Can you imagine if vacation rental company Airbnb and fashion marketplace Grailed had a baby?

That's what the founder of Reserve, an app for editorial fashion rentals, encourages users to envision. And apparently it's exactly what the fashion industry was missing. 

Omar Abul Ata is an Egyptian-Torontonian who attended TMU for retail management and worked at the flagship Louis Vuitton store in Yorkville as an operations lead.

During his years in retail, he received rental returns from fashion stylists and observed how much manual labour the process consumed. That's because there was no such thing as a one-stop shop for sourcing garments for editorial fashion projects — until Abul Ata created it.

He is not a techie by trade, but Abul Ata taught himself how to create an app so that he could take advantage of this unattended space in Toronto's fashion industry. 

At the moment of conception, he envisioned an online directory for designer clothing rentals catered to the industry creatives who needed them most.

But he didn't act on his idea right away. Rather, he used his position at Louis Vuitton to establish a reputation in the fashion community first.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by F as in fracture (@fracture.to)

Since Abul Ata was the direct recipient of Paris shipments coming into the Louis Vuitton store, he was the first person to see the new runway pieces. So he began to take photos and upload them to his Instagram mood board, Fracture.

Soon after, influential fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection at the time, reposted some of his photos and his following spiked. His new followers included internationally-respected fashion mood boards, like Hidden NY. 

Determined to build a network, Abul Ata committed to a content schedule posting three days a week for a year and hit 2000 followers. The second year he hit 22,000.

"That was really when things picked up," he says in reflection. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by RESERVE (@rsrvmrkt)

He finished his last semester at TMU in the fall of 2020, and as soon as he graduated, he enrolled in a 400-hour BrainStation course to receive a UX Design diploma. His personal project for the course was the Reserve app. 

Using the Fracture page to recruit designers for the project, Abul Ata secured his first big vendor, LA-based designer clothing showroom Groupie. By spring of 2022, he launched the beta version of the app as a proof of concept with 15 vendors in total; four from LA and 11 from Toronto. 

That summer, Abul Ata moved to New York and increased the number of vendors to 85, equipping Reserve's total inventory with 4000 pieces of archival designer clothing. 

But the app's user base still wasn't at the standard Abul Ata wanted it to be, so after receiving the Futurpreneur Canadian business loan, he took down the beta version of the app and spent the winter rebuilding the platform. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by RESERVE (@rsrvmrkt)

Now he has finally launched Reserve in it's final form, with vendors across Toronto, New York, LA and Chicago. 

In order to debut Reserve in Toronto, Abul Ata partnered with viral fashion influencer Lexson Millington, a.k.a. Lexsonator, to host a free community styling event in his downtown studio.

Over the June 24th weekend this year, Abul Ata and Millington scheduled back-to-back photo shoot sessions for hundreds of creatives to style models using Millington's massive 1,200-piece inventory, as well as collection of women's garments from local independent designers. 

The event was a real life example of how the Reserve web app functions: by providing a single destination for editorial clothing rentals. 

There are two sides to the app, renting and listing. Vendors (independent designers, retailers or archivists), have full control over their listings, from the daily rental rate, dry cleaning fee, and security deposit, to length of rental time. It's not an automatic transaction, so if a stylist puts in a rental request, the vendor can approve or deny as they see fit. 

Renters are typically industry individuals, photographers, stylists, producers or directors, who require clothes for fashion projects. They can easily browse listings by city, category, designer, size, or colour, and save them for when they're ready to book. Once a rental is secured, they can retrieve it from the designer's pickup location. 

As of now, the Reserve inventory is predominantly archival designer menswear but Abul Ata is working to fulfill more womenswear as well. His hope in the coming months is to secure users and investors alike in order to grow Reserve to its full potential.