[00:00:08] Tandi Tuakli: Hi, and welcome to Happy Porch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast, where together with leading experts, thinkers, and doers, we explore the intersection of technology and the circular economy. My name is Tandi, and I've been working in fashion and technology for nearly 20 years. I help brands create digital first circular business models that not only extend the life of their products, but generate revenue and increase customer loyalty.

[00:00:36] Barry O'Kane: And I am Barry, the founder of HappyPorch, and we provide software engineering expertise for a more circular economy.

[00:00:42] Tandi Tuakli: In this episode, we are joined by Katie Hanton-Parr, the founder of Baboodle, a premium baby equipment rental service. What was really interesting in this conversation with Katie was how she really gave us insight behind the scenes as to how the rental business works, a lot of the challenges, particularly in finding the right technology to be able to not only operate a rental business, but to be able to connect with customers as well.

[00:01:09] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, I agree. And what also stood out for me was when Katie talked about the technology and her iterative approach to implementing the tech stack that she's doing. Baboodle are working quite closely with us at HappyPorch and we think it's really important not just to build tech, but to actually solve the business problems. And within a circular economy context, a lot of that is trying to work out processes rather than just optimise existing processes. 

So using some of the newer coding tools and low-code tools, being able to build on top of some of the providers that she's using to fill the gaps in the operationals with really bespoke tech that solves her specific needs, and I think she articulated that really well.

[00:01:48] Tandi Tuakli: Yes, definitely and starting small, not perfect.

[00:01:51] Barry O'Kane: Exactly. And so without further ado, let's meet Katie.

[00:01:56] Katie Hanton-Parr: Hi, I am Katie, the founder of Baboodle, a rental platform that offers access to premium baby equipment for the time that you need it and only the time that you need it, so that there's less waste, both financially for the customers and environmentally, we keep things out of landfill.

[00:02:08] Barry O'Kane: Awesome. Thank you and welcome to HappyPorch Radio.

[00:02:10] Katie Hanton-Parr: Good to be here.

[00:02:11] Barry O'Kane: One of the things I really love is the tagline “Everything but the baby”, by the way, that you have on some of the Baboodle stuff, always makes me smile.

[00:02:17] Katie Hanton-Parr: We spitballed that for ages and there's loads of plays that you can have on “Save the planet”, “Save money”, all of that sort of thing. But yeah, we went for something a little bit more out there.

[00:02:27] Barry O'Kane: I am interested as a starting point to learn a little bit about your journey, what led you to starting Baboodle and why you're putting yourself through all the pain and trauma of a startup like this.

[00:02:39] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, it's a really good question. So my background is in architecture, so I studied architecture at university, went and worked in architecture for nearly a decade. But then I had my first daughter in 2021, and I think the idea for Baboodle just grew organically from seeing the issues around the way that you purchase kit for your babies and the existing way of doing things as in the linear consumption model. And I was just so convinced that there had to be a better way of doing it. So I think I was on maternity leave, my brain was not working, or it was working, but in a very different way. So I exercised my brain a little bit and started mulling over ways to fix the problem and what that business model might look like. 

So I've used circular platforms for I think probably since their kind of inception into the UK. And I think I'm a good use case for that. I'm essentially a bit of a cheapskate and I constantly try new hobbies and then give them up after a few weeks and so a friend of mine set up Fat Llama in 2016, which is peer-to-peer equipment rental, just everything. So I've done house refurbs, weddings, endless hobbies, all with the help of circular economy. And then more recently with fashion rental. Clothes isn't something I would buy anymore if it was a one-off, a wedding guest, something like that.  

So the circular rental model just seemed like a bit of a natural fit for the problem that I was experiencing. And the problem is, babies grow really quickly. They don't like half of the stuff that you buy for them or you don't like it. It's really unpredictable. The kit that they need is so expensive. It's thousands and thousands of pounds over their first year if you were to buy everything that you are told you need. Which coming at this now, after my second child, I realised that you don't need anywhere near as much as you're told you need. But anyway and it has a really short, useful life with you.

And when you're done with it's really big, it’s bulky, it takes up a lot of physical space, which didn't work for us in a little London house with no spare storage room. And it's time consuming. There's a big time investment in selling it on or donating it afterwards or working out what you're gonna do with it. 

So even things like prams, the pram that you'd pick for a newborn is totally different to the pram that you would pick for a 1-year-old, which is totally different from what you would use for a 3-year-old. The pram that you'd want to take on your holiday with you is different from your day-to-day pram. 

And even seasonally, you might pick something different for summer than you would for winter or you might want to have more children at some point in the future. And so you'd have a period of time where you'd need a double pram. But it's a really big investment. It's probably one of the biggest investments that you'd make in terms of kit for your baby. 

And so if you're spending upwards of a thousand  pounds, sometimes nearly 2000 pounds on something, you want it to tick all of your boxes and have as much longevity as possible. Which means if you're spending that much and you're trying to make it last three, four years, inevitably there's some level of compromise in there somewhere whereas with renting you don't have to compromise. You can pick whatever is best for your family at any one time and just use it for the time that you need that. 

So obviously there's loads of different solutions to this issue. And I think there's a lot of different angles, many of which have been done and really well executed. And I think, this is the rental model that we've come up with, compliments those models. It's not necessarily, instead of, and it's not necessarily, instead of buying new either, it's just something that offers a bit more flexibility and a bit more choice. 

So there's a lot already in secondhand and peer-to-peer but I was coming at it from the perspective of someone who's just spent six months on Facebook marketplace and was fed up and I remember, I think it must have been hormonal. I had spreadsheets coming out of my ears for all the things that I needed to buy and all the like. I'd found this thing in one corner of London and they needed to go and pick that up and I had to get that in an Uber at this point of time, and it was just administratively a lot and who has time for that?

Another level of friction is that you just don't really know what you're getting with peer-to-peer. So there were hidden costs in terms of like, transport costs and fixing-things costs, and Oh actually I'm not gonna put my baby in that costs.

And yeah, I definitely got some absolute bargains, but it swings roundabouts. I definitely got some duds as well, so I think, yeah, that I was fully on board with secondhand and I didn't have the budget for buying everything new anyway. But again, that just came loaded with some issues. So I think while that sort of thing solved some problems, it didn't solve all the problems and it didn't solve the, “What do you do with it after you've got it?” problem either. After about eight months in, you've just accumulated loads of stuff that you don't need anymore.

[00:07:13] Tandi Tuakli: I'm curious, Katie, obviously, you had this sort of pain point that you've identified, and so how did you go from recognising that this is a problem, probably a lot of other parents have this problem, to then actually taking the first steps towards like what's gonna become Baboodle?

[00:07:31] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, so I think it probably just happened quite organically. It's a bit of a weird time to think back on now 'cause it was just me frantically in nap times mapping out various financial models and seeing what had legs, what would be viable, what was a complete waste of time, trying to work out the market size and it was yeah, working out ways to access it on demand. And I was really clear about certain elements of it as well I think. I was really clear that it had to be like super seamless, a perfect user experience. Rental, I think, is a lot more prevalent now than it was even three years ago.

So it had to be something that would bring people on board with the concept of renting, change their minds and it also needed to be good value, and I think, I always set it to be competitive against buying new so that you would never - I didn't want you to be spending more on renting than you would on buying new.  It had to be aspirational, so I was really keen that it was premium brands only.

We were in a bit of a bubble. And I think a lot of new parents can probably relate to that bubble where you're on these WhatsApp groups who are like, try this thousand Pound product, try this thousand Pound product.

So it did have to be a place where you could go that would have all of the things that you had access to, all of the products that you would want. I just designed something that would work for me and my friends. And that looked like essentially building a catalogue of products, putting the idea out there. I think the first iteration of the website was literally a PDF where you ticked what you would like.

And we sent that out to various people, asked them to send it onto their friends, and the rentals just started trickling in. It was super, super slow. And it was literally friends of friends and then it grew to Instagram and we started getting people that we didn't know, and that was so exciting and then I built a website alongside all of this. And I think the website was just me working out exactly what the model was. And actually, I remember thinking at the time, this is so replicable, once we've done this right, it could apply to any industry.

[00:09:19] Tandi Tuakli: What were some of the challenges then when you went from the PDF, just tick boxes to like an actual functioning website?

Obviously it must have been a little bit challenging because you have both the operational side of like, it working for you in the business, but also then for the customers who may be not as familiar with renting those products?

[00:09:41] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah. Do you know what I found? There was work to be done in getting customers on board, particularly with baby equipment, stuff that's quite sensitive. There we just made sure that everyone loved their experience and then it grew from word of mouth. Operationally and financially at the very beginning they were by far the biggest challenges. We were bootstrapping it for ages and we were just basically buying to demand. And we didn't have any of the brand partnerships that we have now, so we were buying pretty much retail pricing and renting it out, which, there's a lot of room for improvement there in terms of the margin that you can make. 

So it was just me at the beginning and I commandeered my whole living room, which my husband was thrilled with. And then my brother came on board and he just came and worked from my living room as well. We then got a 3PL on board. We tried a few actually. And I think operationally, this is where the challenges became really apparent, is that no one is really set up for the reverse logistics side of things. So that was something that we had to map out. 

We took it back in-house after a few months, I think, probably of driving to and from the warehouse and just cleaning on the warehouse floor. Because no one really knew how to do that, basically. They weren't the systems for it. So then, yeah, we took it in-house. We had a tiny little fulfillment room, local to me. And we would just work and clean from there. And that's really where it all started scaling. Since then, we've scaled as we've grown, so at any one point we've been meeting demand. And the demand has all happened quite organically. It's just been largely, like I say, because we've been so lean from the very beginning, the demand has been led pretty much by word of mouth at the beginning. And then we got a bit of an SEO strategy, at that point things started to tick up a bit more consistently.

[00:11:20] Barry O'Kane: One of the areas of interest, obviously from our point of view, is the technology involved in that and through the whole stack. And obviously we work together a little bit. And so I'm quite keen to explore that a little bit more. That scaling process going from the, trying the different 3PLs, doing manual process and growing this year quite a lot, what that looks like and how will you view the decisions you make on the technology and the tools you use to try and help solve those problems while also running the business full time?

[00:11:48] Katie Hanton-Parr: Well yeah, I think you've been a bit of a sounding board for us here, Barry, because, I'd say, you've steered our approach to this quite a lot, there's many ways we could have gone. And so what we've ultimately ended up doing, we are now building our own stuff, but taking a very iterative approach to it. 

And how that started, the model that we're building out is not really overly formulaic. There's no kind of blueprint for it. It hasn't been done. So if you start an e-commerce business you come up with a product, you brand it well, you market it well, you get a 3PL and there's your business. Whereas this is entirely different. It's limited in terms of the out the box plug and play tech stack that you can just switch on. And even what there is out there now, and there's a lot more out there now, it's quite broad stroke. Which obviously from a viability perspective, it has to be. Because I think all of these models, they're all slightly nuanced. They have different needs. I think we started off with spreadsheets and actually that felt really low rent and a bit tin-pot at the time. But what that did is just inform exactly all the information and the data that we need to be keeping track of. And that kind of built out our brief for a really MVP tech stack, which, I can't remember when we started speaking Barry, but it was at the point where we were basically going, do we raise millions of pounds and build out the perfect solution which just works brilliantly for our business at any scale. And it gives us the foundations to grow indefinitely. 

Or do we keep it all a little bit more lean and we build as we go and we work out exactly what we need and exactly what our use case is. And we don't yet know what we don't know. Also importantly, I think there are lots of people, a lot more qualified than us building out this tech simultaneously. So we don't want to overinvest when there will be solutions coming. And it will just be a case of stitching things together with various APIs. 

So that's where we landed really, we knew that we needed our own systems. We've got Supercycle now. We use a combination of Firmhouse and Supercycle, and they do a great job on the subscription management side of things but it doesn't necessarily clock over into the warehouse management. And there are plenty of warehouse management tools out there, but none of them really function in the way that we need for the return side of things. And there are lots of shipping platforms out there who do the outbound stuff, but their return stuff is very limited. Had to stitch together the whole end-to-end process which Barry has built for us, along with Danai who's scoped out exactly what we should be building there. And we've now got something that works really well across the board, so it will track all of our assets, it will give us really usable, useful data to grow the business. And then I think taking a bit of a phased approach to tech, basically which works well for cash flow and it also works well for building the right thing for us and our business.

[00:14:46] Tandi Tuakli: Could you go into the data part a little bit more? You mentioned being able to collect more data now with your new tech stack. And I'm wondering number one, what kind of data you're collecting and then also  how you're gonna be able to use that to scale as you grow moving forward?

[00:15:03] Katie Hanton-Parr: We've had fairly limited data to go off so far. And it's all about the lifetime value of customers and all the actual payment data and that sort of thing we've got. But what we don't have up until now is a really clear digital log of how long a product lasts, an individual product lasts, what that translates to on a SKU basis, and therefore what return we actually have across a SKU, how long things take to clean and process and how often they break or there's a repair needed. 

So that's giving us a much clearer picture on what products actually perform well in rental. And which ones might appear to perform well, but actually the cleaning on them costs double and therefore the margins are just too tight on that particular product. Or it's consistently sent back with missing parts that  cost us too much to replace or that sort of thing. So we've got loads of KPIs that we track across a SKU basis. 

We also are starting to introduce tracking across a team basis so we can start to see where the gaps in the team are, what processes are taking too long and need to be refined? And again, also we can see what's working really well. Like I said, we've historically, we've bought to demand. That's been a good way of keeping us lean and knowing that we're not wasting money. And testing out new products. So we've had a bit of a laissez-fair approach to just testing. Is something gonna work in our catalog? And we just go, we'll give it a go. But now I think we'll have the data to see whether that type of product is gonna work well, how it will perform seasonally, what the voids are gonna look like, that sort of thing.

[00:16:37] Barry O'Kane: I think it's really fascinating that you've got this, as you described, this additional challenge above and beyond. It's hard enough starting a business, but you're also starting a business where there is no blueprint and where you're slightly pushing against the linear model. And so not just optimizing and finding your own identity in your own processes, but also completely, in many cases inventing processes from scratch and creating the sector.

And what's interesting to me is seeing the, as you said, the parallel development of more of the tools over the last few years and they're improving and they're starting to fill the different holes in that tech stack. But there's still a lot of work to be done and going on there.

So in parallel to what you're doing, the tools are getting better. There's this kind of chicken and egg, running to just stand still feeling a little bit. And in the middle of all that, you're trying to run a business and work on how to make it successful and grow and all of these compounding factors.

[00:17:28] Katie Hanton-Parr: I think the tools are helping and there’s so many efficiencies to be made there. I think what will always be the case is that we're basically running a business where stuff comes back broken. You've got to fix it and send it out. And the scale that we're doing that's happening. We've just got a lot of physical things to process every day. So I think it's the age-old adage of being a founder when you are working in the business versus on the business. Always kind of fires to fight or problems to solve, or something's been lost in transit or something's come back broken. How do we fix this? That's the reality of the day to day.

And  I think it is definitely chicken and egg because the tools will help us get out of the day to day and make, you know,  those processes a lot tighter and less margin for human error in there which is essentially what we're trying to eliminate. But yeah, I think, just finding the time to implement and also rip up the existing processes, which requires a lot of change management and team buy-in. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. 

[00:18:28] Barry O'Kane: Just to hop back into something else you said that I think is an important element here. You're working with Firmhouse and Supercycle and we had Supercycle on the show, and we're hoping to have Bob from Firmhouse later in the season. We also spoke to Danai from Refulfil. And how crucial the partnership stuff is, it's like problem solving. It's not just a sort of a service. That's how I view it anyway. It's like there's a real need for what can be complex communication and challenging between multiple people to bring in and really solve the problems.

[00:18:53] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think no one can do this in a silo. I think we are living and breathing it. And communicating all the problems to you guys, Supercycle, Danai every day. Like I say, you don't know what you don't know. So we're constantly iterating, trying things, realizing that we need to tweak that in some way and I think there's a huge benefit to working with a team like you guys who are building in real time. So we're all working out the issues and then solving as we go. And the partnerships there, I think it's created something scalable. There's no way we'd have been able to map this out by ourselves.

I think just having the resource there of, you know, you and Danai who live and breathe this stuff and just know circular inside out and Danai's Ops brain who can just see a problem 10 steps ahead and then solve for it. And he just loves things being neat and tidy, which is music to our ears. Yeah, I think it would be entirely impossible.

And I think this product that Supercycle are building, they're brilliant at listening to exactly what we need, working out how that's gonna work for them across all of their merchants. Creating tweaks for us or APIs for us so we can tweak it ourselves and all of that sort of thing.

I think is the only way really that kind of the smaller factional businesses like ours and indeed the brands are gonna be able to make circular work for them. I think because it's quite a specialised thing, you can't just bring in an Ops person who can do this. I think you need people who fully understand how circular works, are prepared to listen to what the actual real life problems are and solve in real time. Because yeah, we are operational at the same time as inserting all these new bits of tech, which is always a bit scary.

[00:20:37] Tandi Tuakli: We were just discussing a lot about operations there and also that your work with Supercycle and Barry, and I'm wondering if you noticed any sort of maybe commonalities with other rental platforms from your work with them, but then I'm guessing there are things that are very specific to kids rental as far as equipment such as, you know, with car seats and you know, how often you can use things and special regulations. 

So I'm wondering how much of what you're working on is sort of rental, challenges that maybe any rental business might encounter. And then what is also very specific to sort of the products and also the type of products that you're working with?

[00:21:18] Katie Hanton-Parr: So I definitely think the general end-to-end process is probably replicable to the business in terms of product goes out, gets tracked at every point, comes back in, gets assessed, goes back on the shelf, goes out again. 

Challenges that I think we face specifically, you mentioned car seats, for example. So there is a lot of regulation about that and we actually, we don't do car seats for that reason. It's the one product that we just won't touch because it's too difficult to quality check. If a pram is broken you can test it and you can see it's broken. But a car seat, you can't actually do that. We've made efforts to make our catalog a very repairable one, I think, because they're really high value goods. A lot of the clothing rentals, things are either repairable or they're not so expensive, you build it into your model, there'll be a certain number of uses, and then you might sell it on.

We have the same thing, but our aim really is to have only brands that we know that we can repair. So we like to work with brands that have really long warranties. They've got lots of easily accessible parts that they're prepared to send to you that you can swap in and out. 

So I definitely think the repair function is a really big part of our business. And in terms of regulation, I think also the use case that we've got, so a lot of the rentals are probably shorter term whereas from a customer perspective, I think the ideal for some of our items would be to rent slightly longer term and by longer term (I mean) more than three months. And there is regulation surrounding that - financial regulation. So that's another challenge that we're up against, which is, it is assessing customers for credit risk basically, and making sure that we are treating customers fairly, and making sure that they can afford the product. And if they can't afford the product, how do we communicate with all of that? 

So there's a lot of time and resources involved in making sure that we're doing right by the customers there. And it has to be provable and all traceable. And yeah, the compliance aspect of it is huge actually.

And then I guess the other thing, it's not unique to us, but we've got just the logistics of the shipping. I think a lot of the rental items are clothing, so you also have things like Peloton bikes and things like that. And that would be the same challenges, but the shipping carriers aren't set up for returns like this. So none of them have the API where customers can book in collection. That's all very manual and very inefficient for us 'cause we have to book them in. So yeah just little things like that are hurdles to overcome.

[00:23:43] Barry O'Kane: When you're talking about the products there, you mean the sort of size and shape and packaging and things, the physical dimensions of it all?

[00:23:50] Katie Hanton-Parr: Physical dimensions and the weight. Yeah, just the size. And some sizes that would make things easier and over standard shipping methods.

[00:23:58] Tandi Tuakli: Do you also have a certain amount of loss that you have to account for, for example, just with damage, or I assume with, like from my experience with children, staining, you know, all types of things when you receive the return as well?

[00:24:12] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah. Do you know what I was really surprised by though, when we first started doing this at any sort of scale, was how respectful people are generally. It could go one of two ways with rental. People either look after it really well 'cause they're nervous about charges and things like that, which we don't do. I think we've made a really conscious effort not to do that. And we allow wear and tear and we let a lot of stuff go because we don't want that sort of fear around rental.

But yeah, you could get people who don't really respect the item 'cause it's not theirs. But that has really not been the case at all. There are obviously exceptions to that rule, people look after everything and they send it back really respectfully. It's nice, but yeah, like I say, if the aim is if something is damaged, that it's repairable and you can replace parts and we don't have to bin it basically. On the whole, the products that we're using are high-end and they're designed to last and people are looking after it, which is really nice.

[00:25:07] Barry O'Kane: I wanted to explore that part of it, you talked about the relationships with the brands and selecting the right products. And I'm interested to explore that a little bit and again, from a challenges point of view, because one of the other big challenges is finance, right? The cost of the asset upfront because the income is spread out over time. How big a challenge is that and how do the brand relationships you have work?

[00:25:28] Katie Hanton-Parr: So we've got a couple of models that we have with brands. One of them is really straightforward. We basically just buy their wholesale price and we own the product and they provide us readily with parts. And that's probably the most common model. That's obviously an easier sell to brands. They just treat us as a retailer, so they are getting the immediate income.

And then the other model that we have is the consignment model where it is a profit split. So we take their products, they retain ownership of the products, and we would just take a percentage for doing all the Ops and getting them out. I definitely think in terms of reception, I think at the very beginning, cashflow was tight. So we were pushing the consignment model more, it is just a harder sell to brands. They've got to realise that the return on investment is not instant, which is what they're used to. So what we found is that you generally have a sustainability person who's really passionate about it, championing this idea within a brand, but they're going up against the finance team who are just used to a linear way of doing things. 

Yeah, I think, definitely at the start, we probably had some more weariness from brands in terms of will this eat into my own sales? I think what we've seen is that brands are now coming to us with more of an awareness that the secondhand market is happening one way or another. And this is a way for them to get a foothold in that market. It's maybe people that wouldn't have bought otherwise or would've bought secondhand or yeah we're offering a revenue stream within a slightly broader market from people who would just be buying new.

So there's definitely far less resistance from that perspective with brands.

I'd say happily in the last three years, the attitudes from brands seems to have done a bit of a 180 and people are now coming to us. They want to do things sustainably. The brands that we're working with, they want to be able to provide a different service to their customers. They want to retain these customers. Also, it's worth saying a lot of people will try something with us and then go and buy it from the brand. So yeah, we're now having some big brands approaching us. Just with only the understanding that they, I don't think it's a should be getting into a sustainable circular space, I think they want to be. And yeah, the brands that we're working with, like I say, they are also from a product perspective, they like having that information from us. We've got a very direct line to the customer.

We have really good information on how these products fare over time. Probably more insight than across all the brands, more insight than any retailer would have.

It's actually a really useful source of data and a lot of them using that data and that dictates the next release of X model. There's a lot of interesting work to be done from a product perspective with this, just a line of communication directly to the customer with quite intense use.

[00:28:29] Barry O'Kane: I love that sort of example because that feels like one of the promises of circularity, right? The idea of feeding that information back and improving the product design from a maintainability and repairable point of view. I always get geeking from a circularity point of view about that feedback loop.

[00:28:42] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, it’s really exciting. It's not fresh. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't that many people from a product perspective really honing in on circularity within this industry. But there are some really interesting brands coming up who are determined to make solid  products. And there's a brand called Bebello. They've got a product so far, which is a sterilizer for baby bottles. But it's been made for rental, which means we love it 'cause it holds up really well. It's one of the products that we get the least complaints about and it gets really intense use.

I just, I love that concept of designing for rental, which is how things should be designed, really. It's about keeping them, their use going as long as possible. It's  a different way of designing.

[00:29:25] Tandi Tuakli:  I previously worked on a, like kids footwear rental model and we had all of the same sort of experience that you said where, you know, you have customers that maybe rent and then become customers and also the product information that you gain is sort of invaluable in terms of future manufacturing.

And I'm just wondering that based on all of that, do you find that then those brands are actively promoting the rental program or communicating it to their customers in any way, perhaps with the thought that there are people who, as you said, might want to try something out before they buy something from the brand?

[00:30:05] Katie Hanton-Parr: Honestly on the whole, no, I think maybe that's the next tranche of people being on board. There are definitely some brands, iCandy, for example. They just love the idea of making the best possible product that they can. And they gave us a lot of marketing budget and help when we launched with them. So yes, there are some brands that do it. I think a lot of others wouldn't want to create that alternative offer to an instant sale quite so readily.

[00:30:35] Tandi Tuakli: From a sustainability perspective, do they do any kind of collecting data from you to be able to communicate that as well?

[00:30:43] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yes. So, some do, so iCandy do and we are in fairly constant communication with them. Like I say, a lot of these brands that we have, aside from the consignment models is a case of us buying wholesale. That's kind of it. 

What's probably across the board is that we have someone who is really passionate about it all, and that's our line in, but I'm not sure how far through the business that flows. I don't know because we've got one or two points of contact, so I'm not sure how much is shared or what’s actually structural within their business. I don’t know the answer to that actually. There are some brands, they've got sustainability programs and that feeds it into a lot of that, and I know that's passed throughout the business. And then others where I think maybe it stops at our point of contact. 

[00:31:32] Barry O'Kane: It's also another sort of challenge of trying to change the system as a whole. There's a brand mindset. There's a brand that's really focused on very linear flow. Maybe not yet, it's a harder challenge for them. Versus a brand that you said that's really focused on quality and thinking about, 'cause then there's a more natural fit towards the value they get from the data back from rental, for example.

[00:31:55] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, and I think a lot of these brands as well, the ones who are slightly more focused on it, maybe they all already have some sort of circularity built in. 

You send it back and whether it could just be an extended warranty scheme. Or it could be that they take back their own brands and refurbish them and sell them on. So I think a lot of these brands have explored certain models. Some of them have even explored rental, but I think the logistics of it, financially that's not viable for them because they don't need to do that. They don't need to introduce all these processes and flows and hire all these extra people. When they've got their core business model, it's not necessary. But a lot of them, I'd say, do already have elements of circularity built in and we are offering another angle to that.

[00:32:42] Barry O'Kane: And also solving the problems, right? Again from a, as a sort of, you're leading the charge, so to speak, you and the other folks who are really at the forefront of this. Because as we said earlier, you're coming up with the processes and developing the tools and helping the tools developers develop the tools and the structures and the processes so it's where hopefully you become the canary in the coal mine for a larger systemic change.

[00:33:03] Katie Hanton-Parr: Yeah, I think so. And I think that starts with changing in the customer's mind, doesn't it? And I think once the customer's mind has changed, we are seeing huge growth and it's fairly low customer acquisition costs, so that would imply it's a lot of word of mouth and a lot of people just coming round to the idea of rental.

I think that will then force a change amongst brands because they're gonna, I just think, the circular economy is coming, there's no two ways about it. It's becoming a lot more mainstream. It's becoming a lot more readily used by most people, I'd say now in some way or form.

And yeah, there's a million ways that a brand can attack that. I think rental is one of them. It's necessary from every perspective, a customer perspective, a sustainability perspective, even a financial perspective. If your competitor offers rental or buyback or secondhand purchases, then you know.

[00:33:56] Barry O'Kane: Brilliant. Thank you as always. We could keep going forever. There's one last question I have for you, Katie, and that is what's the future like? What are you excited about for the next stage of Baboodle?

[00:34:05] Katie Hanton-Parr: I am really excited to get all these processes that you built which will allow us to scale. So at the moment we've been so focused on kind of the operations and building a really solid foundation for the business. We've not really switched off any sort of brand awareness or marketing so I'm really curious to see what happens when we throw some money at that. And whether they'll just be, I don’t know, we've not fully tested the size of the market yet, so I'm interested to see where that leads us. I'm interested to see there are so many avenues that we can go down in terms of partnerships and B2B solutions at the moment, very direct to consumer.

But I just think there's a huge opportunity, in terms of brand partnerships what we can offer brands and it's something that we might start to build out a little bit more. 

[00:34:55] Barry O'Kane: Just as a final shout out to anybody who wants to go and find out more about Babboodle, where should they go?

[00:35:01] Katie Hanton-Parr: Www.baboodle.co.uk and our Instagram is @baboodle_uk.

[00:35:07] Barry O'Kane: Awesome. And as usual, we share all the links and transcript and show notes on happyporchradio.com. 

Thanks again, Katie. Really fun conversation!

[00:35:15] Katie Hanton-Parr: Thank you very much, both. Good to talk to you. 

[00:35:17] Tandi Tuakli: Yeah, thanks.

[00:35:18] Katie Hanton-Parr: Cheers.

[00:35:20] Barry O’Kane:  Thanks for listening.

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Thank you.

[00:35:32] Outro: This podcast is brought to you by happyporch.com. 

Whether you need bespoke software development, fractional CTO support, or just expert advice, HappyPorch is here to support your circular economy initiatives. If you're driving innovation and circularity, we'd love to chat. 

Your hosts were Barry O’Kane and Tandi Tuakli. Barry is a software engineer, leader, and entrepreneur with over 20 years experience. He founded HappyPorch to help you create web and software solutions that support the shift to regenerative circular economy. Tandi is a circular expert with over 15 years working in the fashion industry. She's passionate about collaborating with brands to create circular programs that reduce waste, drive revenue, and strengthen customer loyalty.