An Outstanding CTO: Who is Annie Thorell?

We welcome Annie Thorell. She is CTO and co-founder of fashion rental subscription service It's Re:Leased. Her passions in life are coffee, architecture and to create change through design. You are most likely to meet her in the woods somewhere.

Please introduce yourself, Annie!
Hi, I'm Annie, an only child from a small village north of Uppsala where I grew up with my father who was a self made software engineer and my mother who's been working on the floor serving customers in a kitchen supplies store through her entire working life. I've always been a very curious person with big dreams, obsessed with design, the routines and rituals of ordinary life and how the two affect each other. I left Uppsala at age 19 for a small town in north eastern France to work as an au pair. I later moved on to Paris where I worked for a year and then moved to Stockholm to study computer science at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. After 10 years at different startups and IT consultancy companies I'm now CTO and co-founder of fashion rental subscription service It's Re:Leased.

Tell us about your journey into tech.
My dad was a software engineer so I'm pretty much born into the MS DOS and Windows 95 world. I thought it was all incredibly boring as a child and teenager though, so I spent a lot of time contemplating how you could make tech more interesting. Then came LunarStorm which I used for coding my first HTML. It took a while for me to realise what you could create with tech. In the end, I turned to KTH where I studied computer science and industrial engineering.

What mistake, in personal or professional life, have you learned the most from?
Wow, this is a hard question. I make mistakes all the time, and used to dwell a lot on them. However I've realised since then that I'm a person who's eager to grow and learn. 

Feeling anxious and dwelling about the past is part of the journey. You grow. You learn. In the end, things you did yesterday seem foolish today. I'm the kind of person who loves to play cards and wishes for the perfect hand. I guess those two combined makes it hard to spot anything I'd call mistakes in my past.

Share your dreams for yourself and the industry!
I wish more women with technical backgrounds are put in the spotlight, not only women who work for technical companies. As an engineer, I'm truly amazed by all the builders out there who really get into the nitty gritty and find solutions to all hard problems they're faced with. I think it is inspiring. Many more women would be interested in trying out engineering, if they could just see what it's really about. 

For myself, I wish for It's Re:Leased to be able to create the new normal when it comes to experiencing fashion. We wish to scale in order to have a true impact and reduce the volumes of garments being produced and discarded every year.