We recently connected with Kati Kanerva and have shared our conversation below.

Kati , appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

It’s easy to have ideas but it’s a lot harder to actually execute them. I had the Idea for couple of years to bring the rent a rack concept to US. The Idea itself is not a new, it’s been existing in Finland and many other countries for years but we were the first one to bring it to US.

After having the idea for couple of years, first we had to find a suitable place for our store. That took about 6 months to find a good space with a good foot traffic and right demographic for our business. After the space was found we builded up our website and made a marketing plan. Finding a great employees was also big part of the process. It was still a middle of pandemic so it was not ideal time to open up a new concept where people are shopping in actual store but luckily things started to open up again.

Our concept is new so we needed to find the vendors to sell their clothes with us. We contacted lot of Instagram influencers and luckily got many pretty big ones who wanted to sell their clothes with us. After getting the store decorated and all the racks booked we were ready to open the store.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We are ” Rent-a-rack” store which means you can rent a rack from our store and sell your preloved clothes. It’s a great way to make some extra money and recycle your clothes. Also Shop sustainably. If you ever wanted to shop your neigbors closets you can do it with us.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We contacted lot of social media influencers and asked if they wanted to sell their preloved clothes with us. Many influencers get gifted lot of great items and might only wear something once for the photoshoot so we knew they have lot of great clothes that our shoppers would appreciate. They were promoting their rack on social media and that’s how we got lot of new sellers, shoppers and a new followers on our Instagram.

We post stories about interesting items we have at the store every day so lot of people are following us to see what we have at the store. We also post wall posts couple of times a week and we do paid advertisement on Instagram which helps us to grow the following,

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Our community has helped us a lot in Atwater Village. Sellers made good sales selling with us and told their friends or someone made a great found at the store and pass that information to their friends. Also, we are so happy that lot of people make Instgram and Tik tok posts about us. We are completely new concept in US and usually people get excited to hear about the new way to sell and shop preloved clothes.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dresscueco.com
• Instagram: dresscue.la
• Facebook: Dresscue

Image Credits
Cara Mcfralane