Launching this month, London-based conscious, sustainable social shopping platform Farleigh.io aims to revolutionise the way we shop online. Millions of businesses are struggling to keep afloat due to this viral outbreak and they will not survive weeks of zero cash flow. However, as we move everything online, it’s still particularly hard for the smaller to medium independents to be seen online. For many brands, businesses and so called bedroom entrepreneurs, social shopping platforms like Farleigh.io can work as a digital high street, sitting at the intersection between Depop, Pinterest and Instagram.
If Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding and sharing image inspiration, Farleigh.io is a discovery engine of shoppable products. With an easy-to-use interface that’s been developed for simplicity and style, users design their own shop windows that look professional and slick — and with a quick click-to-buy mechanic taking you straight through to an in-built check out.
Farleigh.io’s business model is similar to second-hand clothes app Depop – whose popularity comes as Gen-Z’s embrace a different way of shopping online – and focuses on a similar Gen-Z audience, targeting preloved but also beautifully, sustainably designed products from small to medium size independents. Shoppers can discover items off a shoppable news feed, and just like Depop, Farleigh.io’s business model will take 10% of each profile-to-profile transaction to keep the site up and running.
Similarly to Instagram, Farleigh.io focuses on the power of social shopping and the belief that we still trust and value our friends’ and style icons shopping recommendations the most. Windows are easy to design and fun to curate, and once a product is published, other customers can re-window, re-mix and re-publish items into their own windows — each creating and sharing their own looks and styles. If a user inspires a sale for another seller by curating it in their window they are also rewarded 5% for inspiring that sale, a next generation of influencer commerce where anyone can monetise from curating items.
The platform celebrates sustainable products that don’t wreck the planet and is all about reducing, reusing and recycling, with each window limited to ten items. Not only does this prevent visual clutter but it also encourages smaller collections with more high quality products. They’ve also made it easier than ever to incorporate your own pre-loved clothing, homeware or anything into your window, alongside the new stuff, promoting a more circular economy.
