The Volte’s co-founders, from left: Kellie Hush, Bernadette Olivier, and Dr. Genevieve Hohnen. Courtesy of The Volte
For Australian luxury designer rental company The Volte, the biggest thing we can do for our planet is to look inside our closets.
Just after sunset, on a balmy Friday evening somewhere on Palawan’s Pangalusian Island, a crowd gazed on, transfixed. On the island, a makeshift catwalk was set by the pool and beach bar. Garments billowed in the wind; skirts and dresses were gently swept up by oceanside gusts.
This showcase of conscious fashion labels was taken in by the guests of multidisciplinary conferencing event ACTAI Asia Pacific. That evening, models were garbed in creations from the brands Maison Métisse and Ace Harper, and rented looks from The Volte.
“You know, it’s a really different crowd to, say, Fashion Week,” recalls Bernadette Olivier, The Volte’s co-founder. For their tropical presentation, which was admittedly confirmed at the last minute due to their busy schedules, they just “managed to scramble and grab five outfits, because we don’t own the outfits. It’s like Airbnb, but for fashion.”
When Olivier narrates this over Zoom weeks after the show, she’s still trying to catch her breath. Having arrived in Perth after a succession of meetings and plane rides, Vogue catches her during a half-hour interval between meetings, amid a hectic financing round with investors and lawyers. Despite the time crunch, her smile is wide, demeanor warm, and bare face exuding a post-exercise glow and the shadow of a suntan. “I look like a beet!” she exclaims with a laugh.
Day-to-day, she manages The Volte with her co-founders Kellie Hush and Dr. Genevieve Hohnen. The Australian luxury designer rental platform is the largest peer-to-peer marketplace globally. The Volte launched its revolutionary direct integration with retailers and designers in 2024, allowing users to instantly list newly purchased items for rental on The Volte rental marketplace or resale on eBay. The Volte is now integrated with over 20 brands, including Australia’s leading department store David Jones.
“We have what we call ‘super lenders’ on our platform,” she explains. “We have the influencers that everyone imagines, but we also have 60-year-old women who are building really sizable businesses on The Volte. They are savvy entrepreneurs.” They earn between 30,000 to 200,000 dollars a year. On ACTAI’s runway, the dresses featured were those rented 20-50 times, with one dress earning its lender over 10,000 dollars.
The idea for the business came to Olivier when she was a junior lawyer at a hedge fund in London and New York, where a part of their long-term strategy was looking at start-ups. At the time, Airbnb, Uber, and Rent the Runway had taken off, and the young lawyer couldn’t quite understand how such models, particularly Rent the Runway’s, could scale. Wouldn’t you need a warehouse, or a station dedicated to repairs?
“But then also, even though I was working at a hedge fund that had billions of dollars under management, I was still a junior lawyer,” she recounts, “so I was like, ‘Why can’t I earn from my wardrobe when people are earning from their cars?’”
She enlisted the help of her sister, Dr. Hohnen, whose academic expertise in sustainability and group psychology allowed them to examine on a much deeper level how unsustainable fashion was becoming, which Olivier “was completely uneducated about.” She learned about the devastating working conditions in Bangladesh’s factories, and fashion’s status as the second most polluting industry after oil. From their research, it became clear that as consumers, the biggest thing we could do to help our planet is buy well-made items and keep them in circulation for as long as possible.
Kellie Hush, The Volte’s third co-founder, echoes this. “Quality fashion has value post-purchase and that is what drives The Volte. For a long time we have seen the value of pre-loved Chanel 2.55 and Hermes Birkins, for example, so why can’t that be the same for beautiful, gently-worn fashion? That is our mission: for consumers to see that quality fashion is an investment. Fast fashion is not.”
Hush draws from an editorial and publishing background, having previously served as the editor-in-chief of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia. At present, she is the CEO at Australian Fashion Week 2025, and like her co-founders, she’s working toward the goal of leveraging their platform so that more people focus on high-utilization in order to keep fashion in the circular economy for longer. She reflects, “Back in the early days of the sustainable fashion movement, we associated it with natural fabrics, like hemp, and not necessarily great design. But what we see today is that a sustainable fashion industry is about the whole ecosystem which doesn’t mean you have to compromise on beautiful garments. Quality fashion lasts longer.”
In large part, the reason they’re able to carry out their mission is because of a tightly-knit team across continents. While the founders and brand teams are based in Australia, The Volte’s development, customer service, and finance teams are based in the Philippines. Olivier gushes, “We have the most amazing Filipino team who have been with us since day one.” She mentions Lourdes, one of their team leaders who has been with them since their launch, and Emma, who heads their customer service team.
Of their Philippine unit, Olivier says, “They all work from home. And if they have kids, we make sure their shifts are around their children’s schedules, and we try to be as flexible as we can because… God, I’m a working mom. You gotta make it work, right? They all work so hard.” After a pause, she continues, “I really feel emotional when I talk about them.”
It’s through them that they’ve been able to build trust with their clients. If a dress arrives late or isn’t up to standard, they’ve replaced it immediately since day one. This service only used to be available in capital cities, but thanks to over 30,000 lenders all over Australia, they’re able to service any city including remote communities.
Beyond their clients and internal team, their core value of empowerment extends to designers. Dr. Hohnen says, “Our model is about giving designers a meaningful place in the sustainable circular economy.” Part of that thrust is The Volte’s royalty system where when an item is purchased from a partner designer or brand, each time it is resold on The Volte or via The Volte’s resale partner, eBay, the designer earns a standard royalty rate of 5 percent. “And what this means is that designers are able to earn from the entire lifespan of their garments,” Olivier notes, “so they’re financially incentivized to make beautiful items that are capable of being worn many times. And what’s amazing is that some of our foundation partners for items that were listed two years ago through our API, they’re now earning more in royalties than they did from the initial sale.”
Olivier analogizes it to the music industry: if in the 2000s a big part of their revenue was derived from CD sales, it’s now attained on streaming websites where artists can earn from their back catalogs. “And so every time you listen to Taylor Swift, she gets a royalty. Every time you listen to The Beatles, they get a royalty, which wasn’t happening previously. So it’s decoupling that constant consumption for designers and fashion.”
For Dr. Hohnen, The Volte’s vision is to shift the conversation from simply buying less to wearing what we already own. It’s a sentiment shared by Olivier, who, after attending a number of conferences last year, began to feel frustrated at all the talk of a world on fire that didn’t include solutions. “There’s so much focus on recycling and making bags out of mushrooms. And the long and the short of it is, if we don’t stop making and buying so much, no amount of mushrooms and recycling will help.” Consumption is the issue, and through fashion rental, their hope is to steer the focus toward garments that are made for longevity in the first place.
“I think this is a way for designers to protect their art,” Olivier says matter-of-factly. “Because that’s what they are. They are artists.”
