The New York Times ran a startling piece on the cover of its business section on Monday, November 11 (today.) The headline is: “Haute Couture, Available Through the Netflix Model.” The story is of two young entrepreneurial women from Harvard Business School named Jennifer Carter Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman. Together, they’ve started a website called Rent the Runway, which has its headquarters in New York. It’s just finishing its testing phase, but in a nutshell, it’s a service for women to rent dresses through the mail: it’s the Netflix of fashion. If this sounds farfetched, it’s already here, and not a minute too soon for a rotten economy: on Renttherunway.com, you have to sign up for approval. Then you will be able to rent dresses for a four night loan for anywhere from fifty dollars to two hundred dollars. You wear it, then drop it back in the mail. Of course, it remains to be seen if they will have the right trends covered, and good fits (apparently, they will have stylists on the site live to help with fit). For $25 more, you can get a second dress as a backup, in case the first one doesn’t fit well. They also include a fit kit, with double sided tape, bra strap adjusters and deodorant stain removers. We don’t know how this particular site will do – but we do think the rental of dresses is a potential goldmine, a great idea, and we want to see more of it – whether it’s by mail order or in stores. – Merle Ginsberg
- Fashion Rules!
- Fashion Blog Stylists Speak The Future of Fashion Is Rental – ?
WearTodayGoneTomorrow.com has been providing this exact service for close to a year! They loan all of the same (and more than 125 other) top designers weekly at a mere 5 – 10% of retail values. Think $500 dress for either $25 or $50! They ship nationally, and items arrive within 2 – 3 days. They measure all clothing, and everything is guaranteed to fit, or you can get your money back! They’ve been featured in InStyle, Teen Vogue, People, The Today Show and many more… They’re amazing!
I think this is a great idea but i’m goin to keep it to myself:} i cant wait to start shopping on rent the runway…designers for rent and then give em back…heck yeah..i already cant stand wearing things more than once…but then again do they have more than one dress of the sort b’cuz i dont wanna wear something somebody else had on either:{