Do you have a favorite jacket with a ripped sleeve or dirty sneakers gathering dust at the back of your closet? Tingit, a new Lithuanian startup, wants to help people restore their old clothes to their former glory with its repair marketplace.
The platform allows you to take photos of your damaged items with your phone, upload a quick video, and get a quote for repair or restoration. Once you're happy with the quote, you pay through the Tingit app and mail the item to the repair shop of your choice. Then you just wait a few days or weeks. There's no need to hunt down backstreets to find a professional restorer or negotiate unfriendly shop schedules; the platform does all the heavy lifting for you.
For now, there's just one problem: Tingit is only available in Lithuania, where the Vilnius-based startup launched in February. But the startup has just raised a pre-seed funding round of €500,000 to continue expanding, and CEO and co-founder Indrė Viltrakytė says he has his sights set on expanding to other European markets. That will likely happen later next year, when the company looks to raise a seed round of funding.
Lithuania is home to the leading fashion reuse marketplace Vinted, and local entrepreneurs have a proven track record in this space. Tingit is also a pure marketplace, but it aims to connect people with broken or damaged fashion items with businesses that can repair them.
“I grew up with the guys who founded Vinted, so it's been really inspiring to see the company grow from a small local shop to this huge global market,” Viltrakytė told TechCrunch. “I hope we can achieve something similar with repairs and create synergies with companies that are already working in the sustainability space.”
Viltrakite came up with the idea for Tingit after working in the fashion industry for many years and becoming frustrated with the industry's issues of sustainability and overconsumption. It's also not her first experience as a tech entrepreneur; she worked with Vinted co-founder Justus Janauskas for three years on a social media startup for teenagers that gained some local traction but then shut down. She's also dabbled in digital fashion and cryptocurrency/Web3.
Still, platforms that deal with physical repairs come with a different kind of challenge.
“I'm a problem solver, so when I think about something broken, I have the urge to fix it,” she says. “I've personally tried to fix a lot of things. […] And that's always a big headache and a hassle. I had a Dyson hairdryer and it took six weeks to arrange for a repair for various reasons. So I thought, it's 2023, there must be a better way. And I looked around and there wasn't a better way. So I ended up just playing around with it and seeing what it was like.”
Tingit currently connects users to repair and restoration services for clothing, shoes, and accessories, including specialized restoration work like sneaker and handbag repairs, as well as more general services like dry cleaning.
Viltrakite says the decision to focus on fashion was because the four co-founders already had industry expertise, but she says there's no reason to stop there if they can scale: sports equipment, toys and appliance repairs are possibilities for the future, but anything is possible if there's demand and there are businesses offering the service.
European Union regulations are the driving force here, with right-to-repair requirements being introduced alongside an expansion of ecodesign rules that includes plans for digital product passports, all aimed at driving the transition to a more circular economy and helping the European Union meet its climate target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Macroeconomic conditions may also favor “makeshift repairs.” According to Viltrakite, one of the startup's investors expects a recession to come. “So he thinks the next wave will be repairs, because the last wave was second-hand clothes,” she said.
To date, Tingit has completed over 650 repairs on its marketplace and has received over 2,500 repair requests from users. Viltrakytė says the company works with three local businesses to provide its services: one that repairs clothing, another that repairs shoes and bags, and another that offers dry-cleaning services.
Upcycling and alterations (modifications) are also part of Tingit's plans, as is offering recycling, but Viltrakytė says that certain adjustments (i.e. tailoring) don't lend themselves to the platform's hands-off approach, as measurements are more accurate when made in person.
Shoe repairs currently account for 70% of orders on the platform, with typical customers being busy working mothers looking for ways to get their work done more efficiently.
Viltrakite admits she's a little surprised that more men aren't using the platform, given that the majority of sneaker enthusiasts are male, but she suggests this could also be due to a lack of awareness about the types of repair services available.
“I would love to introduce the concept of seasonal maintenance,” she said, noting that new shoes can last much longer if properly cared for. A twice-yearly repair service could be proposed as a “new habit” to invest in things to make them last longer.
“My personal goal is to basically make repairs a habit. Like I always say, like brushing your teeth,” she added.
Prices for repair and restoration services vary depending on the complexity of the work, ranging from €9 for a shoe protection treatment, to €25 and up for replacing a zipper on a garment, to €139 and up for the restoration of a luxury handbag.
Viltrakytė noted that the startup has received some very high-end items sent to it for repair/restoration, such as an Hermes handbag worth €10,000. And given the growing popularity of vintage clothing, fashion resale platforms, and second-hand marketplaces, there are some interesting ways in which a repair marketplace intersects with this broader trend.
She said the company has already received a lot of inquiries from people sending screenshots of items they saw on second-hand marketplaces like Vinted, asking how much repairs would cost.
“I think it can increase the value of second-hand goods because people have no idea what to do with them, especially fashion items,” she says. “Even if it's a really used bag, if it's a high-quality item or well-made item, [restore it] It's not like new, but it's 85% like new.”
Tingit started as a business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace, but Viltrakytė sees an opportunity to expand into B2B2C.
“We can become an official agent for brands, which is a proven business model,” she said. “We also have plans for API integrations for retailers and other marketplaces such as Vinted and Vestiaire Collective.”
The startup is also considering how it can further increase its use of technology to make it even less of a pain for people to get their things repaired. Viltrakytė said it wants to work on using AI to automate the damage analysis and estimate generation that's currently done manually. That way, users wouldn't even have to take and upload a video of their item, but could just show it to the camera.
AI could also be used to automate the evaluation of clothing items for resale or generate data on what is in circulation in the circular economy, which could be of interest to a range of companies. Fashion authentication and product lifecycle tracking are also areas that Tingit is interested in exploring.
Tingit's pre-seed funding round was led by Firstpick, a Lithuanian VC fund and accelerator for tech startups in the Baltic States, with participation from BADideas.fund (Latvia), PurposeTech (Czech Republic) and Heartfelt Capital (Germany).
“There is still a knowledge gap when it comes to leveraging technology to increase sustainability, which is why we're excited to see how Tingit can help educate consumers and help them form sustainable habits,” Jonė Vaitulevičiūtė, managing partner at Firstpick, said in a statement.