Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss were buds at Harvard Business School before launching their site, Rent the Runway. “Actually, we met on our very first day of class, “laughs Fleiss, who, along with Hyman, received a $15 million investment from Keliner Perkins in March of this year. The site the very first to allow customers to rent top-notch designer styles for approximately 10 percent of their retail price– has found footing with a broad audience of women seeking luxury styles for formal occasions, or just fancy nights on the town. Now entering its second year in business, we caught up with Hyman and Fleiss to hear how the site’s evolved since it’s launch, and what advice they would offer to your girls.
This is an interesting article I found on NBC New York which interviews Rent The Runway founders Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss. It’s perfect for anyone who has the passion for fashion and is looking to build an online shopping business. You can learn lots from this interview.
Was fashion always something you were interested in on a professional level?
JH: I loved fashion. I’ve been a shop-aholic my entire life, and I’d worked in the luxury industry before, and in businesses that create experiences for women, so I think that fashion is a business that certainly always makes a women feel like Cinderella, or at least has that ability to, so that’s what attracted me to the fashion industry beyond loving clothes.
JF: I grew up on 59th Street in Manhattan, so I was very much enmeshed in the Bergdorf’s and Bloomingdale’s shopping culture of New York, but my love of fashion has much more come out of the last couple years with Rent the Runway, and has been a way for me to experiment with new brands myself, whereas before I was sticking to a very narrow window of designers and now I can try a lot of different things.
Where did the idea for Rent the Runway come from?
JH: My sister Becky was having a close-full-of-clothes-but-nothing-to-wear moment, and she was about to attend a wedding and felt that she couldn’t repeat any outfits she had in her closet because all of those outfits had been worn and she’d been photographed on Facebook in them, so I thought that designer brands should really want to acquire customers like Becky, who are really passionate about fashion and who will spend their money on buying brands, but this would be an excellent way—renting a dress would be an excellent way for both her to have an experience with an aspirational brand, and a brand to acquire a new customer earlier in their life cycle.
Who is the typical Rent the Runway customer?
JH: Our target customer is a 15 to 35 year old woman who is going to everything from prom to sorority parties to weddings to dates to baby showers. And we feel that all of those special life occasions are opportunities [for women] to experiment with new brands, and experience something with fashion where you feel beautiful and confident.
What do you see rented most often on the site?
JF: We have a fantastic collection of dresses — we now have over 145 designers on our site — and what we usually do, the first time a woman rents something from Rent the Runway, she’s choosing something that’s very special, New Year’s Eve, [or something] for a wedding she’s going to, it might be a long gown or something very fancy, and then the next time she rents she’s also renting for a girl’s night out, or a date, or something that’s more casual because she realizes that Rent the Runway is just a fun way to incorporate fashion into everyday life. And I think another fun thing is that people typically rent things they wouldn’t purchase, so the gold sequin dress, or the red dress, or the one-shoulder dress, things that go out of your normal comfort zone or that you wouldn’t actually own usually.
To read the entire article click here
