‘If not me then who? If not now, then when?’ This is the mantra for fashion tech entrepreneur Eshita Kabra. These words grace the wall of her studio which also happens to be both the By Rotation headquarters and her own London home.

Words: Emily Armstrong

While planning her honeymoon, Eshita Kabra longed to wear the designer fashion she saw on Instagram, without having to invest in so many outfits for her trip. She wondered how she could borrow them, and the idea of rotating fashion between a community was born. Three months later, while actually on honeymoon in India, she made the heartbreaking realisation that the fashion she loved so much was in fact causing absolute devastation to her beloved home country. This became the truth that has underpinned the ethos of her fashion tech start-up, By Rotation, and the wider acclaim for its contribution to sustainable fashion.

In just two years, By Rotation has gained momentum and garnered attention as the leading community-led fashion rental app. As founder and CEO Eshita prefers the focus of the business to be on customer satisfaction and numbers, not herself as an entrepreneur, however, the two are intrinsically woven together, along with the customer who is at the heart of it all.  

Although deeply driven, Eshita is also an entrepreneur who is measured, humble and pragmatic. She will not yet claim success despite the many accolades, like being inducted to the Forbes 30 under 30 for technology earlier this year. Although admitting the attention is validating, she believes there is no time for pause to celebrate. 

A self-described ‘third culture kid’, Eshita was born in Rajasthan, moved with her family to Singapore as a toddler and was raised there. She then spent several years at university in the US and the last decade in the UK. “That's why I call myself a third culture kid. I've got a little bit of my upbringing from everywhere, and I'm very much a global citizen.” This global mindset is inherent in all that Eshita Kabra does – from planning the strategy of By Rotation to understanding her customers, to recruiting her team. 

Photography: Helene Sandberg

Photography: Helene Sandberg

The light bulb moment for By Rotation was two-fold: “I was planning my honeymoon which was back to Rajasthan, my motherland, and I wanted to wear nice outfits, designer outfits, for this holiday”, says Eshita. “And I thought, wow it would be nice if I could just borrow what all these very fashionable women on Instagram tend to be wearing just once, for this trip. So I started looking into fashion rental, looking at companies such as White Closet in China, Rent the Runway in the US, Style Theory in Singapore, and I realised that the UK, despite being a very fashion-conscious country and also one that's quite forward when it comes to tech, had no real fashion rental solution, which was kind of surprising.”

“It wasn't until my honeymoon, three and a half months later, when I started to realize the problem of textile waste”, she elaborates. “This is in suburban India where it's not just the photos that you see on The Guardian, where they have all these pictures of landfill outside Delhi and Bombay, this is just in suburban hometowns where I was born, and that's when I couldn't help but start thinking that I too had bought a lot of clothes just for this holiday and I'm not sure how much I'm going to wear them, and I wasn't sure if I was going to wear them enough times to warrant owning them.”

Back home in London, Eshita got serious about her idea. “I started looking into the fashion industry and realised just how polluting it is. I learnt that it was even more polluting than the maritime and aviation industries combined, which is crazy because you think that people are always complaining that if you travel too much, you're harming the planet, but it turns out what you're wearing every day is a very questionable aspect as well when it comes to sustainability and climate crisis.”

“So that's when I realised that I could create a fashion rental platform, which would be about women sharing what they already owned with each other, so this Air BNB, this Uber, these sharing economy analogies came to mind,” she recalls. “So I just sort of started with a very ugly beta platform, it's like a web-based white-label platform, and I have been a graphic designer and a web designer since the age of 11, so I was using all these skills that I knew when I was much younger and it all felt full circle, but I did it over the evenings and the weekends, as I still had my day job in finance.” 

Eshita continued to plan By Rotation as a side hustle for the first six months, and finally quit her job the day that the app launched. “We planned it according to that, because it was getting to a stage where we were getting a lot of press, photos of me were being used and I didn't want my colleagues to find something and be like ‘What's going on here?’”, she tells us. “It was great because I wanted to know, 'am I doing this because it just feels like something I want to do now, because I'm bored, or was it something I actually really wanted to do?' Even on the evenings, the weekends, and miss out on hanging out with my friends, going for brunch, doing Pilates, all of that. Was I willing to give all that up to do this? And obviously, it was good that I had a salary because I was paying some freelancers who were helping me out with marketing then, so yes, I think it's good to know how much you want it.”

What is unique about the platform Eshita has created is the focus on the consumer. This isn’t a glamorous aspirational marketing strategy that tries to sell a dream to its customers. By Rotation is all about the customers. “I wanted to approach the solution where the customers are feeling very included and involved, and there isn't a big divide between the brand and the customer, and I think that happens a lot with the fashion industry,” she explains. “We wanted to create an inclusive and an approachable community, a brand that people felt warm about and that they wanted to be a part of.”

Being a global citizen, coupled with her experience working within the finance sector, has informed much of this desire Eshita has to represent diversity, not just in race and gender but in socio-economic demographics too. She wants to offer the circular economy and the chance to be empowered by sustainable fashion choices to all people, at all price points. 

“It's not just the whole race question or size inclusivity question but it's also about making it inclusive to people so that they can afford it. I think sustainable fashion, this terminology and this whole space in fashion, has been reserved for people who can afford to buy independent designers and dresses that cost three or four hundred pounds because there are fewer produced and fewer quantities, and therefore there are no economies of scale there.”

“What's been really important for me is to make sure that By Rotation as a platform can include even the mass market customer who shops at Primark, on Oxford Street or Westfield, so they do have an alternative to buying yet another 20, 30-pound dress that they're going to throw away by end of the year.”

This strategy appears to be working. Customers are relating to the honest and empowering marketing, the inclusive vibe and the variety of product and price points. “It’s been so important to me to do a lot of user-generated content to show average women for our marketing”, Eshita tells us. “Nothing is flashy, nothing is flamboyant, nothing is super polished because none of us are super polished, and people relate to that, we've seen that in our numbers. People just like to see actual reviews from actual customers, not models, not airbrushed photos.”

Photography: Helene Sandberg

This kind of business acumen and consumer insight feels intrinsic to Eshita, but she has also studied and worked hard to get to the place from which she felt ready to launch her start-up. Undergraduate degrees both in the US and the UK were followed by a business school in London, and she then spent over six years in the finance sector. Her perspective on diversity there is an interesting one. “A lot of people think that the financial services industry is very male-dominated, which is true in terms of the statistics, but I would say one of the things that I loved about the industry was that it was very big on merit, so anyone who is working at one of these prestigious firms, have mostly all gotten in there not because they knew the right people but more because they just apply their skillsets, and they worked hard to get there. So, I love the diversity that I saw in the industry, there were a lot of people from all over the world, who studied geography, investment banking, English, they just came from very different backgrounds, even their socio-economic status was very different. I liked that because there's a difference in opinions and different perspectives, which ensures that you don't fall into herd mentality.”

On the transition from the finance to the fashion sector, Eshita says, “I think I probably had a bit of a shock when I was trying to enter the fashion or even the sustainable fashion space, which I think it's still predominantly white female, from a particular part of town who went to a particular university and school, and from a particular socio-economic status. And I think that was surprising because the average consumer is not that, right? So I was surprised that the companies and the teams didn't reflect that either,” she recalls. “I felt like there wasn't anyone in their marketing or their company, in their teams or even at senior level, that looked like me or had a background like me. It just seemed to be getting further and further away from the customer, so with By Rotation I wanted to make sure that we always thought about the end customer, no matter what.”

Eshita is generous with her advice to budding entrepreneurs – who should have tenacity, determination and humility in abundance: try to get some experience working for a company, make your mistakes there, learn from them, and when you want to try to make your idea a business, start it as a side hustle and do your homework. Work out if the passion should remain a passion or whether it can fly, and forensically focus your plans to see if they are viable in the short and the long term. And if you can, she recommends starting the start-up as a side hustle, to begin with.

“I'm really pro side hustles, and also getting some formal corporate experience, if you can”, she says. “Just working for someone else, and if you can get corporate experience that's even better because you learn all the mistakes that you can of a large organisation at someone else's expense, not your expense, and not a small business person's expense. I would recommend working for someone. I think it's humbling, you pick up a lot, and you learn professionalism and diligence ahead of actually doing something of your own. My six and a half years in finance, working for some very large companies and then a more boutique hedge fund, I think I feel I picked up a lot of professional skills, and even etiquette.”

“The network that I built was fantastic, and just being around these people instilled the drive in me, which I would recommend to anyone because I think it's quite lonely to be an entrepreneur”, Eshita reflects. “And if that's the first thing that you're doing out of school or university, I would say it's even more difficult because you probably don't have the training that others who have worked in jobs have had. And knowing how to be a manager is important, so I'm very pro working for someone else first.” 

Understanding what it takes to launch and sustain a start-up is vital. “Be pragmatic and don’t just take a leap of faith” warns Eshita, and she also refers to advice from her father. “My Dad gave me some advice; he's a serial entrepreneur and I really respect him. He said to me: ‘Just remember that the day that you start your business to the future, you'll realize that you're a very, very different person. Everything will change, and if you like the way that things are right now, just really, really reconsider what you're giving up.’ And I still have those thoughts at times, I still question myself, was it worth it? Was it really worth this? So that self-doubt is going to come up a lot, so just make sure your reasons for wanting to be an entrepreneur, not just because you want to be an entrepreneur or a founder.”

“I'm also very pro the side hustle part of it”, Eshita continues, “because I think it's really important to understand if the business that you start-up, the business that you want to found, is it just something that you love as a hobby or as an interest. Because we can be passionate about our hobbies and interests, just like the way we can be passionate about our work, and it doesn't mean we want to make our hobbies and interests into our work. I think there's a big difference there. So you need to know whether it's really worth the opportunity cost. I worked out how many transactions it would take for me to finally quit my career in finance, to take this full-time, and how many years it's going to take for the kind of salary I would have had five years down the road, versus what the valuation of this company could be five years down the road, and whether it was really worth my time again.”

Photography: Helene Sandberg

Photography: Helene Sandberg

On funding, Eshita is cautious. To date, it’s largely been self-funded and she wants to make carefully considered choices about the future of funding for By Rotation. She tells us, “I recently fundraised, so that was three months ago, but all along it had been self-funded and that was very much by choice. I just wanted to make sure that I was getting the right partners on board and that we were going after a vision, a mission that was really about circularity in fashion, not so much about accessing designer clothes and fashion rental. For me, this is a community-oriented tech business, we position ourselves in tech, so it's been very important for me to get the right kind of people involved and the right stakeholders.”

 “The main thing is, for me, staying so lean has shown people, not just our customers and people who support the brand, but it's also showed potential investors that here is a very hungry start-up, that does whatever they can with very little, so imagine if they had a little more, and I think for me that's the finance side kicking in. I'm very careful about stakeholders, about the kind of valuation and equity, the rounds that we want to do in the future. I don't talk about it a lot, because I don't think that this is something my customers connect with. I'm not really looking to be a personality as a businesswoman. For me, it's all about the customers in By Rotation.”

 Eshita’s approach to networking is focused. She has been running a series on the By Rotation Instagram channel called 'A Glass Of Wine with' for over a year, consistently, all through lockdowns. “Through that, I ended up networking with a lot of my guests, in front of everyone”, she tells us. “Because we couldn't meet in person, so what I did instead was I gave them a platform, and they, in turn, became very interested in By Rotation, and then got to know me better. So through that, I made some great contacts that have now become friends and supporters of By Rotation, people who work at venture capital firms, who work in tech, who invest in tech, who have founded companies, who work in companies like Depop and Peanut and Bumble that we love. I've been quite particular about focusing on people who work in tech and community-oriented businesses, and also on the VC side of things. We tend to have similar networks because of the whole finance angle to it. Because a lot of the VC investors usually used to work in capital markets, so they kind of know what the trading floor was like and all the stuff that I used to do, and we tend to be on the same wavelength about how peer to peer is the right way to go for fashion rental, and the focus needs to be on the tech.”

On building her team at By Rotation, Eshita says, “the mindset needs to be very globalized, very open to everyone and anything and the main thing that I'm really looking for is determination and hard work. I think that's super important right now, hard work because a lot of people are passionate about sustainable fashion, but right now we just really need the people who are willing to do the gritty hard work. A lot of it is gritty, we have a very scrappy start-up, we might seem much bigger than we are, but we're not. We work on one farmhouse table in the studio, which is also our office, which is also where I live and that's just what it is.”

Two years into the By Rotation journey, and it appears poised to explode. The recognition is welcome but Eshita remains humble, with her feet firmly on the ground. Talking about being inducted to the Forbes '30 under 30' in the tech category, she says: “Being on the list is great, it's so nice to be recognised, to have these credible lists that I can say I'm a part of. But I think for me, it's really about showing that our start-up does work, as a business. So things like seeing the numbers and getting all these user reviews and stories, I think that's much more important to me. The media hype is great, but I feel like there's so much I need to prove, but maybe that's just me being Asian, we always feel like there's not enough and there's more that we need to do." 

Despite the impressive list of achievements, accolades and industry firsts, something tells us Eshita Kabra is just getting started and she’s not taking all the credit. “As a peer-to-peer marketplace, the product is as good as our customers”, she says, “so I'm no one, really, without them.” This isn’t an entrepreneurial woman on a solo mission. She’s taking us all along for the ride, and taking nothing for granted.