Rent the Runway E-Commerce Company

“Rent the runway” is initially a purely e-commerce company which provides designers dress and accessory rentals.

To create value for customers, RTR provides rental service to customers who always want to dress different clothes but do not have enough money to support this idea. These customers only need to pay around 10% of the retail price to rent for 4 to 8 days period.

By establishing the official website and opening physical stores, RTR successfully combines online and offline service together. They opened five stores in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and these stores helps RTR better deliver value to customers.

Customers can rent clothes and accessory by paying the rental price for each clothes, or they can choose to join the membership and pay a subscription fee for month. Both functions include dry cleaning and caring fee, while members can get free shipping, insurance for clothes and unlimited rental service. RTR cooperates with more than 400 designers. Their relationship is more than the seller and buyer relationship, because RTR will share selling data and opinions of current fashion trend with those designers. In this way, rent the runway can better captures values for long-term development.

When we look back to the innovation process of this company, we find that it is quite fit the framework that we learnt in pervious course. At the very beginning, Hyman observed that her sister bought a new dress for a coming party during the credit card debt period and it just because she wanted to post photography on Facebook with different dresses. By observing her sister’s consuming behavior, Hyman thought that those girls were not care about the actual ownership of those clothes, but just care about how beautiful and awesome they look in the photos. After discussing this idea with her friend Fleiss, these two girls come up with some ideas about doing business.