Harriet Noy, 26, founder and CEO of Hazaar, has built a secondhand fashion platform that now turns over £120,000 a year, tackling the problem of single-use clothing among students. What started as a university project has grown into a business that connects students with affordable, sustainable fashion options, including brand excess stock that would otherwise end up in landfill.
From Facebook groups to a thriving platform
While studying at the University of Birmingham, Noy, originally from Manchester, noticed a recurring pattern among her peers: students were constantly buying cheap, single-use items, often from fast-fashion giants like Amazon and Shein, for one-off events. 'I started Hazaar because I noticed all of my friends were always Amazon Priming fancy dress costumes every single week,' she told Metro. 'When you're a student, you have a constant need for new things, and you end up buying things you will only use once.'
Her solution was to create campus-based marketplaces where students could buy and sell secondhand items without postage—just meet outside the library to hand over the item. 'I thought there was a big opportunity to create campus based marketplaces – there would be no postage, you'd list the item and once sold just meet outside the library to hand over the item. It's about making sustainable options available to students. I wanted it to be accessible both in price point and convenience.'
Initially, she started with Facebook groups and plastered posters around campus, attracting 20,000 student sign-ups. After graduating, she developed an app with carbon reporting data and sold it to universities, so students could access the platform for free while the university covered the cost.
Making sustainability the cheapest option
Noy's core mission is to shift student behavior by making sustainable choices the most affordable and desirable. 'The key thing for me is making the sustainable option the cheapest, the most affordable, the most desirable, and it just so happens to be better than buying something brand new,' she says. 'I interview students about what they're wearing and why, and it's often brands like Shein, and they always say it's because of the price point. So, how can we have an impact to make this more sustainable?'
However, scaling the business proved difficult as universities tightened budgets. That's when brands started approaching Noy with excess stock they wanted to sell to students. This led to a new business model: still running campus student-to-student resales, but also allowing fashion companies to list selected items for students to buy at the lowest possible price. This stock would otherwise end up in landfill or recycling centres.
'The price point will be a lot lower than anywhere else, and students have to verify their status to be able to purchase it,' Noy explains of the new feature, which launched last month.
Learning from the journey
As a young business owner, Noy has learned valuable lessons. She says people 'are rooting for you' and advises reaching out to older, more experienced owners for advice, as she did when the business launched in 2020. She also cautions against 'chasing' investments over revenue. 'Investment should only be used when you're trying to scale in a direction that you know works,' she says. 'In the early days, I used investment almost as a distraction from figuring out if the business model actually works.' She received a few small investments early on, which she now wishes she had used more wisely.
Looking ahead, Noy hopes Hazaar will become the go-to platform for brands wanting to reach students, and a reliable, affordable community for students themselves. 'The rise of secondhand is great, because there's so much excess stock from brands in the world. I want to bring that to students at secondhand prices,' she adds. 'I want to prevent stock from going to waste.'
