Student-Founded Secondhand Fashion App Hazaar Reaches £120,000 Annual Turnover

Harriet Noy was watching her university friends order Amazon Prime fancy dress costumes week after week when the idea for Hazaar took shape. Now 26, the Manchester-born founder has turned that frustration into a secondhand fashion platform reporting a turnover of upwards of £120,000 a year.

"I started Hazaar because I noticed all of my friends were always Amazon Priming fancy dress costumes every single week," she told Metro. "When you're a student, you have a constant need for new things, and you end up buying things you will only use once."

Noy built Hazaar while studying at the University of Birmingham, starting with Facebook groups before scaling the concept into a dedicated app. The model is deliberately campus-first: students list items peer-to-peer, and transactions are completed face-to-face on campus, cutting out postage entirely. It is a stripped-back, frictionless system designed around student life rather than retrofitted for it.

The sustainability pitch is built on price, not principle. Noy interviews students directly about their wardrobes, and the answer she hears most often points to brands like Shein, chosen for one reason: cost. "The key thing for me is making the sustainable option the cheapest, the most affordable, the most desirable, and it just so happens to be better than buying something brand new," she says. That reframing, putting affordability ahead of eco-credentials, is what separates Hazaar from the longer-established resale platforms that still feel aspirational rather than practical for a student budget.

Scaling the business has not been straightforward. Universities tightening their budgets made campus expansion harder to push through, a structural challenge for any platform whose growth depends on institutional access. But a new commercial avenue has since emerged: brands are now approaching Noy directly, offering excess stock they want routed to student buyers. The detail suggests Hazaar is evolving from a purely peer-to-peer marketplace into something with a B2B dimension, though the terms and scale of those brand partnerships have not been confirmed.

The £120,000 turnover figure is the clearest marker of how far the platform has travelled from its Facebook-group origins. Whether it can sustain that trajectory as universities remain financially cautious will depend on how Noy balances the campus-first ethos that defined Hazaar's early traction against the brand relationships now knocking at its door.