I'm Joining Emmy Clothing Company

After four years of working as a freelance developer and a consultant, I joined a circular economy startup called Emmy.

I have concentrated entirely on hands-on programming and tech work during the past four years. I wanted to have this tech focus to help me level up my development game which had gotten a bit rusty during my 10-year stint as an entrepreneur in Flowplayer. In my opinion, this worked out pretty well to the extent that pure tech focus is starting to feel a bit boring, and it's time for me to take the next step in my path.

About Emmy

To give some context to this blog post, let me first briefly introduce Emmy. The following quote is from Emmy's LinkedIn page

Emmy is a pioneering service for consumers to recirculate brand apparel that they no longer need. Reinventing the way people sell and buy second-hand items, we offer an effortless turnkey service for people to wake up the money sleeping in their wardrobes.

The circular fashion economy is growing faster than the traditional linear fashion market. According to this article, the resale segment grows 24x faster than retail. With 20 %+ monthly sales growth, Emmy is one of the fastest-growing apparel recirculation operators in the Nordics and Europe.

Motives and Purpose of Work

There are a couple of motives that pushed me to this move. First, I want to expand my role beyond purely technical hands-on work. In Emmy, we plan to grow the development efforts and expand our development team with both in-house and external developers. Being one of the company's first in-house tech people means that I get to drive the successful growth of these efforts.

Building software is more than just programming: As an engineer, I think of it as Software Engineering, which takes a holistic look at building software. It takes more than just typing on the keyboard to build quality software effectively: People and the team, communication, processes, company culture, learning and knowledge building and similar "soft issues" all play important roles here.

Suppose I would continue my career concentrating mainly on programming as a consultant. In that case, I think I would be wasting 70% of the skills and experience that I have gained during my 30 years career in software engineering. I'm looking to Emmy now as an opportunity to widen my professional scope so that I can use my current skills fully and also learn more.

Now more than ever, the purpose of work has become vital to me. I hope to experience the excitement of working in a startup environment again. I look forward to being an integral part of making Emmy a success. Being part of something great provides purpose for me. As a consultant, I have missed that.

Emmy's role in the circular economy is the second part of the meaningful purpose. Following surely sounds like a cliché, but Emmy is making the world a better place by providing means for people to recycle.

We need to recycle to save the planet. I want to advance the transition to a circular economy where recycling is the norm. This mission feels more purposeful than the ones I have been working on lately: ad-tech and consulting to bill an hourly rate.

The tech stack

Saving the world is nice, but it's even better with cool tech. I will be working on state-of-the-art technology in Emmy, including tools like Shopify and GraphQL APIs, serverless & Lambda, Next.js, Contentful.

I'm excited to dive into these technologies during the upcoming weeks and months. Especially the serverless stuff I look forward to learning and mastering.

Stay tuned for another blog post, perhaps more about the tech aspects of building an e-commerce store. Watch this space for the next update :-)