It was November 2015. I wasn’t an expert in Instagram but I realized that lots of the followers of my friend were asking about where to buy those items she was wearing in those pictures she was posting. That was the reason I came up with the idea for influencers could sell through Instagram.

My friend Alex Rivière ( @ariviere ) and I had a meeting to talk about the idea. She liked it but she suggested to change it a little bit.

We all know fashion influencers receive clothes from different brands in order to be promoted. They also go shopping and after several days, weeks or months they have amount of clothes they don’t have time to wear so they organize fashion markets and put all that clothes to sell. But organizing those fashion markets isn’t easy. And that was how Bitrendy was born, a platform where users could buy fashion influencer’s own clothes. We offered a full service to influencers: we picked up their clothes, we kept it in our offices, we put it on sale and managed shipping and we charged a commission for each sale.

After one year pivoting, A/B testing and asking fashion influencers I thought I had a good product and decided to apply Conector startup accelerator program to “accelerate“ growth and look for traction and repetition in order to close seed round investment.

Conector was very helpful and I have to thank to all my mentors I had and helped me: Micky Ribera (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickyribera/), Ivan Ruiz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanruiz/), Marc Ros (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-ros-78ba235/) and David Tomàs (https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-tomas/).

During the accelerator program I got investment from Enisa. Enisa is a type of loan specific for small and middle companies from the Spanish goverment. With the investment received we hired 4 people and offcially moved to our office. Also but not less important, we changed the name of the company from Bitrendy to Buytrendy. The main reason was because new name better explained what we were doing but also because an entrepreneur from USA told me every word starting with “bi“ would be always related to something bisexual. As you can imagine I didn’t want that perception for the company.

Other startups joined Coenctor Accelerator Program

With the new name Buytrendy we started to have more sales and more influencers were joining. We created a video for new launching and during last three months we had $10K in revenue and 53 fashion influencers in the platform with 1.200 items to sell.

Moreover we wanted to keep growing as quick as possible and increase our sales margin so we decided to create and manage our own clothes with designs from our influencers. We asked four of them to design a t-shirt and we would sell them on the platform.

We were doing good but we experienced how fast you run out of money. And that’s the reason I should have started dealing with investors sooner. Buytrendy solved a current problem but at the same time had other problems like scalability because at that moment we had the stock in our offices. What would happen if we doubled the number of influencers in the platform? I can tell you there wasn’t enough space so we should have rent another office or a big store? At the end, after few weeks trying and dealing with many investors we couldn’t raise seed round and had to close.

Being an entrepreneur is very exciting and hard and I’m proud of what I did and more specially to give it a try and run my own business. I know some day I’ll do it again and hopefully put in practice all I learned from my lasts experiences.

Buytrendy, fashion influencer's closet