Can You Buy Rent The Runway Dresses
Finding the right size and fit online can be a challenge for many women. "I can try on 30 items and only like how one of them fits, or I'll have to try 3 different sizes before one fits," Lyric_Boy posted on Reddit Female Fashion Advice. Frustrated fashionista fizzlepop agreed, adding that trying to follow a manufacturer's guidance for what to order doesn't always help: "Size charts tend to put me 1-2 sizes larger than I would have picked in person. I'm not sure why this is."
can you buy rent the runway dresses
Funky fashion is fun. Funky-smelling fashion? Not so much. There have been some complaints that RTR rentals have various odors. "They all had a very strong chemical smell, I assume from the cleaning fluids," noted a user on the DC Urban Moms and Dads board. RTR, however, says it stands by its "conscientious cleaning processes, focused on both wet- and dry-cleaning, us[ing] biodegradable detergents that are free from added fragrances and zeolites," according to the company's site.
Even with this apparently rigorous progress, there have been times when a previous wearer's body odor haunted a dress that made it through RTR's detox. This actually happened to a die-hard RTR fan interviewed by Mama Kate Knows Best. (Though it didn't deter her from renting again!)
One hack to avoid renting an item that's seen (and smelled) better days is, when you're shopping, to sort by "newest" instead of the default, which will show items by "recommended" (via Legos in My Louis). You may even end up with a never-worn-before item!
There also may be late fees. Mary Taylor Renfro spent $35 on a dress rental, didn't return it on time, and ended up with a bill for $1,072.36. "The fees they charged me [were] beyond exorbitant," she told The Daily Beast. "And when I addressed the issue with customer service representatives, I kept being rebuffed and dismissed with lines like, 'These our terms, and you accepted them, sorry.'"
Rent the Runway does often have a clearance section, though, where you can buy previously worn clothes and accessories. If you're lucky, you might be able to find the item you borrowed and buy it (along with many other used designer items) for a steal. Then you'll be owning the runway!
How long do you keep the item for?You can keep the item as long as you want as long as you are still a member! Keep in mind it will take up one of your monthly spots, but that also allows you to keep a coat or dress for an entire season before swapping it out for something different.
Designers for less: An obvious one, but I can borrow something that normally costs $1,000 (for no good reason might I add, but I digress) for a flat rate. Unlike the Reserve four or eight day rentals, the cost of Unlimited stays the same no matter how expensive or affordable your pieces are.
Each clothing rental service will be different, but many of them offer memberships where you pay a flat rate once a month and get to rent several items every month. Typically 4-8 items a month is the norm.
To return your dress or designer clothing, most clothing rental services will provide you with a garment bag to pack your items in. This typically includes a prepaid shipping label. Then you just drop it off at a post office or a designated shipping carrier.
Five years ago Jennifer Hyman was a 29-year-old Harvard Business School graduate with no experience in fashion or technology, pitching her startup, Rent the Runway, to a boardroom full of partners at a big-time Boston venture capital firm. The idea then, as now, was to buy designer dresses wholesale and rent them, over the Web, for a night or two for a fraction of the price. When Hyman was about to get to the part where she explained how many inventory turns she could get from a Diane von Furstenberg, one of the men interrupted the presentation, cupped her hand in his and said, "You are just too cute. You get this big closet and get to play with all these dresses and can wear whatever you want. This must be so much fun!"
Hyman now laughs about it, doing an imitation of the guy in a baby-doll octave. But at the time she was floored. Weeks before the patronizing VC trapped her hand in his grip, Hyman had gotten six term sheets from some of the country's best venture firms, which valued her "big closet" at $50 million. The comment left her more driven than before. "Opposed to screaming and shouting about inherent sexism in this entrepreneurial world, I thought, Let's work it--let's build the most kick-ass logistics company in the whole world, and then we'll reveal what's under the dress."
The operation is downright daunting in its complexity. Each day Rent the Runway and its software algorithms juggle more than 65,000 dresses and 25,000 earrings, bracelets and necklaces as they zip across the country among its 5 million members. Sixty percent of the dresses fly back out the door the same day they arrive balled up in Mylar UPS return envelopes. Its Secaucus, N.J. warehouse employs more than 200 people who sort returns, remove all kinds of stains, sterilize jewelry and mend tears. This fall the operation moves to a larger, 160,000 square-foot warehouse, at which point Hyman will officially become America's largest dry cleaner.
Fashion is, after all, a rotten investment. Hot colors cool, styles change fast--so can your dress size. For $70 on Rent the Runway you can wear a $2,295 white strapless Calvin Klein Collection gown; $30 rents you a $1,295 Vera Wang Jawdropper dress. The company just launched a new subscription service called Unlimited that lets customers borrow up to three accessories (sunglasses, bags, jackets) for as long as they want for $75 a month. "We're giving our customer access to things she wouldn't have otherwise purchased, either because it wasn't smart to buy it or she couldn't afford it," says Hyman, the CEO. Adds Fleiss, who oversees strategy: "Being naive helped. If we knew how hard this was going to be, I doubt we would have done it."
User numbers, repeat business, rental volume and revenue have doubled in each of the last two years, and Hyman says she has lent out more than $350 million worth of fashion so far in 2014, which would track toward another doubling, $100 million in revenue, this year. Hyman says Rent the Runway would have turned a profit last year if they hadn't continued to expand infrastructure and systems.
Accordingly, linking fashion into the sharing economy has proved very enriching. A $24.4 million funding round in March 2012 placed a $250 million valuation on Rent the Runway. Hyman is looking to raise another big chunk this fall, likely at a valuation north of $750 million, sources say. (Hyman and Fleiss won't talk ownership stakes, but ballpark estimates based on similar trajectories would be that they still collectively hold 30%.) Given the current frenzy for these types of companies, it could run up against the coveted $1 billion mark--an especially rare feat for a New York startup with two female founders in this era of Silicon Valley bros.
Hyman has the frothy pitch to match. Dresses, she argues, are a Trojan horse: "We started off with the goods that are the most difficult to rent because of the durability of the product and all the services you must build. Now we can rent any product in the world. "She envisions Rent the Runway as a marketplace for retailers and brands to rent unsold inventory instead of shipping it off to discount outlets. Or perhaps a high-end consignment store for the wealthy? At the very least, guys will be able to stream their ties and cuff links.
The dress-rental lightbulb went off when the Hyman sisters were home for Thanksgiving in 2008. Becky was showing off the $2,000 Marchesa dress she had bought for a wedding and the huge dent it had made in her credit card balance. "As an older sister I looked at her packed closet and started freaking out on her," says Hyman. "Becky told me how she wanted something new to feel great and that she had already been photographed in all her outfits on Facebook."
Hyman put two and two together and told Fleiss about her dress--rental idea. They decided to test it out at Harvard. If it flopped they could always take corporate jobs; Hyman had an offer from NBC Universal, Fleiss at job site The Ladders. In a move that is now an HBS case study, the pair bought and borrowed dresses, running a series of tests at Harvard and Yale to see if women would rent, first, a fancy dress they could try on and, later, one they saw only in a photo. In both cases the answer was yes. Test results in hand, they cold-called investors.
Hyman and Fleiss ran the company out of extra space in a Tribeca architecture firm, using a local dry cleaner to store and turn around dresses. As the business grew, they got another $15 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in April 2011 and moved operations to a floor in their current building, later leasing a second level to store the growing inventory. They lured in college-age women, a core customer base, by deploying hundreds of "runway reps" at campuses and sororities. Says Juliet de Baubigny, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, "We didn't back them as a fashion start up. It's the sharing economy meets the Facebook--Instagram generation."
Despite the comparison with Netflix--and there have been many--Rent the Runway is in a business where the stakes are higher, the problems more complex. Delivering a delicate designer dress is trickier and more expensive than slinging scuffed copies of Breaking Bad across the country. The dresses must arrive on time and in perfect condition. One mistake--a late arrival, an unsightly stain, a poor fit--creates a customer relations nightmare. "If we mess up it's not just the customer who hates us," says head of marketing A.J. Nicholas. "Her friends hate us, her sisters hate us, her mom hates us."
So with every dress it lends, Rent the Runway's algorithms get a bit smarter about ways to track the location of each item, select shipping methods, set prices and control inventory. Algorithms crawl customer reviews to tabulate which dresses women are renting for certain occasions and then forecast demand to determine if a prepaid shipping label that goes out with a dress should get that dress back overnight or if it can wait for three-day return. 041b061a72