One of the reasons I started Borro was to make a real difference to the world — corny I know. But as we’ve been looking at impact this week, I’ve realised I need to think BIGGER if I’m going to make a meaningful change.
At the size my business is now, yes, I might prevent a few people buying new clothes, but it feels about the same impact as remembering to turn out the lights. If I really want to help change this broken fashion industry, I need to dream bigger.
Seeing the founder of The Little Loop (a clothing rental business for older kids) on Dragons’ Den was an inspiration. All the dragons, bar one, made an offer — demonstrating they could see that this type of rental business could be a big success. Touker Suleyman asked about partnering with M&S, H&M, Zara and the like, which really made me think. If my business is going to grow to a size where I feel like I’ve made a significant impact, these are the sorts of partnerships I need to be aiming for. OK, so obviously neither me at Borro nor Charlotte at The Little Loop want to work with H&M or Zara due to their rather dubious ethical practices. But M&S, or John Lewis…. maybe, just maybe, that could work.
When I had to nail down what I wanted my impact to be this week, I started with aiming to reduce the amount of new baby clothes bought in the UK by 5%, which equates to about 30,000 customers. 30,000 sounds like a HUGE number to me at the moment, but 5%? seemed a bit measly. So my new goal is to reduce the amount of new baby clothes bought by 10% by 2030. That means 60,000 customers. Yep. 60,000. At the moment that doesn’t sound very realistic, but at the same time, if I only ever aim for 100 customers, then that’s what I’ll get (although I’d settle for that at the moment!).