Our Story

Over consumption is one of the major challenges facing sustainability in the world today. Our preferences are changing with a blink of an eye, and we move on to the next best trend real quick! Especially in today’s culture with the rise in social media, once something is photographed, it’s deemed a big social suicide to wear or use the item again. Okay, that might be a bit over exaggerated, but we are living in a world that is rapidly evolving and we’re constantly trying to play catch up. This endless evolution of preferences come at a high cost, both environmentally and monetarily. So… what’s the solution?

My solution was always to borrow from my cousin for specific occasions and sometimes get her hand me downs. In our family, we were always taught to share and an unspoken motto we had was “what’s mine is yours” or “what doesn’t fit me, you can have.” With 46 cousins total, that meant the world was our oyster. But we all grew up and for the most part, live miles apart from each other now all over the globe. The ones that are still close to me in vicinity are not my size and we definitely don’t have the same style!

Now a-days, the rise in rental companies over the past few years along with second-hand online retailers that are booming, are both viable solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the thrift world and buying second-hand pieces. But for occasional items, it just still wasn’t worth the high fraction of the item cost I was paying, along with the cost of cleaning and maintenance, and the fact that I was hoarding everything! My tiny apartment closet simply didn’t have space for it. Marie Kondo would surely not approve of it. But how could I throw out my beautiful gold-sequined dress I wore to my cousin’s wedding in Puerto Rico 5 years ago? I tried selling it on Poshmark and gave up. The sequins had fallen, and the cost of dry cleaning and fixing it were just not worth it. I also didn’t have the time to take good quality photos, post it, and continue back-and-forth conversation with prospective buyers.

So, then there is the option of renting. It’s lovely to see so many brands now experimenting with their own form of rental services. I tried out many different rental platforms, and what I noticed was most of them were subscription services. As a lover of many brands, I would want to subscribe to multiple platforms, and that all together would be costly and just time consuming. It would be worth it if I was someone who experimented with my style on the daily, but I was only looking for occasional items for a specific one-time use. I just didn’t see the value.

The flaws in the systems brought the idea of Allborrow as an alternative resolution. Allborrow’s story is a conglomerate of many moments throughout the past 2 years, that once accumulated, ended up in a big Aha! moment.

With Allborrow, we’re taking it way back to the day’s where we were taught that sharing is caring. We serve to promote a sharing culture and allows access over ownership: where consumers can borrow occasional items without the burden of ownership, all while reducing their carbon footprint and the dent in their pockets.