Isabella Barreiro Hopes a Solid Performance at LaunchCon on Friday Propels her Peer-to-Peer Clothing Market Across the South
As Jordyn Paul-Slater writes for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, "[w]hile Columbus puts more emphasis on entrepreneurship as a piece of its economic development strategy, four founders will get their chance to pitch business ideas they hope could grow along with the region." Paul-Slater is referring to the four finalists, selected from 65 applicants representing Columbus and cities within a 150-mile radius, who will compete for $40,000 at the StartUP Columbus LaunchCon, a Shark Tank-style competition, this Friday. One of these finalists is Isabella Barreiro, an interior design student at Auburn University who simply needed more clothes. “Whether it was Greek season, football season, holidays, career fairs, job interviews, events, themes, you always have something to dress up for,” Barreiro told Paul-Slater. “There’s only so much that you can rotate through. There are only so many outfits you can buy before your wallet starts to get rough.” To meet her need Barreiro founded Chifforo, a peer-to-peer marketplace, built around local in-person pickup and not shipping, where verified college students can buy, rent and sell fashion within their university community at affordable prices. As she explained to Paul-Slater, her market is a focused niche, not many different target audiences, and to test her concept she created a GroupMe of Auburn students that rapidly expanded from word of mouth. Now, the group exceeds 1,000 young women, even though the company is at the “prelaunch stage,” with its website scheduled to be launched in the first week of January 2027. At that point Barreiro plans to expand Chifforo to other SEC schools, which is where a solid performance at LaunchCon would help. “Winning at that stage would allow me to expand to a vast degree,” Barreiro told Paul-Slater. “We want to establish lockers for pickup and dropoff. We want to have days in place to facilitate the process. So that’s what it will really look like.”

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