Q&A with Bianca Rangecroft, Founder and CEO of Whering

Bianca Rangecroft is the Founder and CEO of Whering, a fashion technology app that allows you to digitize your wardrobe to see and style everything you own. Bianca worked at Goldman Sachs from 2017 to 2019 in the firm's Consumer and Investment Management Division in London.

When and why did you found Whering?
Bianca: I founded Whering in June 2020 out of a desire to change the personal styling landscape and the way we interact with our clothes. My goal is to upend the throwaway culture. For me, the fashion system is broken. There is a vicious cycle of not being able to see what one owns, impulse buying (never getting it quite right) and lack of inspiration in the styling process. We wanted to take this cycle digital and harness the power of machine learning to hyper-personalize our fashion experience.

Who is your target demographic and is the app available to a global audience?
Bianca: The app is available in many parts of the world and expansion to the United States is our next step. We are targeting millennial professional women who are style-conscious and sustainability curious. We created Whering for recovering lifestyle hypocrites like us: millennial women who are excited to take back ownership of their fashion consumption and the way they dress.

How is Whering making fashion more sustainable and environmentally friendly?
Bianca: Our mission is to extend the lifecycle of the idle clothes in our wardrobes. Sustainability is at the centre of everything we do at Whering. We are hoping to reduce the carbon and water footprint of consumers by focusing on the two parts of the value chain that they control including purchasing and utilization. By allowing our users to digitize their wardrobe, they are able to track what they wear, understand their most worn items, re-create different versions of their looks and become true outfit repeaters. We hope to create an impact dashboard for our clients to empower them to understand the impact of purchasing decisions and the beauty of offsetting certain behaviors with more conscious ones. We’re also onboarding a network of green dry-cleaners, donation points and repurposing services across the United Kingdom to make repurposing, mending and donating more intuitive.

Many feel like they have a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear. How does Whering help with this problem?
Bianca: The ‘I have nothing to wear’ dilemma feels universal and that sensation of being trapped in indecision is only too familiar. For me, part of the problem isn’t having nothing to wear, but having nothing new to wear. We keep buying because we think that just one more item will unlock our ideal wardrobe – but how can it if we have no accessible inventory of what we own?

We are using machine learning to offer tailored styling suggestions that enable you to view your wardrobe in a different way, receive new outfits ideas and get the jolt of novelty, which is not dissimilar from buying something new. Our aim is wardrobe zen and a good half of that is item cohesiveness. We help you identify what you really need to keep and what pieces can unlock outfit combinations you had no idea existed.

Since the app is in its early stages, how are you attracting new customers and what is a basic summary of your business plan?
Bianca: Our business model is a B2C freemium model with a subscription service for premium features. We also take a commission on each sale of sustainable product that our algorithm suggests to users based on their style preferences and wardrobe compatibility score. The long-term monetization strategy is a data play, but this will only become relevant once we scale.

Our customer acquisition plan is simple, engagement is everything to us (even more so than traditional retention). We started with a small group of incredibly engaged users and have focused on organic word of mouth. Now that we’ve seen a massive uptick in downloads, we’re focusing on delivering engagement through highly personalized content and shareable features that will enable us to benefit from network effects to attract more users who buy into our value proposition (as well as rolling out influencer marketing and PR).

How does Whering stack up with its competitors? What sets it apart from the crowd?
Bianca: The Whering team has the perfect balance between fostering a highly data driven culture and creative edge. We have worked hard for our brand to embody the look and feel of a heritage label whilst preserving the tone of a best friend. We feel this and our superior user experience is crucial for mass adoption and to not just be another ‘wardrobe organizer’ app. Our secret sauce is in the product. In only a couple of months of existence we have outperformed all the technology on the market. In under 13 seconds you can bulk upload pictures, which we instantly crop and automatically tag. This process makes it effortless to later search for your clothes. We have also incorporated functionalities that our competitors have not yet tapped into, giving us an opportunity to catch more of the available market. Most notably, these functionalities are focused on the hyper-personalization of our product (both on the sustainable shopping recommendations and on the styling side) and the soon to launch social components of our app.

What skills from your time at Goldman Sachs help you run Whering?
Bianca: Goldman Sachs employees share a drive for constant personal growth and entrepreneurship. I cultivated the passion to do better, work smarter and constantly re-evaluate my positioning. This has helped me grow as a tech founder. Something particularly valuable in our day-to-day operations is the concept of strategic direction verse tactical plays, which we implement at Whering to ensure we are constantly testing and tweaking (to help us find product market fit) while staying true to our North Star and mission.

Knowing what you don’t know is perhaps the most valuable realization as an early-stage founder. The ability to surround yourself with subject matter experts and call on their expertise is something the firm instills in you. I have been able to call on the Goldman Sachs network extensively to help me navigate a tough market to penetrate, build an incredible advisory board and efficiently hire. I carry my experience from Goldman Sachs with me in much of what I do, and it has helped me define the values upon which we built Whering, but above all in the way I communicate, motivate and engage my team. Being a team player is the single most powerful piece of the Goldman Sachs culture that I’ve retained at Whering and of which we are really proud.