The New Rules of Wedding Dressing with By Rotation Founder | Eshita Kabra-Davies
Here Comes the Bride
In this episode, Eshita Kabra-Davies, founder of By Rotation, discusses how the peer-to-peer fashion rental model is transforming wedding at
Key takeaways
- By Rotation has grown into a community of over 600,000 members facilitating designer fashion rentals.
- Renting high-end pieces like Vivienne Westwood or Stella McCartney offers an affordable way to access luxury for single events.
Main topics
- Sustainable fashion rental
- Multicultural wedding etiquette
Notable quotes
Nothing new needs to be .added to the world's wardrobe.
Conclusion
The episode serves as a guide for modern, eco-conscious brides and gue
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Who doesn't want their wedding? Who doesn't want to be in Vogue? Yes. Guests wearing white. No, please don't. I was told to pack a ski mask and a bikini because they wouldn't tell me where I was going. And I was like, it has to be Ken. And it was. Speaker 1 (0:13) Don't imagine this to be the best day of your life. Don't overcomplicate it. Wearing the same outfit to two weddings in a row. Fine or faux pas? I wouldn't. You can rent. Come on. You have no excuse now. Speaker 1 (0:34) My guest today built a business from an idea sparked on her honeymoon. Ashita Kabra-Davies, founded by Rotation in 2019 after a trip home to Rajasthan, bought her face-to-face with the scale of textile waste. And she built it on a single principle, that nothing new needs to be added to the world's wardrobe. It is now a peer-to-peer fashion rental platform with more than 600,000 members and women and brides can rent designer wedding dresses on it from names including Jenny Packham and Stella McCartney. She also had her own multicultural wedding celebrations blending Indian tradition with British so she knows precisely what goes into planning and how many outfits one wedding can demand. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on to Here Comes the Bride. Thank you for having me Georgie. I must also just add that you've just had a baby three weeks ago. So honestly, I don't even know how you're here. It's so kind of you to have made the time for us. Speaker 2 (1:29) It's good to get out of the house. And I love talking about weddings and wedding guest outfits because, you know, that's a big thing for bi rotation. I love Speaker 1 (1:37) that. How are you feeling there? Speaker 2 (1:39) Feeling good, feeling better being out and about from the house. I mean, I think both of us are founders. We like to be active. We like to still have a sense of who we are, who we were. So being here is great. Thank you for inviting me. Speaker 1 (1:52) You're a superstar. Thank you. Why don't we start by you telling us a little bit about who you are and for anyone who doesn't know what BiRotation is. So Speaker 2 (2:02) I'm Ishita. I am the founder and CEO of BiRotation. We're a social network. So essentially an app, kind of like the Instagram of Fashion Rental or the Airbnb of fashion, as people have called us. It's essentially a sharing economy where women are lending and renting designer fashion with each other, thereby making more than £200,000 a year just from lending out their clothes. So it used to be a side hustle for a lot of women on the app, and now it's actually become a full-time gig, which is offering lots of flexibility. It's allowing people to become their own entrepreneurs. you know, it's become so much more than design and labels for less. And I think that financial empowerment side of things has been this byproduct of this idea that I had, as you said, while I'm still working full time in finance. So I'm just like really excited by what it's become, which is a community of women sharing things with each other. Speaker 1 (3:12) That's so amazing. Honestly, what you've created is incredible. Thank you. And so tell us about how you thought of that idea. I know it was something that you thought about on your honeymoon. Is that right? Speaker 2 (3:21) Yeah. I mean, I was already kind of thinking about the outfits that I wanted to wear on my honeymoon. I'm sure, like yourself, you must be planning all your itinerary back to back. So I had the spreadsheet, I had the outfits that I was going to wear, the setting they would be in. Love it. All the different places we were staying, the cities we were exploring in Rajasthan. And that's when I was like, it would be so cool if I could borrow clothes just for this trip because I'm not sure I need like clothes that are for a desert and a safari. while I live in London, which is always cloudy and rainy, although not at the moment. Not now, not in 2020. Climate crisis is real. It's hot. Speaker 1 (4:04) And Speaker 2 (4:04) that's when I was thinking about this idea. So when I was planning the honeymoon, I was also looking at what were the options out there. And turns out there was a gap in the market, especially in the UK, where there were no rental companies and nothing digital anyway. that offered more casual, more holiday contemporary clothing. It was a lot of like, you know, gowns and, you know, things that you'd wear maybe to weddings and hats and such, but nothing that was a bit more casual. And that's when I thought, okay, well, there's definitely a gap here, but I also want this to be more like Airbnb and Uber where I could borrow things from other fashionable women that we see on Instagram. you know, posting their outfit of the day photos, OOTD. And I'd also like to monetize the wardrobe that I've collected because I'm such a shopaholic from Singapore. And then that's when I, you know, started thinking about it. And it was only on my honeymoon when I saw a lot of textile waste in my suburban hometown, which I hadn't been to for over 14 years, that I saw a lot of textile waste. And I started thinking back about how many Made in India labels I had seen on clothing and how a lot of this clothing was being purchased in Western countries and then being donated, which ultimately end up in landfills in India and a lot of African countries. And that's when I thought the system is broken and it's impacting my own people. So why not I create a solution where people can share things with each other? And we can stop consuming so much fast fashion. So it was really about tackling fast fashion. Speaker 1 (5:51) But Speaker 2 (5:51) we've evolved to really become very aspirational where people are now renting items that are premium designer luxury and are competing with price points of, say, Zara and H &M. And on that sustainability Speaker 1 (6:07) piece, often, you know, people are only wearing their wedding dress or their wedding outfit once. you know, it can feel like a large investment and a big purchase, but it's not sustainable if you're only wearing it once. What kind of advice would you give to brides and women looking at that moment right now? I mean, I was Speaker 2 (6:24) completely guilty of this. So, you know, got married with an, you know, my husband's English. So we had an Anglo-Indian wedding. And if you know Indian weddings, they occur over multiple days. There are multiple occasions and there are multiple outfits which all have dress codes and themes. And I was one of those brides, you know, I had a theme for every single one of our five events and they had to be a dia too. I wanted people to wear Indian outfits and a lot of my guests were in Indian. So, you know, they had to go and purchase outfits for the wedding. And I think I look back at it and I was like, wow, I was, I was probably, you know, a big. sort of contributed to this wasteful, you know, rhetoric that we see within the wedding industry. And now with obviously founding By Rotation, you know, wedding guest dressing and also something borrowed, having a more modern take on it, which is through rental, has been, you know, they're two of our most rented occasions, rented for occasions, which make complete sense. And, you know, if I was getting married again, 100 % everything would be rented, would be borrowed, would be shared. It just makes so much sense. And I do feel like, you know, one of the things that we've seen growing a lot on bi-rotation is this concept of something borrowed, which, you know, something blue, something borrowed. Love it. And everyone's kind of renting for that. And I think. We saw in the earlier days, it was things like the shrimp's bag, you know, the beaded one. Yeah, that Speaker 1 (8:01) was iconic at a civil ceremony. Exactly. And Speaker 2 (8:04) then it's now kind of evolved into people renting Vivienne Westwood gowns. Amazing. That they're renting from another bride. Because, I mean, these gowns are like £6,000 worth, you know. And you kind of know what you want. And they're quite classic. And if you can find something that fits you anyway. then you might as well rent it because you're going to be wearing it not even for a full day, but for a few hours, right? Yes. It's just kind of interesting seeing that my own wedding, which I think was probably, you know, not very sustainable, could actually have a sustainable do-over thanks Speaker 1 (8:40) to the company that I built. It's amazing. I love that. Do you think that there's still sort of like a stigma about renting your wedding outfit? Or do you think we've sort of moved past that? And what you see is that? brides are happy to rent. I Speaker 2 (8:53) mean, I think it's very cool. It's become so cool that, you know, a lot of large fashion publications and prestigious ones have actually written about the brides who rented their wedding outfits and their wedding accessories. So yeah, it's kind of like what the cool girl does, what the tastemaker does. And I think we've made it very accessible, very approachable. I think it gives Speaker 1 (9:20) you brownie points. And from what you see, is it the whole wedding outfit that they're renting or is it pieces? Is it for the hen? Yeah, I mean, we also have a Speaker 2 (9:29) honeymoon collection. We have a hen do collection. We've seen people renting for specific things like their civil ceremony. And then obviously there are some brides, as I mentioned, who've been renting full on gowns. which are like the Vivienne Westwood gowns. There's another brand called Pronovias. We've seen Elisab on the app as well. There's also... Speaker 2 (9:56) Rose Etienne. Oh yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I think the short dress. Yeah, they do. It's been so interesting, like seeing all the different sort of new trends and brands that have come up and what are really being rented. But yeah, we've seen people rent like full on gowns for the main, the main event of their wedding. You know, our common