UGA Grad Helps Scale Atlanta Clothing Rental App e.closet To 30,000 Users
ATLANTA, October 26 (Hypepotamus) - At first when Skyler Ventura said he was going to quit his job and pursue an app idea around women’s fashion, he said his mom was strongly against the decision.
Now, she’s making money on the platform herself….and has even turned part of her home into a distribution center to help fulfill orders coming in on the app.
Her change of heart is one sign of how quickly things have moved for e.closet, a marketplace where people rent or sell clothing from their own closets. Another sign of how quickly things are moving for e.closet is the platform's transaction volume? September sales (Gross Merchandise Volume) reached $73,600, up from $24,500 in August, according to Ventura.
The company now has more than 30,000 users, with growth coming largely through word of mouth, he told Hypepotamus. And while the app started with a college focus, it has found an eager audience in high school and beyond.
For Ventura, e.closet is an opportunity to build a business around something students were already doing online...while helping people earn a little (or a lot) of money along the way.
From Campus Instagram Accounts To e.closet
While in college, Ventura noticed the sheer number of college students at UGA using individual Instagram accounts to sell or rent out outfits. But he realized there was no centralized marketplace for that type of rental.
During his senior year at the University of Georgia, he developed a clothing rental concept called Rotation. The idea won the Idea Accelerator at UGA’s Terry College of Business.
Make every text, call, and lead count. CallRail connects the dots between your campaigns, conversations, and customers.
About a month later, Ventura connected with the team behind e.closet, which had a more established technology team. Rotation merged with e.closet in May.
That was also the month Ventura graduated from UGA with degrees in finance and accounting and started to work on e.closet full time.
He joined as co-founder and CFO, working alongside founder and CEO Brandon Spencer, who lives in Marietta, Georgia, and co-founder and chief growth officer Olivia Mayer , who lives in Dallas. The founding team is entirely under 27.
Mayer herself has made over six-figures selling on e.closet, according to Ventura.
Turning A Closet Into Income
The marketplace’s proposition for clothing owners is straightforward: Make money from pieces they already own.
Owners keep 85% of each rental or sale and can reject rental requests. Customers, meanwhile, can shop in other people’s closets for an outfit suited to a particular occasion. Items can be shipped or arranged for pickup.
Ventura says he is one of two guys selling on the platform, and he’s bought dresses to rent through the app. That helps him understand what owners experience when listing items and completing transactions.
And, yes, his mother and a few of his sisters are actively making money on the app each month as well.
But like any marketplace founder, Ventura knows just how difficult it can be to scale a consumer-facing company. There are operational headaches — including emergency dry cleaning bills — and the team has to manage the expectations of people on both sides of a transaction.
Even with those challenges, Ventura described the experience as “overwhelmingly positive.”
Finding Customers Beyond College Campuses
One source of demand has come from outside e.closet’s original college audience. This fall, e.closet found an unexpected number of high school homecoming shoppers coming onto the platform.
Ventura said e.closet attracted hundreds of high schoolers without a dedicated marketing effort. It offered another indication that demand could extend beyond the campuses where he first noticed students renting clothes.
Maija Ehlinger
The opportunity, he explained, is to serve all customers who want a specific outfit for a specific event.
Rather than committing to a subscription with a set number of items (like what is available on Nuuly) or renting from a company’s own inventory (like what happens with Rent The Runway), e.closet customers rent only what they need from an individual owner’s closet.
The team is using AI-driven customer support, recommendations, and search to help support the marketplace as it grows, Ventura said.
For the Atlanta startup, the next challenge is turning word-of-mouth interest into a business that can consistently serve both clothing owners and renters.
Ventura has already persuaded his mother to participate. Some family members still need convincing.
“I have five sisters…and only two of them have signed up for the app to this day,” he said.
Maija Ehlinger
The Region’s Ecommerce Opportunity
e.closet is building at a time when online spending continues to grow. Retail ecommerce sales reached $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, adjusted for seasonal variation. That represented 17.1% of total retail sales and a 12.2% increase from a year earlier.
Southeast-based founders are working on tech to improve how transactions happen in the ecommerce space.
Thryft Ship, for example, helps Instagram resellers manage inventory, payments, and shipping. Other startups are focused on turning product discovery into purchases. Atlanta’s Agentix is building infrastructure to let shoppers complete transactions inside AI conversations, and Raleigh’s ReFiBuy is designed to help brands and retailers stand out in our new agentic age. SmartCommerce, also out of Atlanta, has focused on helping consumer packaged goods brands connect with online shoppers as advertising and buying habits evolve.
Last year, a "Tinder for clothing" startup Styl, created by Duke students, was acquired.
For e.closet, it is all about helping someone earn money from an outfit another person wants to wear. Its next test is keeping up that scale while bringing on investors.
And, of course, getting through prom season.
--
See more Hypepotamus stories in your search results
Featured Photo by Chastity Cortijo / Unsplash
