From Tech Executive to Fashion Rental Pioneer: Büsra Zanner of Wearr

Recently on HappyPorch Radio, we sat down for a frank, insightful conversation with Büsra Zanner of Wearr, a circular minded, event oriented premium clothing rental company out of Germany, now serving across the EU. Hers was an entrepreneurial origin story that many of us can perhaps relate to: An idea that grabs hold of you, carrying you along, until you find yourself stepping away from your sure bet job in favour of bringing something you're passionate about to the world.

We learned a great deal about the nuanced art of partnerships, the value of placing your customers at the absolute center of all considerations, and using technology as an enabler rather than a driver of your business.

Let's dig in, shall we?

When an Evening Conversation Becomes Your Next Chapter

Büsra's journey into fashion rental is refreshingly unplanned. Working at one of Germany's fastest-growing tech startups, she had no intention of leaving, let alone starting a company in an entirely different sector. Then came that dinner conversation…the one about wardrobes full of expensive occasion wear gathering dust, about the pressure of social media making outfits "obsolete" after a single photo, about the growing consciousness that this waste simply didn't make sense anymore.

"That night already, I was searching for logos, bidding for the domain," Büsra recalls. "It was pretty much taking me with it."

What followed was a masterclass in rapid validation. After speaking with friends and potential customers to identify the most pressing pain point (event rentals, not subscriptions), Büsra saw an opportunity in the upcoming Oktoberfest. Visitors from outside Munich typically face a choice: spend seven to eight hundred euros on traditional attire they'll wear once, or settle for cheap Amazon alternatives. Wearr launched on September 9th, just weeks before the festival. By the end of September, they'd received over 60 orders and sold out their entire pilot stock.

For a brand-new consumer business, this validated something crucial: there was real demand for premium rental when executed properly.

Technology as Foundation, Not Facade

Here's where Büsra's background in tech becomes particularly interesting and instructive for others building circular businesses. She approached technology not as the star of the show, but as essential infrastructure.

From day one, Wearr looked like a polished, premium platform. "Even my colleagues were asking me how long have you been working on this? Was this like a year-long project?" Büsra laughs. "And I was like, well, three weeks!"

But that Shopify storefront was just the customer-facing layer. Behind it, everything was manual—Büsra herself was packing, shipping, even hand-delivering orders while still working her full-time job. Yet she understood something fundamental: the technology stack matters most for what it enables you to do, not what it appears to be.

"From day one we really cared about the kind of data we collect and how we make use of that data," Büsra explains. This data serves multiple purposes: helping curate pieces with the highest rental potential and durability, personalising the customer experience, and streamlining operations.

Her vision is clear: customers should feel like they're browsing a mood board created by a personal stylist who knows their age, lifestyle, fashion preferences, and upcoming events. No marketplace-style sorting through endless options, just seamless, curated discovery, thanks to nuanced use of data.

The operational side benefits equally. Rental businesses have historically been resource-intensive, requiring listings, photography, quality descriptions, order management, and return processing. "Along this chain, there are so many pieces that basically you can automate now and therefore build your team as linear as possible," she notes, working closely with tech partners to systematically automate where it matters.

The lesson? Technology should make your business more efficient and your customer experience more delightful, but it shouldn't dictate your business model or distract from core value creation.

The Art of Partnership: Knowing When to Say No

Perhaps one of Büsra's most valuable insights centers on partnership strategy. In the circular economy, we often celebrate collaboration, and rightly so. But Büsra emphasises that what you decline is as important as what you accept.

Take sourcing partnerships. Wearr works with several channels: purchasing standout pieces from current collections, working with private lenders who have extensive wardrobes, partnering with emerging designers seeking exposure, and collaborating with retailers managing vast sale inventories.

But getting to this mix required saying no. Secondhand platforms initially seemed promising, but Büsra quickly realised the math didn't work. "They typically have very old pieces. And the pictures they take are horrendous," she explains. Processing those items would require receiving them, re-photographing them, and creating new listings, it’s an enormous effort for uncertain returns.

By contrast, individual creators and influencers proved surprisingly fruitful. A single person might send 15-20 dresses from the last two seasons, all already vetted by someone matching Wearr's target audience. The quality bar was higher, the effort lower, and the pieces were already "social proofed."

On the influencer front, Büsra learned to be highly selective. She turns down collaborations that don't match Wearr's brand positioning, regardless of follower counts. "You will have people that have a million following and they will post something about you, but their following is so scattered that you will not get so much out of it. But then someone with maybe 30,000 people following will talk about you and then suddenly overnight you will get hundreds of people following you."

Her advice? Look for alignment over reach, and don't be afraid to maintain high standards even as a small startup. "How you act also in this term determines how far you will go," she observes. You can easily burn through resources dealing with partners who won't deliver the quality you need.

Customer Experience Above All Else (Yes, Even Over Sustainability)

This might be the most honest, and most valuable lesson Büsra shared: sometimes you make sustainability trade-offs in service of customer experience, and that's okay.

Wearr's target customers are professionals aged 25-45 working in finance and tech, attending frequent business and social events. They have disposable income and high expectations. They're sustainability-conscious, but what really drives them to Wearr is convenience and quality: avoiding the hassle of buying, storing, cleaning, and eventually disposing of occasion wear they'll only use once.

"Circularity is of course at the center," Büsra affirms, describing the joy of seeing her own pieces travel from a doctors' ball in Vienna to a film festival in London to Berlin's Bundes press ball. But when customer experience conflicts with sustainability, like choosing express shipping to guarantee on-time delivery, customer experience wins.

"We make sure that the customer gets the order on time," she states plainly. "I don't know if this makes sense."

It makes complete sense. Rental businesses live and die on reliability. Miss one wedding or gala, and word-of-mouth turns negative fast. Büsra compensates in other ways: donations, greener logistics partners, developing reusable packaging. But she's clear-eyed about priorities.

The results speak to this approach: a 4.9 customer satisfaction score, 100 Net Promoter Score, and purely word-of-mouth growth. One customer wrote: "I've heard about you from four different people. Now it's time for me to try it out."

As Büsra notes from her previous experience selling sustainable enterprise solutions: "We all love talking about sustainability, but when it comes to paying for it, it's not as present." Circular business models need to feel as good as, or better than, traditional ownership. Otherwise, they remain niche.

Staying Focused When Everything Looks Like an Opportunity

With Wearr gaining traction, Büsra fields constant requests to expand: workwear subscriptions, accessories, different rental models. Many of these could work. Many could be profitable. But she's forcing herself to say no.

"If I know for a fact that if I wanna go for this, I need different kind of brands, different kind of pieces, and it's going to be a distraction both on our time as a team, as a very small team and at the same time on our capital," she explains.

Her strategy: make event rentals profitable first, while slowly building the technological foundation (customer profiles, wishlists, referral programs, store credits) that will enable future expansion. Then, and only then, consider new use cases.

"If something isn't working, then it's okay to tweak around and iterate. But when something is working, I think it's good to focus and to make it stand on its own feet before jumping into too many different areas."

This discipline, maintaining focus even when opportunities abound, may be one of the hardest skills for any founder, particularly in the circular economy where the potential applications of a good model seem endless.

The Takeaway

Büsra's story offers a refreshingly pragmatic roadmap for circular economy entrepreneurs. Start with clear customer pain points, not grand sustainability missions. Use technology to enable your vision, not define it. Be ruthlessly selective about partnerships, measuring not just potential but actual return on time and resources. Prioritise customer experience even when it requires sustainability trade-offs, knowing that a failed business helps no one. And perhaps most importantly: stay focused on making your core offering profitable before chasing adjacent opportunities.

Less than a year in, Wearr is already serving customers across the EU with a model that's sustainable precisely because it's customer-centric first. That's circular economy thinking at its most pragmatic, and most promising.

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You can find Wearr at wearr.com or reach out at [email protected]. You can listen to and read the full conversation on HappyPorch Radio here.