The Borrowed has opened in New York as its American headquarters, taking a South Asian rental, resale and peer-to-peer lending platform that worked in Britain into a market it had been serving informally for years.
Divina Chopra, cofounder and chief executive, spent her merchandising career at Hermès, Burberry and Rolex. Shreeya Thakkar, cofounder and chief operating officer, came from a decade at Goldman Sachs.
That is a different business from the western rental model, which largely monetizes occasion dressing around a fixed calendar of weddings and events.
Their premise is that peer-to-peer rental for South Asian fashion was already thriving on both sides of the Atlantic, but had grown transactional: renters working with dozens of individual lenders and absorbing the inconsistency that comes with it.
