Rent the runway5/30/2023 Then, amid the pandemic, it permanently closed its bricks-and-mortar stores. In response, Rent the Runway brought on a new chief supply chain officer with experience in operations at Amazon, and a board member with experience leading fulfillment operations at Amazon. First, a system switchover glitch resulted in a two-week suspension of orders and new customer onboarding. Our goal is to automate the movement of goods to streamline our processes, which is why we invested in robotic arms and X-ray machines, explained Mike Liberant, Director of Engineering, Rent The Runway. Then-fresh from a $1 billion valuation-the company faced a series of challenges starting in 2019. Larry Steinberg, CTO of Rent the Runway, discusses how Rent the Runway is utilizing MongoDB Atlas to support the Closet in the Cloud. It began a vast expansion phase in the years leading up to the pandemic, with partnerships that included Neiman Marcus and W Hotels, and opened physical locations in five major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. It then expanded into other womenswear categories, such as workwear, denim, jewelry, and bags, and added a subscription option that enabled a certain number of monthly rentals for a standard fee. ![]() Rent the Runway began as a way for people to rent one-off designer pieces for a fraction of the retail price, with a focus on formalwear and special events. Amazon has previously offered preowned fashion via Shopbop’s Pre-Loved Edit (offering designer bags and accessories) and via What Goes Around Comes Around, through a brand store on Luxury Stores at Amazon (offering luxury accessories and apparel). Preworn items, which Rent the Runway discounts to its customers depending on factors such as on how long the item has been in rotation, will be priced by Amazon. “Therefore, we're only paying the manufacturing cost for the inventory and not the markup between manufacturing cost and wholesale.” “We're not trying to get people to stop buying clothes we're trying to get them to stop buying low-quality, unsustainable, underutilized clothing.” The pieces from the Collective have the designer’s brand name in the tag and are manufactured by Rent the Runway in “a host of factories all over the world,” Hyman says. Hyman says the aim is to encourage people to invest in better-quality clothing when they do buy new: “We want to be a substitute for fast fashion and take away all of the trend-based items that you would have purchased and worn only once or twice,” she says. “Renting is a way of slowing that down, but only if consumers and users of rented clothing will rent instead of buying new stuff.” Rental is estimated to extend a product’s life by 1.8 times, according to a report from McKinsey and Global Fashion Agenda, based on the average number of rentals during a product’s lifetime. ![]() “What we have now is overproduction and overconsumption,” says Ola Bąkowska, project manager at Amsterdam nonprofit Circle Economy. Last month I partnered with West Elm and Rent The Runway on their latest collaboration: rentable decor bundles. This raises questions about how Rent the Runway’s evolving model fits into the wider sustainability agenda and the push toward circularity.
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