Fomeno App: Simplifying thrift shopping
4 min read
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – With 2023 just times absent, quite a few of us are building a checklist of new year’s resolutions. If a single of yours is to contain additional sustainable procedures in your lifestyle — 3 girls from the University of South Dakota may have just what you will need.
Likely from retailer to shop to discover the fantastic outfit can be exhausting — particularly when you are going to thrift or vintage stores. Carrying out so on line is even more of a hunt. Which is why three good friends from USD created one thing a lot easier.
“Fomeno is an application where by you can thrift from a bunch of diverse on the net thrift, classic, upcycle stores. So we provide a bunch of distinctive stock into one particular spot so it is straightforward to obtain what you’re hunting for,” Fomeno co-founder Payton Ryz said.
Established by Brigit Blote, Payton Ryz and Ashlynn Atwood, Fomeno makes it possible for you to scroll by way of outfit inspirations or lookup for some thing particular. The moment you obtain it, just simply click. From there, you will get tips for products from additional than 50 distinct on the web thrift retail outlet companions. Click on once much more and you are exactly wherever you need to have to be to make a buy.
“We’re just trying to actually simplify that process on line and assist join men and women so that we’re making the manner sector extra circular mainly because rapidly fashion is like tremendous harmful to our natural environment,” Ryz claimed.
Quickly trend is the time period for affordable clothing produced fast by mass-industry vendors in response to the most up-to-date traits. Reducing fast trend is at the coronary heart of the mission of Fomeno.
“A lot of persons never even know that a fundamental cotton t-shirt uses the exact same sum of water that someone beverages in 3 years. So it’s like a nuts amount of money of resources that will take to deliver new clothes,” Ryz reported. “Also, these clothes are currently being developed in factories throughout the place that we don’t necessarily see day-to-day. They are doing work beneath severe conditions, obtaining paid much less than a dwelling wage. So form of halting that cycle of this mass creation of dresses that bought and then probably an individual will don them a pair times and then they’ll be very poor good quality so they throw them out. Or they just close up in the thrift shops.”

To commence their mission, the 3 close friends used for the Hult Prize, a competitiveness that crowd-sources strategies from college-stage learners right after hard them to clear up a urgent social situation — these types of as sustainability.
“At the close of all that, we ended up being 1 of the eleven individuals that they chose to earn a hundred thousand bucks. So that was really cool, like so incredible, really kickstarted all the things,” Ryz stated.
From there, they expanded their team and hired Annie Lien as a design and style curator.
“It’s been so exciting due to the fact I have received to satisfy men and women throughout the globe with so a lot of distinct kinds and personalities and passions and just outlooks on everyday living. It is been so exciting,” Lien explained.
This earlier November, they finally released the Fomeno app.
“That was just about 3 decades immediately after we had first begun the levels of competition,” Ryz explained. “It was a lengthy journey but I think that is the startup daily life. You preserve grinding absent and at some point, it clicks. We have truly been grateful to have a new growth and tech crew on board.”
“If you opt for to store second-hand, like that tiny option in your daily everyday living is creating these a huge change,” Lien explained. “So just the slightest tiny transform in your customer behavior can make an huge impression on the globe and the individuals who live in it.”
Hear from Payton Ryz how Fomeno got its exceptional name:
Four younger, feminine business owners leaving a greener footprint on this Earth.
“We like to brand ourselves as a ‘do good’ business since that is our target,” Lien explained. “We want to enable the world and we want to support the folks on the world since we’d like to preserve it for our little ones to have and for their young children to have. Battling in opposition to the quickly style market is a single of our significant ambitions.”
“So we constantly want to keep that mission at main,” Ryz explained.
The Fomeno app is obtainable now to obtain on Apple gadgets.