Jennifer Sieg sits down with Layla Sargent, the founder of online service repair platform The Seam, for this week’s Ambition A.M. profile to discuss how she’s made way for a new kind of circular fashion ecosystem.
Tech, it can do everything, right?
How about making fashion more sustainable by helping repair old clothes?
That’s what Layla Sargent the 35-year-old entrepreneur set out to achieve when she founded her online repair service platform, The Seam, in 2020.
The platform is essentially a marketplace. It connects eco-conscious fashionistas with makers and retailers from across the UK and has seen bookings increase by 400 per cent year-on-year, with 20,000 booking enquiries last month alone.
With the circular fashion industry expecting to reach a market size of £8.6bn by 2030, it’s a trend that could very well continue.
The secret? Getting people to love their clothes – first and foremost – and providing a place to help cherish items long-term.
“More people need access to somebody who can help them to love their clothes,” Sargent says.
“That for me is the bedrock to sustainable behaviours.”
How it works
The Seam users are connected with local makers from across the UK who best fit their repair needs.
The Seam is available to three kinds of users – whether you are a maker looking for customers, a customer looking for a maker, or a retailer looking for data on consumer behaviours and trends – and, in turn, has three steady revenue streams of booking fees from each.
“Skills are really important. machinery is really important and location is really important,” Sargent says.
She adds: “In the name of sustainability and also economic growth and community development across the UK, we firmly believe in matching people to local makers.
“There is no need to ship products across the country to get them repaired.”
Fuelling your ambitions
Sargent is quick to attribute her early entrepreneurial ambitions to her childhood memories, having spent countless hours watching her grandmother sew together her old and new clothes.
“Growing up, everything in our home was very inherently circular,” she says.
“We’d reuse everything, I’d have dresses made out of my grandpa’s shirts and, you know, it was a real deep hit to me of responsible consumerism I’d say.”
Tales of successful entrepreneurship often begin with a personal ambition, and Sargent says if it wasn’t for hers – the challenges she faced along the way would have been nearly impossible to face.
Personally, I find that it’s fundamental that there has to be this kind of deep, deep emotional connection to what you’re doing because otherwise, when the hard times hit, it’s just going to be much more difficult than necessary.
Layla Sargent
“For me, it’s my upbringing that kind of gives me the resilience and also the drive to keep going…otherwise I don’t know how people do it if I’m honest.”
Knowing when (and where) to start
The Seam was far from Sargent’s first business venture, or idea, but fortunately, it’s the one that made it past the many drafts on her coffee table.
“I always had big dreams, I would always try and find problems to stuff and I’d always question stuff – I think I’ve always been very curious,” she says.
“Don’t get me wrong, I came up with like 20 actual business ideas before I founded my first business.”
Moving to London helped her connect the dots, however, when she realised that merging the growing £4.7bn circular fashion industry into such a fashionable city would be the key to her long-term success.
“In London, you have arguably the most talented cobblers and dressmakers than anywhere else in the world, so it made complete sense,” she adds.
“Obviously now… we have makers from all the way from Edinburgh right the way down to the south coast in Cornwall, but that’s where I wanted to start.”
CV
Name: Layla Sargent
Company: The Seam
Founded: October 2020
Staff: 6
Title: Founder & CEO
Age: 35
Born: Birmingham, UK
Lives: Hackney, London, UK
Studied: Journalism
Talents: To hire great people!
Motto: To practice humility and embrace growth on a daily basis.
Most known for: The story of my grandmother who inspired me to create The Seam, a wonderful (and now somewhat famous) dressmaker!
First ambition: To create something bigger than me.
Favourite book: “On Looking” by Alexandra Horowitz.
Best piece of advice: To understand the importance of mental compartmentalisation – being able to separate different aspects of life and focus on each one without letting them overlap or interfere with each other