Early this March, Victoria College students flooded Roy Thomson Hall for Highball, VUSAC’s annual formal event. While many ticketholders recycled an old prom dress or splurged on a new one, another trend surfaced: renting a dress from Common Thread. Founded in November and still awaiting their official launch, Common Thread is a peer-to-peer dress rental program organized by students from Victoria College. The group is currently not affiliated with the University of Toronto, and has taken shape under founder Lucinda Qu and her team of six executives. Common Thread is still very much in its early days, but after the success of their first pop-up shop they will be looking to grow the operation to involve more volunteer and organizer positions, along with expanding to high school and other university campuses across the Toronto region.
From February 29 to March 3, Common Thread set up a pop-up shop in the VUSAC offices in the Goldring Student Center, catching the attention of students across the University of Toronto campus. Most of the renters were students from Victoria College for events such as the Gardiner Gala and Highball, while others from St. Michael’s College and the law school also took advantage of the service for their respective formal events. With over 100 dresses in their collection currently, the pop-up shop attracted over 30 renters in their four-day period of operation. Executive member Artemis Ghahremani explains that the collection is aimed to appeal to a variety of sizes and styles: “Common Thread is very much focused on equity; we’re not targeting size 2 petite women. We have dresses in every size and make sure we’re accessible to everyone, which is really important and can be overlooked easily.”
Common Thread functions as a platform to connect lenders. “We drew inspiration from apps such as Airbnb and Uber; the idea of taking something that’s already yours and using the app to connect with someone who needs it,” says Ghahremani. A Common Thread app is on the drawing board for the future, but for now they’re experimenting with the pop-up shop format, where students can browse racks of the Common Thread collection and check out a dress for the reasonable fee of 10% of the piece’s original purchase price. This covers a week’s rental, and typically costs renters between $5 and $12. “What’s great about Common Thread is it’s not so much about the designer or how much you paid for it, but expressing your personal style, being able to switch it up,” says Ghahremani. “It’s really important with style trends that are constantly changing to express your individuality, and you shouldn’t have to have crazy amounts of money to do that.” The service also benefits those who want to rent out their dresses; as a lender, they receive a portion of the profit in return, along with the knowledge that their clothing isn’t simply collecting dust in their closet.
There is no hard date for the launch for Common Thread, and plans for what will follow the initial success of the pop-up shop are still being developed, though the group hopes to have a finished website or app out by September 2016. In the meantime, you can follow them on their Facebook and Instagram pages, or browse their look book on their website listed below.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/commonthreadto
Instagram: @commonthreadto
www.common-thread.ca
