The Question That Started Endless

Seven years ago, I was lucky enough to get in a room with THE David Reiss - founder of Reiss.

I pitched him the idea of Endless. Fashion rental.

He looked at me and said: "You think you're going to get people to wear worn clothes? Never going to happen."

At the time, rental was so niche. Resale wasn't mainstream. Circular fashion wasn't a category - it was a question mark.

I left that meeting more certain than I had been going in.

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People ask me what question started Endless. They expect something visionary. A market insight. A data point.

The real answer is personal, and slightly embarrassing in how ordinary it is.

I was working as a womenswear buyer at Marks & Spencer, and then lingerie, and I genuinely loved getting dressed. I loved the confidence that the right piece gives you, the way fashion can completely shift how you feel. I also saw the other side of it every day at work. Overproduction. Relentless newness. Waste at scale.

And at the same time, I was just a normal woman who loved getting dressed up. Fast fashion was often the only affordable option. The alternatives felt clunky, expensive - or simply not aspirational.

There wasn't anywhere to shop circular fashion that felt exciting.

So I built it.

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That's the founding question, stripped back to its actual form. It wasn't "how do I fix the fashion industry?" It wasn't a mission statement. It was one woman standing in front of a wardrobe thinking: why doesn't this feel as good as it should?

The question followed me. From London to a small UK launch to a trip to Dubai that turned into a move. The scepticism followed too. There was a lot of it when I set up Endless seven years ago, and again when I brought it to the UAE.

A city built on newness, luxury, and luxe labels - how would circular fashion fit into that?

I had an answer. I started Endless with a simple goal: to make circular fashion feel as exciting as shopping new. Not the budget option. Not the green option. The first option.

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David Reiss wasn't wrong about the obstacles. He was just wrong about the direction.

The data eventually proved it. Circular fashion - a core part of the fashion industry - is projected to be worth hundreds of billions globally within the next decade, growing significantly faster than traditional fashion.

But the shift I care about most isn't the market size. It's the individual moment. The woman who said to Cosmopolitan Middle East, in a piece that ran earlier this year, that the UAE is "way more receptive than people expect - people care more about the experience and how fun it is, how they feel wearing something, than whether they own it."

That quote was Endless. That's the answer to the founding question.

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The hardest part of building is believing in the work long before it pays off.

I believe that now more than I've ever believed it. Not because the journey has been easy - it hasn't been, not by any measure. But because the question that started all of this was a real question, asked by a real woman, about a gap she couldn't stop noticing.

That kind of question doesn't stop being the right one just because the market isn't ready yet.

Sometimes you just have to keep building until the world catches up.