Meet the Penn grad behind Pickle, the growing fashion app that lets you rent clothes from influencers’ closets
University of Pennsylvania graduate Julia O’Mara cofounded the app, which just raised $12 million in funding from investors.
The sleeper fashion trend for summer 2025? Renting clothes from a stranger.
That’s the premise of Pickle, a clothing rental service cofounded by Brian McMahon and University of Pennsylvania graduate Julia O’Mara that recently raised $12 million in Series A funding to become what investors hope will be “the Airbnb of fashion.”
Pickle — as in, what to wear when you’re in a pickle — was founded in 2021 as a social polling app where users could crowdsource feedback on fashion dilemmas ranging from what to wear to a wedding to whether a designer bag was a good investment. O’Mara and McMahon pivoted in 2022 after watching users recommend clothes from their own closets and offer to let others borrow them.
Now lenders rent out pieces from their closets for days or weeks at a time and a fraction of the original sale price, either shipping the clothes nationwide or working with Uber or DoorDash couriers to make deliveries within the same city. Renters must return clothes directly to the lender, who determines how the pieces should be cleaned. Pickle users can leave reviews after each rental, creating a level of social pressure that might keep you from, say, returning an outfit with pee stains.
Clothes on Pickle are West Village Girl trendy and hover just below the bona fide luxury fashion range: Think slinky Rat & Boa wedding guest dresses that retail for upward of $300, flouncy ruffle mini skirts from LoveShackFancy, tiny Cult Gaia purses, and Coyote Ugly-style pleather sets from I.Am.Gia. The range has enabled Pickle to triple its monthly active users year-over-year to the point that 1 in 4 Manhattan women aged 18 to 35 are using it. A spokesperson for Pickle declined to share its total user base.
Pickle’s ascension comes as oversaturation seeps through the clothing rental space: Subscription services like Rent the Runway and StitchFix are shedding customers while Philadelphia-based Nuuly has grown to 300,000 subscribers thanks to a catalog of Anthropologie and Free People products. Other peer-to-peer services, meanwhile, haven’t picked up steam.
O’Mara, who studied engineering and played lacrosse before graduating from Penn in 2019, wished she had something like Pickle during college and the early days of postgrad to simplify the mad dash of finding an outfit for a fraternity formal or a happy hour. She left a consulting job at Blackstone to work on Pickle full time in 2021 despite not being that interested in fashion.
» READ MORE: What does it take to keep Nuuly clothes fresh?
“When I needed a last-minute outfit, I would run down the street to the Urban Outfitters at Penn or to the closest Zara in New York City to grab something affordable that I would probably wear one time and never use again,” said O’Mara, 27. Pickle “lets you wear something once guilt-free.”
Pickle’s largest markets are where influencers congregate — N.Y.C., Los Angeles, and Miami — but O’Mara said Philadelphia is on its way to becoming one of the app’s next hubs. Philly has seen its user base more than triple year-over-year, the Pickle spokesperson said.
What will it take to be fashion’s Airbnb? The Inquirer talked with O’Mara about how influencers, social pressure, and keeping pace with the trend cycle have helped Pickle sidestep the clothing rental industry’s pitfalls.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
A lot of the popular rental services already pull from brands that are also popular on Pickle. How does the app differentiate itself, especially as tastes have gotten more homogenous?
Our supply ends up being super dynamic and very up to date because it’s exactly what people are interested in wearing right now. We get a lot of feedback from customers where they’re like, ‘Pickle has the coolest stuff,’ and that’s because each piece is something quality, something that an actual person wanted to wear.
» READ MORE: The top Nuuly trends in Philly. And how the service picks its styles.
Pickle started gaining traction after influencers such as Remi Bader, Brigette Pheloung, and Brooks Nader started listing their closets on the app. Have those relationships been worthwhile?
The reason we thought about influencers had a lot to do with what’s challenging about starting a marketplace: We wanted to be able to start telling people to rent on Pickle, but we couldn’t do that until we had a decent amount of clothes for people to rent.
Who are people that have excess clothes laying around but also driving style trends? We started with nano and micro-influencers in New York City, people with a couple thousand followers. Our pitch was, ‘You have these amazing pieces. We know you can’t wear them all the time … this is a great way to be able to circulate them and have a side hustle.’
We don’t do any paid influencer marketing, and the majority of top lenders are not influencers. … Their clothes make up less than 1% of our inventory, so it’s just become a way for influencers to connect more deeply with their audiences.
Does Pickle rely on influencers to first build supply in every city?
Not necessarily. Since we’re available nationally, we look for pockets where users are starting to coalesce and then focus our efforts there.
We started in New York City, then our next big city was L.A .only because people started using Pickle there organically without any marketing. People had learned about Pickle from organic social media and started to ship clothes back and forth from New York to L.A. before opening up their own closets to the point were people could rent locally.
That’s how we ended up growing in Miami. People were shipping clothes around Art Basel in December and now F1, Music Week, and Swim Week. Philly is one of those markets too … we’ve seen a lot of users that used to live in New York now live in Philly.
Since Pickle is peer-to-peer, so the app seems to operate under the assumption that every user will do the right thing. How did you come to trust that would be the right approach?
We’re very similar to Airbnb. If you go and trash someone’s house, you’re going to get a horrible review. You’re not going to be able to use the platform anymore. So the fact that we have reviews is a pretty serious incentive.
What also helped is that Pickle’s local, city-by-city approach makes clear that you’re taking care of someone else’s item. … If it’s a local rental, the clothes might be from someone who might be two, three degrees separated from you. The world isn’t that big.
What has cofounding Pickle taught you about fashion?
Everything I’ve learned about fashion I’ve learned from Pickle.
Before my closest association with being interested in fashion was, like, wanting something fun to wear out with friends. … Now I know about trend forecasting, the top brand people are renting from, what they retail for, what their materials look like, and the quality.
It’s really given me a sense of personal style. I definitely lean a bit boho … but my style is also more diverse than ever because I have access to all sorts of clothes I wouldn’t otherwise shell out money for by renting through Pickle. … Right now I’ve been experimenting with butter yellow — a color that has never been in my closet — and open back tops. I dress them down and dress them up for more fancy nights out.
What was the last thing you rented from Pickle?
I recently did a segment on the 6 p.m. news for Fox 5 local in New York City, so I rented this beautiful Veronica Beard dress [that retails for $498]. It was white tweed with a little bit color intertwined in the thread, collared, and sleeveless. It made me feel really confident.
Correction: This story incorrectly stated Julia O’Mara’s graduation year. She graduated in 2019.