This App Is Redefining Sustainable Fashion

Ever gone vintage shopping and found the perfect item? There is a thrill in discovering the perfect piece, but behind every fast-fashion find or overpriced vintage tee lies an unsettling truth, that the fashion industry is one of the planet’s biggest polluters. 🌎

Meet Vanessa Sanchez, the first-gen founder and CEO of bonnee, the clothing swap app that is changing the way you shop.

The Clothing Swap App

When it comes to fashion, many of us are caught in a familiar contradiction of loving style, but knowing its environmental toll. That’s exactly what led Vanessa Sanchez, Maritza Sanchez, and Meredith Vey to create the clothing swap app bonnee.

Users post an item from their closet on the bonnee app by uploading pictures to the platform. Users receive one credit for every item they post. From there someone else can swipe and take that item. The user who receives the clothing items only pays for shipping.

“ We are introducing people to a whole new way of getting new clothes,” Vanessa explains. “It's a really inexpensive way for people to find what we like to refer to as new to you clothing. We always like to say that we believe that your next favorite outfit is hanging in someone else's closet.”

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Making Fashion Accessible

bonnee’s founders aren’t just into fashion and style, they’re former ecommerce entrepreneurs. Vanessa worked on Goodwill’s marketing team for several years and saw firsthand how the fashion resale market has changed, and the negative and positive impacts of donated clothing items.

“When it came to fashion, we had a little bit of guilt associated with that. We realized, especially being a Miami based startup, we are seeing climate change happening every day. So we know the huge impact that our collective decisions make,” Vanessa says.

“We had been swapping amongst ourselves for years. We'd been attending local in-person swap events, and we realized that there was an opportunity to digitize that experience and make this in-person community online and accessible to people all across the country. So I think that's really why we decided to create bonnee.”

Vanessa hopes that bonnee makes swapping accessible for everyone, ensuring every item has equal value and every user has access, regardless of location or income.

“With the rise of vintage and resale platforms, secondhand clothing is becoming expensive,” Vanessa says. “You’ll see vintage T-shirts online for $200. That’s just not realistic for most people. bonnee flips that dynamic.”

“We really wanted to make it easy and very simple for people to be able to go on bonnee and find something that they like,” Vanessa says. “bonnee is accessible for everyone because your style twin might be in Seattle or they might be in a small town in Texas. You just never know, someone in Texas can take an item from someone in California.”

Building a Tech Startup

Aside from a few pitch competitions and accelerator programs, bonnee is completely bootstrapped. The bonnee team has built an app that they are completely in control of. “We’re really proud of that,” Vanessa says. “It’s hard, but it also gives us full control over the platform and how we want to shape our community.

“That entrepreneurial drive comes from our roots. “Maritza and I are first generation, we have a Cuban father and a Colombian mother. Our dad ran businesses our entire lives,” Vanessa says.

The bonnee team spent months running focus groups to test if there was real demand. bonnee officially debuted in January 2024, and Vanessa and the team are already working on version 2 of the app.

Advice for First-Gen Founders

As a first-gen founder Vanessa as one piece of advice for others 📣“Go for it!” 

Vanessa acknowledges the risk, but emphasizes that with the right support system, it’s worth it. “Even if you don’t have another founder with you, just having those mentors who are able to help you. There are a lot of different programs out there that provide resources for entrepreneurs, whether that be at the local or federal level.”

She also wants founders to know that it’s okay to start small. “Your business doesn’t have to be your full-time job right away. You can side hustle it. You can build as you go.”

The Future of Sustainable Fashion

Ultimately, the goal is simple: “We want bonnee to be synonymous with swapping,” Vanessa says. “ We're really just excited for people to be thinking about sustainable fashion and to think about swapping. We would love for swapping to be the new shopping. When you have a special occasion or you have a vacation, you think about, turning to the secondhand market.

bonnee is available for download on iOS and Android. Learn more and start swapping at bonnee 📲

Mexican-American Style x Vogue

Daisy Maldonado wrote this awesome piece in Vogue titled Young Mexican Americans Are Reclaiming Style as Resistance.

It’s such an incredible piece on style, that (sweet) and conflicting spot of being a first-gen Mexican-American, and where fashion and being visible becomes a form of resistance. What we wear has become proud assertions of our identity.

Check out the full article in Vogue.

Let me know what you thought of this edition. Don’t forget to follow Latino Owned on Instagram and connect with me on Linkedin and email! 📧