A letter from the founder

Before Showroom was a website, it was a few things I loved. Spending time with my friends. Shopping for fashion and tech. Designing. Somewhere in there I fell in love with art and clothes, and one designer kept coming up for me: Virgil Abloh.

Around the same time I started my first business, selling shoes.

Virgil had a website called Free, where he taught people how to build a brand. One lesson stuck with me more than any other: a piece of trash in a garage is just trash, but put that same piece in a showroom gallery and it becomes a work of art. Nothing about the thing changes. What changes is where it sits and who gets to see it. I carried that idea into almost every business I worked on after that.

At the start of this year we came together to build something that would make a difference in our own community, and I went back to that idea one more time. With Showroom, your things are just things sitting at your house until you bring them to the Village. Here, they become something another student is looking for.

The things you shop for on Depop or Amazon are things other students already have, and would sell. Buying from each other, whatever it is, keeps the money with the people around you. And finding out that someone a few lockers down wanted the same jacket you did is how people who might never have talked end up building a bond.

So we spent weeks building it properly. The lockers, so a sale never depends on meeting up. The checks, so what you pick up is what was listed. The tech and the safety work you will never see. All of it to bring Showroom to life, free to join and free to list on, for every student.