“You’re likely to get it wrong on the first try”: the Pitch winner Amber Linz on Zipr’s change of direction

Last September, Amber Linz’ circular fashion app Zipr won the first iteration of the Pitch, selected by a guest judging panel of VCs and startup leaders for its market potential.

Billing itself ‘TikTok for fashion’, it let users become influencers to sell their own clothes and set out to make a more attractive shopping experience for secondhand clothes — a marketplace defined by poor and uncertain customer experiences due to concerns about size, fit, condition and no return policies.

SmartCompany recently caught up with the founder to get some updates about Zipr’s new direction, a pivot that meant pulling out of an accelerator program and not accepting funding “because we knew that it was going to be wrong at the time to accept people’s money or go into this program based off an idea that we didn’t know would actually be the one that we would go ahead with.”

Change of direction

Through conducting many more of the interviews that initially helped shape Zipr’s original business model, Linz, co-founder Bryce Altman, and the team realised something “wasn’t quite right.”

“We realised that the direction needed to change, which led us to solving this really massive problem that we kept hearing over and over and over again, for quite some time,” Linz said.

Instead of trying to change consumer behaviour, Zipr set out to put its attention to that space.

Linz refers to the massive influencer marketing industry.

“It’s sort of a yawn these days to even speak about,” she said, “because everyone knows it, and uses it, and does it, and it’s very established.”

“But collaborating with creators still remains highly manual, unpredictable and time-consuming.”

This creates a pain point for brands, who then favour a smaller pool of influencers with large followings, which in turn creates problems for influencers just starting out, or with smaller followings.

“Brands choose to favour big-name talent, whom they pay or gift items to, but these people may not genuinely endorse the product. They may not love the product or even know the product, or want it, or any of these things.

“But when you are going to pay them 600 bucks? They’ll do it.”

This can lead to issues with authenticity and a missed opportunity to find the right influencers who know and love the brands. And for many entry-level influencers, it just means not being able to land clients or paid work. Globally, that’s a market of 139 million semi-pro creators and 41 million pro creators and, according to Linktree’s 2022 Creator Report, 59 percent of beginner creators haven’t monetised yet and a further 35 percent earn below what can be considered a ‘livable income’.

“We’ve completely turned it on its head,” Linz said, “to enable brands to really leverage their true ambassadors, their real customers who love them, who continue to buy from them, who have a strong lifetime value and who will best represent the product because they know it the best.”

And as for the influencers, “we’re really helping that 94 percent who just can’t get collaborations with brands.”

How Zipr works

“We attract these on-brand influencers, we vet them against the brand’s criteria, such as engagement rate and following, among other things, and we provide them with the discounts that a brand has approved.

“The influencer shop as usual, with a discount, and in exchange for that discount, they create content and post it on their socials. They add an affiliate link and we track all of this performance data in the dashboard for them. So all of a sudden, this super time-consuming process for brands is completely automated and they get to work with their best ambassadors and influencers who are going to create the best content.

“And brands only actually pay for performance, which is affiliate sales, so every part of it has been flipped to be more effective for the brand, and for the influencers.”

The pivot

The decision to go in this new direction, while well-informed from the feedback they’d been receiving, was still a daunting one, said Linz.

“When we were in that realisation stage of ‘this actually might not be right, it’s not solving enough of a problem, it’s requiring too much of a change of behaviour, it’s such a saturated market’, there was a lot of things flying our way.

“It was super daunting because we’d invested so much time and energy into it, and every day was a new challenge.”

Linz and the team were in the process of raising money and had been accepted into an accelerator program. “All these things were happening but we actually decided not to take any of that.

“Because we knew that it was going to be wrong at the time to accept people’s money or go into this program based off an idea that we didn’t know would actually be the one that we would go ahead with.”

Perfection versus speed to market

Linz said her biggest learning after the pivot was about having the confidence to change direction and put something out there. “As a first-time founder, your nature is to build something that’s perfect.

“You’re embarrassed to put anything out there that’s not perfect, and you think that nobody will use it if it’s not. 

“But if you’re solving a big enough problem, if someone is desperate for it and they’re pulling it out of your hands and they need it today? It doesn’t matter what it looks like or feels like.”

“You should not be building something that will take you more than a maximum of six weeks to build”, she said.

“Because you’re likely to get it wrong on the first try, and then six months or a year down the track, you feel like your world’s going to fall apart if it doesn’t work – but six weeks later you can just rebuild.”

Grand plans

Zipr is signing new brands and influencers but is on the lookout for the big one. “We really think it’d be amazing to form a partnership with an industry leader, a massive brand for which influencer marketing is how it spends its marketing cost, and really understands [influencer marketing] and who can help build it out with us.”

On top of that, Zipr wants to move to the US and onboard US brands, to take advantage of the more fruitful influencer-brand ecosystem over there. “This whole entire concept really works in the US,” she said.

The US is “just the right environment for this to manifest. Brands are much more familiar with influencer marketing and use it to a larger extent.”

the Pitch is open for entries again, this time with a focus on fintechs. If you’ve got an early-stage startup idea and you fit the bill, get your pitch in now. Click here for eligibility, dates and details. Entries are free and close on July 7.