Bib + Tuck was born. Bib + Tuck was and is the solution to our buyer's remorse without compromising the bad-itude of our closets. // 27