As the oldest of four children in a blue-collar family, Kaleena Eugene-Louis knew growing up that her parents couldn’t afford to buy the expensive designer clothes that her Renaissance High School classmates were wearing.
“My mom was the coupon queen, and she learned how to make it happen with what we had,” said Eugene-Louis, who grew up on Detroit’s east side. “I want to help women be the flyest girl in the room while balling on a budget.”
The entrepreneur is doing just that by empowering women to use what they already have to get the look they want with “Zero to Wear,” a virtual closet app she launched earlier this year. Eugene-Louis’ app allows users to upload their wardrobe and piece together outfits.
“Some women don’t know what they have,” she said. “They’ll have a closet full of clothes and still say they don’t have anything to wear and buy something new, which pushes more clothes to the back of their closets.”
The result is overspending and a closet full of clutter, which leads to an even more stressful time finding an outfit, she said. The U.S. women’s retail market is expected to hit $394 billion by 2025, according to Statista.
Eugene-Louis says her app helps women not only save money, but also helps them keep track of everything they own and makes finding an outfit more convenient. Users can put outfits together from anywhere at any time, which Eugene-Louis says saves users time and it’s less stressful than rummaging through a closet full of chaos.
The app also allows users to invite friends to see outfit combinations in their virtual closets to preserve space for peer-to-peer feedback. The base app is free, but for a fee it also offers some premium features.
Eugene-Louis says what sets Zero to Wear apart from other virtual closet apps is the vigorous research that she put into developing the app while she was a part of the Start Studio program, a business training incubator run by the entrepreneurship development hub TechTown Detroit.
Nicholas Slappey, program coordinator for TechTown Detroit, said Eugene-Louis’ application for the program stood out because she identified a clear problem.
“Women wear so many hats [in society] and need so many different outfits for many different occasions,” Slappey said “And the purpose of our program was to help Kaleena validate her solution to that problem.”
The validation process included strenuous market research. Eugene-Louis was tasked with conducting nearly 180 interviews with potential customers. For her, it was the most challenging part of the program.
“Because your idea is your baby, and you’re not talking to people who’s going to tell you what you want to hear – you’re not asking your mama,” Eugene-Louis said. “You’re asking unbiased people who had to be brutally honest.”
A key finding from her interviews was that 50 percent of women don’t wear everything in their closets, proof for the need of an organizational tool to help women keep track of what they own.
After Start Studio, she entered another one of TechTown Detroit’s development programs called STEEP, which helped her develop a business pitch for her app, network with other entrepreneurs and tech developers in the city. In that program she met Sydney Davis, founder of NixCode, a no-code app development software company. Eugene-Louis hired Davis to build Zero to Wear, and in February, she launched the app.
So far, 1,600 people have downloaded Zero to Wear and began uploading their virtual closets, Eugene-Louis said.
The launch was the culmination of a nearly 10-year process. Before Eugene-Louis entered Start Studio, she compiled notes for seven years on her vision of starting her own personal styling business. But her dedication to her job and family stopped her acting on those ideas. Some encouragement from her husband led to her to apply for the Start Studio program.
“I give Start Studio all the credit for teaching me those principles – the market research, the customer discovery – I didn’t understand how important that was,” Eugene-Louis said.
Eugene-Louis is still conducting customer research, and what she’s learning is that even though people are downloading the app and uploading their wardrobe, they are still struggling to piece together outfits. To address this problem, Eugene-Louis is working on expanding the app to help users connect with personal stylists on the platform, who would access their clients’ virtual closet and help them piece together outfits.
Eugene-Louis describes it as a dating site for personal stylists. To test the feasibility of this new addition, she has partnered with Raine Webb, a personal stylist from Detroit who has worked on red carpets and with celebrities such as R&B singer Normani and actor Keith Powers. Webb owns a personal styling company called Vintage by Raine.
“The app requires you to upload pictures of your wardrobe, and some people are like, ‘Well, I don’t have time for that.’ That’s where I come in,” Webb said. “They can hire me, I go to their house, upload their wardrobe, and organize their closets.”
Webb and Eugene-Louis are still finalizing how much Webb’s services would cost on the platform.
Another plan in the works is to develop the platform into a marketplace where users can buy clothes from other users, sell and trade clothes they don’t no longer wear. Eugene-Louis says these new add-ons are what will set “Zero to Wear” apart in the market.
“As far as I know, I’m the only person doing this,” Eugene Louis said. “In all of my travels to these different tech and business conferences, I don’t see anyone doing what I’m doing.”