Fomeno App: Simplifying thrift shopping

Fomeno App: Simplifying thrift shopping

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – With 2023 just times absent, several of us are generating a listing of new year’s resolutions. If just one of yours is to consist of far more sustainable techniques in your everyday living — 3 women of all ages from the College of South Dakota may possibly have just what you will need.

Likely from store to store to uncover the ideal outfit can be exhausting — especially when you’re going to thrift or vintage stores. Doing so on-line is even more of a hunt. That’s why three buddies from USD established anything less complicated.

“Fomeno is an application in which you can thrift from a bunch of diverse on line thrift, classic, upcycle retailers. So we provide a bunch of different inventory into just one site so it’s quick to find what you’re wanting for,” Fomeno co-founder Payton Ryz mentioned.

Brigit Blote, Payton Ryz and Ashlynn Atwood — co-founders of Fomeno. Image courtesy of Payton Ryz

Designed by Brigit Blote, Payton Ryz and Ashlynn Atwood, Fomeno will allow you to scroll as a result of outfit inspirations or look for for a thing particular. When you discover it, just simply click. From there, you’ll get recommendations for goods from additional than 50 distinctive on line thrift store companions. Simply click once extra and you are particularly exactly where you will need to be to make a invest in.

“We’re just seeking to truly simplify that method on the web and help join people so that we’re creating the style marketplace a lot more circular due to the fact fast vogue is like tremendous harmful to our ecosystem,” Ryz mentioned.

Quick fashion is the phrase for affordable clothing developed swiftly by mass-sector retailers in response to the latest trends. Minimizing rapidly manner is at the coronary heart of the mission of Fomeno.

“A large amount of people really do not even realize that a standard cotton t-shirt uses the similar quantity of water that somebody drinks in three decades. So it is like a mad quantity of methods that will take to deliver new outfits,” Ryz stated. “Also, these outfits are getting manufactured in factories across the country that we do not essentially see day-to-working day. They’re operating underneath severe conditions, getting paid out significantly less than a living wage. So form of halting that cycle of this mass creation of clothing that bought and then probably somebody will wear them a couple situations and then they’ll be lousy good quality so they throw them out. Or they just finish up in the thrift retailers.”

Photo courtesy of Payton Ryz

To start out their mission, the 3 pals applied for the Hult Prize, a competitors that group-resources strategies from college-degree pupils after tough them to clear up a pressing social concern — these types of as sustainability.

“At the conclusion of all that, we finished up becoming a single of the eleven folks that they chose to win a hundred thousand pounds. So that was actually cool, like so amazing, truly kickstarted anything,” Ryz mentioned.

From there, they expanded their workforce and hired Annie Lien as a model curator.

“It’s been so enjoyment for the reason that I’ve got to satisfy people today throughout the globe with so numerous distinctive styles and personalities and passions and just outlooks on lifestyle. It is been so thrilling,” Lien said.

This earlier November, they lastly introduced the Fomeno app.

“That was just about three decades right after we experienced very first commenced the opposition,” Ryz said. “It was a extensive journey but I assume that is the startup daily life. You keep grinding away and sooner or later, it clicks. We have genuinely been thankful to have a new enhancement and tech workforce on board.”

“If you opt for to store second-hand, like that little selection in your day to day existence is making these types of a massive big difference,” Lien claimed. “So just the slightest small alter in your shopper routine can make an enormous effect on the globe and the people today who live in it.”

Hear from Payton Ryz how Fomeno obtained its exceptional identify:

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

“We like to model ourselves as a ‘do good’ enterprise because that is our purpose,” Lien mentioned. “We want to assistance the world and we want to assistance the individuals on the earth simply because we’d like to protect it for our little ones to have and for their young children to have. Fighting versus the rapid manner business is one of our massive objectives.”

“So we constantly want to continue to keep that mission at core,” Ryz stated.

The Fomeno app is accessible now to download on Apple devices.