RÊVE EN VERT: filling a significant gap in the market for luxury fashion made responsibly

• THE IDEA

  PRODUCTS & SERVICES

  Rêve En Vert features sustainable luxury fashion and accessories for women from more than 20 designers, including Pamela Love, Ryan Roche, Christopher Raeburn and Lemlem. A visit to our site is an experience that includes sophisticated imagery, dynamic editorial content and in-depth interviews with our designers. We only carry designers who operate their businesses with respect for people and the planet.

  We define Sustainable Luxury as “Quality Fashion Made From a Place of Consciousness”. We believe luxury is the result of quality materials and thoughtful production rather than just a price point. To this end, we offer investment pieces for women who won’t sacrifice style for ethics.

  PROBLEM SOLVED

  Women want to shop for fashion responsibly, but until now, there has not been an easy way to do so. Rêve En Vert is changing the way sophisticated women shop and solving a substantial need for the conscious consumer by placing many sustainable designers on one platform.

  There is a shift in consumer behavior – they want to understand the origins of products they buy, from groceries (Whole Foods) to health & beauty (The Honest Company) to autos (Tesla). Fashion is the next market to embody this shift and we are positioned to lead it. Major fashion brands (The Kering Group, Eileen Fisher) are reworking their businesses to meet self-imposed sustainability standards. We are already there.

  REVENUE MODEL

  Our website has been live for 21 months. We’ve made sales to 20 unique countries, with most in the UK and US. We have been in a beta phase and with additional investment, we can scale. When the site launched, we had 700 unique users and we now have nearly 5,000 unique users/month. We are acquiring users organically via SEO as we have not had a formal marketing budget. We leverage social media, have conducted successful influencer campaigns, and are working with a marketing firm to optimize our social media positioning. Over the next year, we have allocated 26% of our fundraise to marketing. We have allocated this spend across Affiliate Marketing, Ad Words, Retargeting and Online Display.

  EXIT STRATEGY

  We believe that sustainability in fashion is unavoidable. Given the small steps by established players in the industry toward more sustainable practices, we think the growth opportunity for us is significant as we are not a huge company in the position of having to implement a costly retooling process. Once we scale, we will be an attractive acquisition target for an existing fashion retailer looking to enter the sustainable realm. One question we get is “What if Net-A-Porter decides to enter the sustainable fashion market?” Our answer is twofold: (1) It would only make the market bigger, which would be positive for us, and (2) we would be an obvious acquisition target for NAP.

Source: icnw