Rent the Runway founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman on how tech innovation has made rental an easy sell in the fashion business. The year is 2009. You’re getting ready for a night out.
Your iPhone 3G pings. It’s a Facebook notification. Your best friend has just uploaded a new album of photos.
You start scrolling. And there it is. The dress you were going to wear tonight.
She has tagged you and people have already liked it. Now, what are you going to wear? Do you have time to buy something new? It was on this late-noughties conveyor belt of fast-fashion excess and social media scrutiny that Jennifer Hyman and her co-founder spotted an opportunity. Why not turn that conveyor belt into a sustainable aisle of designer brands, they thought.
Rent the Runway was born. The US-based online service has been renting out designer clothes at affordable prices for 15 years now. For Hyman, the idea wasn’t that radical because, as she sees it, the fast fashion market is a rental market.
“People pay an affordable price for an item they will only wear two or three times,” she tells SiliconRepublic.com. Of course, fast fashion was a growing industry long before 2009.
It emerged in the 1970s when companies began moving their factories to regions where they could pay lower wages, particularly Asia. By the 1990s, the output from these companies had accelerated to keep pace with the latest trends. However, in the 2000s, the growth of social media gave fast fashion a new force.
The ability to .