With Reserve Marketplace, Omar Abul Ata charts a new path in Toronto’s fashion scene

After a 5-month trip to New York that saw Omar Abul Ata rub shoulders with hip-hop royalty, influential vendors and some of the top stylists on the East Coast, he decided that thirty $1,000 campaigns were a stronger bet than a single $30,000 campaign for his emerging luxury rental marketplace, Reserve (external link) .

While fashion rental services such as Rent the Runway and Vivrelle have become more popular  (external link) among environmentally-conscious consumers looking to regularly rotate their wardrobe, Reserve is an industry-only luxury rental marketplace for commercial and editorial projects. For $75/hour, photographers, stylists and other creatives can access studio space, and for $150/hour, Abul Ata offers the studio along with luxury and contemporary fashion garments and accessories. 

Described as Airbnb and Grailed’s baby (external link)  by BlogTO, Reserve initially launched as his final project for BrainStation’s UX Design Diploma with a beta “proof of concept” version before Abul Ata’s (Retail Management ‘20) trip to NYC. After increasing its vendor base from 11 to 85 and re-building in the winter, Reserve fully re-launched this summer, emboldened by a partnership with TikTok fashion influencer, Lexsonator (external link) .

“We did an open call in June – 40 photographers, 120 stylists and models, a total of 380 people and 100 shoots in two days,” says Abul Ata of his “Come Style Me” event he held for Reserve. “Think of it as speed dating for creatives. It was building community, and gave us user-generated marketing content for the next two years.” A quick scroll through Reserve’s Instagram page (external link)  shows off photography that would be right at home next to digital-first publications like i-D and BULLY.

Emerging stylists are notorious for having some of the hardest career paths in fashion; 1Granary’s viral story about the @stressedstylist  (external link) Instagram account details horror stories, from running around public transit drowning in garment bags to begging fashion publicists for pieces. Abul Ata was partially inspired by his own days working in retail at COS and Louis Vuitton. “I would experience it on the return side, and it was a mess of productivity having to re-tag and steam garments. Talking to my stylist friends, I know how time-consuming it is.”

Abul Ata sees community as the key to making the fashion industry just a little more inviting, having leveraged the online network he built as the curator of his Instagram mood board, @fracture.to (external link) , to real-life contacts. Although Renters and Listers need to apply and qualify, Reserve is designed to support up-and-coming creatives with the opportunity to produce work and level the playing field. 

Building community in an insular industry poses its own challenges in Toronto, a big city that seems claustrophobic at times. Where Toronto’s fashion industry employs over 50,000 people, New York City hits over 180,000, along with the pull of cultural flashpoints like New York Fashion Week.

“The talent in [Toronto] is unmatched, an untouched goldmine of talent, but there’s a culture of not being open to people you don’t know,” explains Abul Ata. Outreach to both creatives and investors for funding has proven difficult for apps like Reserve that are early in the market.

“90% of my job is outreach. It falls on people in the community – the only reason I was able to do Come Style Me was because I worked in New York.”

Heading into the fall, Abul Ata manages his time in Toronto and New York, with Reserve hosting vendors across Toronto, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. 

Scaling from the ground up, Abul Ata hopes to bring on investors so that Reserve can be in every major creative city – a one-stop shop for fashion industry professionals. “I’m in the ‘doing this’ stage of my life, so when it comes to my 30s, there’s no question about what I can do.”