F is for Fashion
Jaxi
Pre-loved fashion for the South-African market
Problem
The fast fashion industry is one of the world’s largest polluters, producing twice as much CO2 than aviation and shipping combined. Most of the clothing articles produced in this market also end up in the ocean, creating grabage patches and microplastics that negatively impact our ecosystem.
One small shop in Johannesburg, South Africa, started selling second hand clothes, cleaned and packaged at a discounted price to help combat these problems and also offer low-income south africans an alternative to fast-fashion. Things got out of hand however, and their small shop grew at an outstanding rate. Now, they approached us to scale their business to a platform for the entire country.
How we helped:
- Brand Design
- Brand Strategy
- Website Building
- Business Strategy
Insight
The experience of selling and buying second-hand clothes online has been really hard to nail down. Uploading, buying, checking reviews and receiving the delivery only to find something is wrong with your product and there is no way to get a refund. Some platforms preferred to have a hands-off approach, not intervening in the deals going on in the platform. Jaxi took a very different approach.
Our Solution
To solve the problems that plague second-hand fashion marketplaces currently, we proposed a more involved, supportive process, since our customer also had access to a physical location and workforce who could handle incoming orders. That’s why the Jaxi platform was acting more as a middle-man rather than a marketplace, receiving packages from sellers and handling delivery through the Paxi network. In addition, the platform would hold funds in escrow until the buyer confirmed the product he received was in order.
In addition to that, we implemented automated notifications for sellers, buyers and the Jaxi team to easily handle new orders. However, the focus of our development was in the user experience and how to simplify it so that for any interested user, it wouldn’t take more than 1 minute to upload a product to our platform. Taking a lot of cues from the European competitor, Vinted, we made sure there was clarity in the buying process, rating items as “Good”, “Fair” or “Almost new” and adding a broad tree of categories for each of our target segments.
Unfortunately, our partner in South Africa decided to no longer continue development because of personal reasons, but we think this type of platforms could be the future, not only for clothing but for other commerce products as well. If this idea sounds good to you, join us to run it as a co-founder!
