Exploring Life & Business with Marissa Braun of BRRWSCTY

Today we’d like to introduce you to Marissa Braun.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I moved to Los Angeles as an actress eight years ago after I graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I’m originally from Indiana but spent a lot of time on the East Coast too, so California was uncharted territory. I’ve been working in entertainment, hospitality, and fashion for the last decade, but it feels as though I’ve lived a hundred lives since being out here. I’ve built a career as an event producer working with incredible brands, artists, venues, and communities. As the founder of my own event production company, Bad Handwriting, and during my time as the event producer of Winston House and The Waterfront, I conceptualized and produced hundreds of digital marketing and social media campaigns, film productions, photoshoots, festivals, concerts, livestreams, launch parties, activations, street markets, and panel discussions. I was on a successful path, but something was amiss.

Toward the end of 2021, I decided to make a big change. I pulled a “Covid move” and put all my stuff in storage to have my “eat, pray, love” moment of traveling and self-discovery, setting an intention to find my calling in life. In preparing to live out of a suitcase for at least the next year, I pared down my wardrobe and experienced the laborious process of both online and in-store resale. It was oversaturated and everyone wants to give you $5 for a designer piece with tags on it. I didn’t even want to get rid of most of my pieces because I understand their value, and I still wore a lot of them once or twice a year. So I took a step back and thought, why do we only have Rent the Runway to rent clothes from when we have perfectly good items in our own wardrobes that we could be lending, borrowing, and making money on?

Growing up with three sisters and a super stylish mom, we constantly raided each other’s closets. I saw the opportunity to scale and monetize that same idea into a societal, communal closet. We already do this in the girl world between siblings, sorority sisters, and friends, but I’m finally providing an infrastructure with insurance and a community built on trust. I rolled up my sleeves, and BRRWSCTY (pronounced Borrow Society) was born. In the same way that Airbnb opened up our homes and Turo opened up our cars, BRRWSCTY opens up our wardrobes.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Well, I inadvertently upped the ante when I first embarked on this journey by having no steady income, no car, and no address to call my own, living out of a suitcase for the last year and a half. I’d be formally pitching to investors via zoom with my laptop stacked on 7 books, 3 shoe boxes, and a pot stacked on a kitchenette. There’s something beautiful and chaotic and hilarious about the grind. I’ve always been able to laugh at myself and my mistakes but learning to romanticize every step of the journey has allowed me to relieve pressure and find beauty in all of it. I like to joke that my entire life changes every two hours which is only half true. Early on, I was told by so many people how hard it would be. As someone who’s been working roughly 15 – 20 hour days 5 – 7 days a week since I was 25, I brushed that off. I was also relieved when I realized how many of my skills as a producer were powerfully applicable to being a founder. I have an eagle eye view of the big picture, the ability to break that down into actionable steps, an almost-OCD level of organization, strong sense of resourcefulness, excellent project and budget management, and timely decision-making skills.

But it’s definitely vulnerable being a first-time founder, fundraising in a bear market heading into a recession, and being a woman in tech, especially when we still only receive about 2% of venture capital funding. I have also found that women founders, especially when non-technical, are disproportionately pressured to have a co-founder. However, as a fellow SMU graduate, I’ve watched two non-technical women build successful, billion-dollar tech companies: Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble and Amber Venz Box of LTK Brands (RewardStyle, LiketoKnowIt). They’ve inspired so many women like me, and I can’t wait to continue in their legacy to empower women and other marginalized groups to be founders too.

When measuring success by the achieved milestones, it was easy to fall into the “I’ll be happy when” narrative. But I really wanted to be the person who was happy and present, especially in my personal life, despite what was happening with my company. I had to learn to surf, gracefully dancing with each high and low as it comes. I’m still a work in progress, but I learned how a reaction can turn into a mood which can turn into a personality quicker than we’d like to believe, so learning to roll with the punches and stay open to opportunities was vital.

In acting, in event producing, and in starting a new company, every success and failure feels very public. In the most difficult times, I would find myself dodging social hangs until I felt I had something to show for it. I’m an extroverted extrovert but since I haven’t hired a team yet, I felt siloed at times. When I would come up for air and reconnect with friends, I would immediately be reminded of the overflowing happiness and energy I get from spending time with my people. The benefits were bountiful whether I was just kicking it with a friend, networking at an event, or sharing notes with another founder. I’ve been reminded of just how kind people are and how willing they are to help those around them. I realized stress blinded me to the opportunities around me. Gratitude is so profound, and practicing it regularly has helped me appreciate all the things going in my favor.

It can be difficult to know when to keep pushing and grinding and when to practice some restorative self-care. But I’m learning about myself every day, and the challenges make the victory all the sweeter. I’ve come to love and appreciate the dualism of life and of my experience as a human. I choose to focus only on the things that I have control over, do everything in my power to move forward and make progress every day, and trust that the things that are meant for me are already on their way.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
BRRWSCTY is an online, peer-to-peer, luxury marketplace renting currently-owned wardrobes. We’re Airbnb for wardrobes. Our mission is to reduce the harmful impacts of fashion on the earth by creating a global, sustainable marketplace allowing people to monetize their wardrobes and experience luxury affordably. We are creating a new culture of consumption centered around investing in high-quality, long-lasting pieces.

No one is doing what we’re doing the way that we’re doing it. Let’s say you’re going to a dinner in two hours and you don’t have the right purse or jacket. You can get on the app where everything is geolocated, shop other people’s wardrobes on demand, click request, and have your item sent to you immediately in an UberConnect. We receive a return on every other investment in our lives except fashion – until now. We’re completely revolutionizing the way we consume and connect with others through fashion. We’re a helpful resource for stylists, a whole new way to engage with followers for influencers, and an unlimited wardrobe and moneymaker for college students.

BRRWSCTY is a bunch of friends getting ready together. We are a community-first, fashion-forward, and sustainability-mindful company. We are the community building the product we want. We empower the individual, not the corporation, to monetize their underutilized assets. Almost every other clothing rental company works with brands, not people, to rent out their inventory in the hopes that people will buy it. Other people launch rental programs within their own brands or are powered by Saas that builds the infrastructure in-house. We are strictly a peer-to-peer marketplace which grants lenders and borrowers more autonomy. The reality is, no matter how sustainable it is, you can’t tell women in fashion to just wear what’s in their closet. So we unlock access to wardrobes around the world belonging to influencers, stylists, celebrities, and a friend of a friend. In an age of social media that has created an insatiable demand for content, shopping hauls and unboxing videos are favorites. We still provide that newness, that discovery, that feeling of “dopeness acquired” without harming the environment. A huge reason to shop secondhand is discoverability. Most other companies lead with how sustainable it is to rent clothes instead of having incredible inventory and amazing community members with coveted wardrobes to borrow from. Beyond traditional shopping filters, people can also shop by lenders, and since we’re social commerce, you can follow them and message them. Without any marketing so far, I already have a waitlist of more than 500 people including 10 confirmed macro-influencers (500K – 2M followers each) and 20 confirmed micro-influencers (5k – 25k followers each). To join the waitlist, go to https://brrwscty.com/.

We are actually sustainable. Our biggest challenge is finding creative ways to offset our carbon emissions from shipping, and I’m excited to announce some new partnerships helping us with that in the coming months. But most damage to the environment happens in the production cycle, so to focus only on expanding the lifespan of a garment and end-of-life cycle is only addressing half the problem. We have to slow production. We are reducing overconsumption and therefore, overproduction. Buy less, buy better, and borrow more is our mantra, and it not only reduces the volume of production, but it will be able to improve the life of garment workers. To not accept items more than two years old simply turns a blind eye to the entire fashion production industry.

Lastly, we want to make an impact at scale and our model allows us to do so. We are deliberately a marketplace, a tech company with low overhead, making us very scalable. Along with several other future moves, we plan to transform travel. We believe everyone should be able to travel with nothing but a carry-on and arrive at their Airbnb or accommodation with their wardrobe already full of everything they want to wear during their stay, even locally sourced.

Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
Meditation has transformed my life, and the Calm app is my favorite. It’s so easy to take a few minutes a day for the Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt and Daily Jay with Jay Shetty. It’s the simplest way to gain control of and freedom from your thoughts and emotions.

I’ve always been a slow reader, so Amazon’s Audible app has now allowed me to listen to more books in the past year than I’ve read in the last few years combined. Specifically, Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass catalyzed the change in my life, and I’ve since read it almost a dozen times. I recommend this to anyone who feels stuck, unhappy, or unsure about yourself. My Pi Phi little and dear friend gifted it to me, and I have since gifted it to most of my friends.

To anyone looking for proof-of-concept and product-market fit, I highly recommend using Bubble, a no-code site. I was able to teach myself the program and build, iterate, and launch my MVP in record time. It’s a quick way to bring your idea into fruition and start receiving real-time feedback.

Lastly, Airtable is the single greatest organizational tool, and I love it because there’s a way to organize the data into various formats for different people’s preferred displays. I’ve been using it for years, and it’s such a valuable tool.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://brrwscty.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brrwscty/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinbrrwscty

Image Credits
Delaney DelPonti