“Not content with the conscious consumerism bona fides available at more stores, the founders of the new site Zady are making it easier to buy clothes with character that will last.”
If experiences truly beat objects as a path to consumer happiness, the next obvious step in retail is translating objects, as much as possible, into experiences. The approach was spearheaded by the sustainable consumer, for whom to trust is to verify. Increasingly everyone from Whole Foods to Etsy to Chipotle is seeking to provide maximum context on the organic, artisanal, and fair-trade bona fides of their offerings.
Now comes Zady, a new “conscious consumption” online retail company, founded by two women on the cusp of 30, Soraya Darabi, a startup advisor and cofounder of Foodspotting, with her high school friend Maxine Kaye, née Bedat, who founded the nonprofit, fair-trade direct sustainable home goods business Bootstrap Project and whose resume also includes a turn as a law clerk at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Their goal: to move from a world of fast fashion and Bangladeshi factory collapses, to one of products made with integrity to last.
NOTE: SF Entrepreneur had some scathing comments at the bottom of this article. We’ll have to see if Zady has what it takes to pull this venture off.
SFEntreprenuer:
Soraya has no idea what she is doing with Zady. She got funding without any traction. Eugene Chung, the VC who lead her round from NEA, moved on to TechStars where he was fired after just barely a few months. Idiots help idiots. Zady was supposed to launch last year, but Soraya didn’t understand the buying cycles so its launch was delayed by a whole year. It should be noted that the $1.35M will be depleted soon after they launch and they will be raising yet another round of VC funding. –> BEACHMINT Part II, another NEA investment.
At what point are people (bloggers) going to realize Soraya was not a co-founder of Foodspotting? Or that she left Foodspotting at least a year before the acquisition? I wonder how the founders of Foodspotting feel about her co-opting their achievements!
Continue reading at: Curating A Collection Of Slow Fashion | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation.
