Fashioning a fortune by letting you rent that must-have outfit

AS a student at uni, Victoria Prew set herself a not-som o d e stambition: “ I wanted to build a unicorn business by the time I was 35.

- Lucy Tobin

To get there, I knew I needed to combine a highly scalable tech platform while solving a real problem.”

At 28, the founder of fashion rental marketplace Hurr has seven years to go to hit her target of building a $1 billion business. For now Hurr, a favourite of celebrities including Holly Willoughby, Ellie Goulding and Stacey Dooley, is approaching £6 million turnover this year, and recently completed a £4 million seed funding round backed by Octopus, an early investor in fashion selling site Depop.

Prew launched Hurr in 2019, her second tech start-up after building an app that cut standby electricity from student houses — “so if people left their hair straighteners on there wouldn’t be a fire”. She wound the business down after a year “because we had real work to do at uni — but the entrepreneurial seed was planted.”

Realism set in on graduation: “Given that 90% of start-ups fail, I trained in commercial real estate so I had a professional qualification to fall back on.” But Prew handed in her notice the day after qualifying as a chartered surveyor, starting work on Hurr the next day, and launching the site after a year of development and research.