"Most people want convenience. So as an enterprise, if you can provide convenience, that's when you will have a sense of community come in."
Swapaholic marketed how small changes could help the planet, and people stayed apathetic. What worked was a great deal, something cool and a pickup service.
"It's one of the ways you consume. It is not the way you consume."
Fashion used to have four seasons. Now new clothes drop every week, 52 microseasons a year, and shoppers move between brands and ways of buying.
"In the shop I said we're never going to buy bags. Customers have to bring their own bags."
The early rule was that nothing shipped out could be plastic. Then the biodegradable mailers fell apart on the clothes, and a noble cause still needed a cost line and a reputation check.
"If you want to be sustainable while doing good, you do have to think about profit."
One of the first things a Harvard Extension course taught her was the triple bottom line. For years she took two of the three more seriously.
"I've gained a lot of knowledge capital from making those terrible, terrible mistakes."
Asked what she would do differently, she said to try the idea as an MVP before a full-fledged business, once the key assumptions have been proved.
In her early twenties, Priyanka Shahra had an ASOS parcel at her door every week and wore it like a badge of honour. She never stopped to ask how it could be that cheap. A few years later, studying sustainability, she found out. Fashion is one of the most polluting industries on the planet. Around 100 billion garments are made every year, and most of them end up burnt or buried. So the woman who swore she would never work in fashion built Swapaholic, a Singapore community closet where you swap in clothes you no longer wear for points and swap out something you will, and later DinoStaury, a values brand for children.
We get into what ten years of trying to change consumer behaviour has taught her: people say they care, but they act on convenience, value and what feels cool, and fashion has no loyalty. We follow a garment from cotton field or petrochemical lab to the incinerator, and talk about why returns and recycling cost more than making a new shirt, certificates that can be bought, 52 micro-seasons a year, and why sustainable brands lose on price before they start.
And the founder's half: biodegradable packaging that fell apart on the clothes, a cassava-starch bag too small for a gown that ended in a shouting match and a run of angry Google reviews, years of undervaluing the profit leg of the triple bottom line, and why it is easier to never learn a bad habit than to unlearn one.
This one is for anyone building something good for the planet who has been told the customer will come because the cause is right.
Swapaholic & Priyanka — Highlights:
→ A Singapore clothes-swapping community closet: swap in clothes for points, swap out others, sell closets, buy brands' past-season stock
→ Certified B Corp since August 2024 and a registered social enterprise
→ Founded in 2017, with DinoStaury, a values brand for children, as the second business
→ Runs community swap events and "swap your mindset" sessions