Entrepreneur and Charlotte native Jessica Kelly moved back to the Queen City last year to be closer to her parents during the pandemic, bringing with her tech startup THR3EFOLD, an ethical fashion brokerage platform.
THR3EFOLD, founded in 2016 in New York City, is a software-as-a-service platform that helps brands build ethical and sustainable fashion by connecting to ethical factories around the world. Founder Jessica Kelly said the platform also helps brands manage pricing and production all in one place.
"A lot of production teams don’t have the training and resources to know how to meet those ethical and sustainability goals," she said. "We’re trying to put that all in one place to give them the ability to have a safe and ethical supply chain."
But before THR3EFOLD could move beyond a concept, Kelly wanted to learn as much as she could about the industry.
In 2013, feeling disconnected from her New York-based career in public relations and fashion marketing, she decided to take a mission trip to Zimbabwe that ultimately changed the way she viewed the fashion industry.
"I'd gotten to the point where I was craving more meaning and connection to what I was doing," she said. "I returned to New York from that trip with a desire to find a way to provide ethical, sustainable employment to people around the world."
"I learned that fashion employs one in six people in the world, and primarily women," she said. "Ninety-seven percent of our clothing sold in the U.S. is made in developing nations where these jobs are needed the most, and unfortunately these job can be very exploitive," she added.
Kelly began researching industry ins and outs and eventually visited India in 2016 where she spent a month meeting with owners of factories that employed women who were rescued out of sex trafficking.
"These factories operated under the world's leading labor standards and provided things like daycare to their employees," she said. "But they also had really bad websites, which makes it impossible for brands in the U.S. to find them."
Armed with that knowledge, Kelly returned to the states to build a platform brands could use to gain resources, find ethically certified factories from around the world and manage production.
Kelly said she's spent the last three years building a network of factories and raising enough crowdfunding dollars to develop a working platform for THR3EFOLD. With 80 factories on-boarded, the team was ready for a Beta launch in early 2020, but Covid-19 forced Kelly to delay the release to March of this year.
"Sustainability was already a growing trend in fashion, and Covid exposed a lot of deep, structural cracks in the fashion industry," she said. "Despite the extra time it’s taken, we’re perfectly positioned now for what the industry needs, when it needs it."
In addition to the platform launch, Kelly said she also created an accelerator program out of the THR3EFOLD brand, called Coaching Club. The program began in September 2019 and is a four-month accelerator that focuses on giving fashion startups the tools they need to launch and grow their brands.
"Seventy-five percent of the brands that come through are prelaunch, so they're going through sourcing and prepping to launch their startups," she said. "The other 25% are small startup brands that have launched and are looking to implement strategy and scale."
"It's really my favorite, in terms of what we've been able to do in such a strange time to help brands pivot and continue to grow," Kelly added.
