Laura Evans
Cofounder of Valti
Harvard University
Computer Science major
Stumped about what to wear to your date party? She created a crowd-sourced dress-sharing service that provides Harvard girls with a simple (and moneymaking!) solution.
GLAMOUR: So tell me a bit about your on-campus dress venture, Valti. What’s the idea behind the service – and the name?
Laura Evans: There are a lot of times you’ll wear a dress and you don’t really want to wear it again for another couple of months or however long, especially now with all the Facebook photos that go up right after an event. So instead of having that dress sit in your closet and take up space, you can put it in the Vault, which is what we call our dress warehouse. By letting other girls rent it, your dress makes money for you. When you’re ready to wear it again, we’ll bring it back to you dry-cleaned within 24 hours.
GLAMOUR: Very cool. How’d you conceive the idea?
LE: It came from a problem I saw in my own life. I transferred from Cal-Berkeley after my freshman year, and when I first got to Harvard, it was extremely different. One big thing I noticed was that I constantly had all these formal events. I’d literally brought one dress to school and couldn’t afford to buy any new ones, which was tricky when I suddenly had all these occasions to dress up for.
GLAMOUR: How did you manage to turn that idea into a real company?
LE: Valti started out as one of my final projects for a computer science class. Microsoft and Google and all these big companies came to our big fair, and when people were handing me business cards, I realized I could continue this past the course. My cofounder ended up being the guy standing next to me, and our next move was to jump into the Harvard Innovation Challenge. We ended up doing really well in the competition, and that’s where we met several investors interested in putting money into the company.
GLAMOUR: What kind of work did it take to get the investors to actually give you money? How’d you land the $50,000 angel investment?
LE: There were many 4 a.m. bedtimes! But that’s part of the fun of it. And if you don’t do that in college, when else will you be able to? We began meeting with different investors, and they kept throwing down these numbers that, as a college student, I could barely fathom. But we knew we had a service people wanted and that we could build the platform to make it happen. We stayed at Harvard over the summer, programming like crazy for the launch. Once we started to believe in the idea, other people did too.
GLAMOUR: How does Valti differ from Rent the Runway, another clothing-sharing venture started by a Harvard woman?
LE: One of the problems a lot of my friends and I found with Rent the Runway is that if you can’t really afford to buy a new dress for an event, it can also be pricey to rent one from them. We keep our prices at $50 and under, with an average of $30-$35. The beauty is that we’ve found a way for women to not only save money by renting from us, but to make money on their own dresses.
GLAMOUR: What’s the business model?
LE: Girls can request their dress back at any time, and we’ll return it within 24 hours. We give them 50 percent of the profit. That other 50 percent goes towards dry-cleaning and running the company and making a profit. A girl will typically earn $15-$20 a rental.
GLAMOUR: You use great photos of real college women all over the site, where you’ve written that Valti is “redefining beauty and promoting self-confidence. What’s the idea behind incorporating size acceptance into the company’s marketing?
LE: I’m on Harvard’s swim team, and as a competitive swimmer always wearing a suit, there’s a constant focus on your body and what you look like. There are a lot of coaches who pressure their athletes to look a certain way and have a particular build, usually one that’s very lean. The idea is that Valti helps girls find the right dress for them, which is why we stock a real range of sizes. We want people to feel great about themselves.
GLAMOUR: What has been your experience breaking into a generally male-dominated industry – the world of tech start-ups – with a service oriented toward females?
LE: I’m definitely a minority. Most of the people I take computer science classes with are Asian guys who love video games and have been programming since they were eight years old. My mom told me stories growing up about her experience in the business world and about how the glass ceiling definitely did exist. She talked about having to be way better at her job than the men there only to be paid less. I always knew that was her experience, but I didn’t think it existed any longer. Though I’ve found that to an extent it definitely still does. I want to get more women in high-level positions in the business and tech world, and starting Valti while still in school has helped me start to break in myself.