Tingit Is Building A Marketplace For 'Zero-effort' Repairs

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Do you have a much-loved jacket with a torn sleeve or pair of grubby kicks gathering dust at the back of your closet? Tingit , a startup out of Lithuania, wants to help people restore their used clothing to its former glory with its newly launched repairs marketplace.

The platform lets you use your phone to snap and upload a quick video of distressed items to get a quote for repair or restoration. If you're happy with the quote, you can pay through Tingit's app and then mail your stuff to the chosen repair shop. After that it's just a case of waiting for a few days or weeks. No need to trawl through back alleys for specialist restorers and wrangle unfriendly shop schedules. The platform takes all the slack.

There's just one catch for now: Tingit is only available in Lithuania, where the Vilnius-based startup debuted the service in February. However, the startup has just raised a €500,000 pre-seed funding round to keep scaling the business, and CEO and co-founder Indrė Viltrakytė says it has its sights on expanding into other markets in Europe. That will likely happen later next year when the company will be looking to raise a seed round.

Lithuania is home to fashion reuse marketplace giant Vinted , so the country's entrepreneurs have pedigree in this area. Tingit is another pure marketplace play, but it aims to connect people who own damaged/distressed fashion items with businesses that can repair them.

⁘I grew up with the people who started Vinted. So watching the company go from a small, local shop to this global huge marketplace was really, really inspiring,⁘ Viltrakytė told TechCrunch. ⁘I do hope that we can achieve something similar with repairs, and find synergies with companies that already work on the sustainability front.⁘

Viltrakytė came up with the idea for Tingit after working in fashion for years and growing frustrated by the industry's problems with sustainability and overconsumption. This isn't her first experience as a tech entrepreneur, either: She worked for three years with Vinted co-founder Justas Janauskas on a social media startup for teenagers that saw some traction locally before they shut it down. She has also dabbled in digital fashion and crypto/web3.