Fomeno App: Simplifying thrift shopping

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – With 2023 just times absent, several of us are making a listing of new year’s resolutions. If one particular of yours is to contain extra sustainable methods in your life — three gals from the College of South Dakota may have just what you will need.

Going from retail store to store to come across the fantastic outfit can be exhausting — particularly when you are likely to thrift or classic outlets. Undertaking so on the internet is even a lot more of a hunt. That is why three good friends from USD designed a thing less complicated.

“Fomeno is an app where you can thrift from a bunch of unique on the web thrift, vintage, upcycle stores. So we bring a bunch of diverse stock into 1 place so it is effortless to locate what you are seeking for,” Fomeno co-founder Payton Ryz reported.

Established by Brigit Blote, Payton Ryz and Ashlynn Atwood, Fomeno enables you to scroll through outfit inspirations or lookup for anything certain. As soon as you obtain it, just click. From there, you will get suggestions for things from more than 50 various online thrift retail outlet companions. Click once a lot more and you’re specifically where by you need to have to be to make a obtain.

“We’re just making an attempt to seriously simplify that procedure on the web and assistance hook up men and women so that we’re creating the trend field far more round simply because speedy vogue is like super detrimental to our setting,” Ryz mentioned.

Speedy style is the phrase for economical garments created fast by mass-market vendors in response to the latest traits. Minimizing quick style is at the heart of the mission of Fomeno.

“A large amount of people today really do not even recognize that a basic cotton t-shirt uses the exact sum of drinking water that anyone drinks in three decades. So it’s like a mad amount of money of resources that requires to deliver new outfits,” Ryz mentioned. “Also, these garments are remaining made in factories across the state that we really do not automatically see working day-to-day. They’re working below severe conditions, obtaining paid out a lot less than a dwelling wage. So variety of stopping that cycle of this mass creation of clothes that acquired and then probably another person will use them a pair moments and then they’ll be poor good quality so they throw them out. Or they just conclude up in the thrift shops.”

To start their mission, the three pals utilized for the Hult Prize, a levels of competition that crowd-sources ideas from college-degree learners following difficult them to remedy a pressing social challenge — such as sustainability.

“At the end of all that, we finished up becoming 1 of the eleven folks that they chose to gain a hundred thousand dollars. So that was truly great, like so amazing, seriously kickstarted almost everything,” Ryz explained.

From there, they expanded their staff and employed Annie Lien as a design curator.

“It’s been so exciting for the reason that I have got to fulfill people across the globe with so a lot of unique kinds and personalities and interests and just outlooks on existence. It is been so fascinating,” Lien explained.

This past November, they lastly released the Fomeno app.

“That was almost a few many years just after we had first commenced the competitors,” Ryz explained. “It was a extensive journey but I assume that is the startup lifestyle. You keep grinding away and ultimately, it clicks. We have definitely been grateful to have a new improvement and tech workforce on board.”

“If you pick out to store second-hand, like that minor alternative in your daily daily life is producing such a big variation,” Lien stated. “So just the slightest very little adjust in your purchaser behavior can make an massive effects on the world and the people who reside in it.”

Listen to from Payton Ryz how Fomeno got its exceptional name:

4 younger, female entrepreneurs leaving a greener footprint on this Earth.

“We like to brand ourselves as a ‘do good’ corporation due to the fact that is our target,” Lien said. “We want to help the planet and we want to aid the persons on the earth due to the fact we’d like to maintain it for our small children to have and for their youngsters to have. Battling versus the quickly manner industry is one of our major targets.”

“So we generally want to hold that mission at main,” Ryz reported.

The Fomeno application is out there now to download on Apple gadgets.