Interview with Farleigh Hungerford, Founder at Sustainable Fashion Startup: Farly.co

Farly.co is a new sustainable fashion tech startup aimed to solve the rise in fast fashion which is currently poisoning the environment. – and instead offers users a slow, more conscious and exciting place to shop online. In short, Farly.co is a profile-to-profile flea market that builds on the current conversations around circular and sustainability in fashion.

Our goal is to revolutionise the way people shop online. Its aim is to offer users a fun way to buy, sell and curate products among friends with a rewarded curation fee on influenced sales, so shopping online has never been so fun!

Farly.co is the antidote to the old world of fashion and consumerism. This new fashion tech startup offers users, from generation Z through to baby boomers, an opportunity to get involved in the future of sustainable fashion consumption.

A bit like Pinterest, but shoppable; a bit like Depop but more curated. Farly.co is simple to use, fun and easy to navigate, enabling users to create their very own virtual shop window, where users can curate and share the sustainable products that they love with friends. Users can design their own windows by quickly uploading images and then using an integrated editing tool to crop, clip and tweak their windows before publishing.

The site features an inbuilt click-to-buy check-out, profile-to-profile messaging, product search, an inventory and a shoppable newsfeed, making it user-friendly and simple to use.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I launched the company as a reaction to the fast fashion waste, mass production and onslaught of deadstock. The mission for Farly.co is to champion shopping that doesn’t wreck the planet, so each window features up to 10 items encouraging more considered and curated shopping trends. We also want to empower each of us to become our own trendsetter and share unique finds with friends.

Passionate about products from unique markets around the world Farly.co is creating a bi-directional e-commerce space that encourages a circular market space for a multitude of brands and individual sellers who all share a love of well-crafted, considered products.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
We soft-launched Farly.co in January 2021 and we received some great traction in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, SheerLuxe, The Industry as well as some more tech-focused editorials.

To date, the platform Farly.co has been boot-strapped by investment raised through family and friends though we are currently seeking investment and having conversations.
The community is growing organically with almost 500 users on board, and we are preparing for a wider launch later this year.
 

What can we hope to see from Farly.co in the future?

 
The next steps are to continue to build the community, launch to a wider audience later this year, raise finance so we can build a team, push marketing targets and build the app. The longer-term vision is to revolutionise the way people shop by making it fun, inspiring and responsible. We want to build a thriving community of buyers and sellers who all appreciate well-designed responsible products and the emotional value of those products.

We want to make it exciting for people to make money just by promoting and recommending great products and styles to their following.

I want to help build a future that is greener, fairer, healthier, more resilient, and more innovative than ever before. At the heart of my vision is for us to redefine consumer culture as: more conscious, more mindful and better informed.