Your closet is full, your wallet is empty, but you keep shopping. This is the life of so many American women. However, a new Web site, DigNSwap, created by two UCLA alumni, offers a way to stop that pattern, without sacrificing one’s fashion sense.
Ibrahim “Ibe” Elbouchikhi, who graduated from UCLA in 2004, and Li Qui, a 2006 UCLA graduate, recently launched DigNSwap, which allows users from across the country to post clothing and accessories they no longer want, and trade with other users for new items.
“It’s kind of like eBay but without actually paying any money,” Qui said.
Qui first developed the idea after attending a “swapping party,” where friends get together at a party and exchange clothes with each other.
“I thought about it, and it’s very limited because sometimes friends have different sizes, or taste, so I figured, why not put it online so that you trade with everybody,” Qui said.
Qui then shared the idea with Elbouchikhi, an engineer, who set up the Web site himself, with Qui as the designer. But it wasn’t as easy as that.
“It’s like launching an economy. You need to have items on there for people to see value in it, and then you can’t get items in there unless people list things. What we’ve been doing is going after visionaries who can see the purpose of this site as it will be when it’s really big, and they did, and they post things and they’re really passionate about it,” Elbouchikhi said.
Since its launch, the site has been growing fast and gaining fans all over the country.
“When we launched, we thought it was going to be mostly the San Francisco, L.A. people, but actually there’s a lot of people from the Midwest, (people who) wanted (a Web site like DigNSwap) but they just don’t have the opportunity. This concept just hasn’t even arrived there at all,” Elbouchikhi said.
One happy DigNSwap user is Sarah Baig, a friend of Elbouchikhi, who has been a DigNSwap user since its conception.
“I want to be able to not waste my clothes. I was cleaning out my closet, and I had clothes that I didn’t want, but I thought someone else could use,” Baig said. “I like the fact that you can swap with anyone and you don’t have to know the person.”
While at this point the users may be strangers, Qui and Elbouchikhi hope to turn DigNSwap into a type of social network.
“We really want to keep it like a community, where people feel comfortable posting their stuff and talking to each other,” Qui said. “We want to expand to more of a social network as well, and add features where you can leave comments for people, like, “˜Oh, that’s a great outfit,’ or things like that, so there is more interaction.”
Beyond the appeal of becoming part of a community of shopping without spending money, another benefit of using DigNSwap is its less damaging effect on the environment.
“Part of this is about the fashion, being able to trade and keep your wardrobe up to date, but another part of it is environmental,” Elbouchikhi said. “We’re not recycling things back to raw materials and then building them up again, which actually does a lot of damage, we’re repurposing the items and reusing them right away.”
The launching of DigNSwap in late August may have come at just the right time, with everyone spending their money a little more carefully.
“Given the economy right now, people will just have less money to spend on shopping, but at the same time our closets are still so full of stuff,” Elbouchikhi said.
“We buy these really well-made things today, really expensive, designer brands, and they can last for so much longer than they do today. Our fashion style is so quick. We get tired of things so fast that they get thrown away, We just can’t afford to do that anymore. You can’t sustain that. Someone else is going to love those items. Let’s repurpose it. It should be a natural thing.”