The power of the fashion rental revolution

For any­one who works in the fash­ion indus­try, this is a famil­iar sta­tis­tic: £140-mil­lion worth of used cloth­ing is sent to land­fill every year. We have known for a long time that over­con­sump­tion is caus­ing irre­versible dam­age to peo­ple and the plan­et. But a more recent and thus far less ubiq­ui­tous fig­ure is now doing the rounds: the UK cloth­ing rental mar­ket is pre­dict­ed to be worth £2.3 bil­lion by 2029, accord­ing to Glob­al­Da­ta. Wel­come to the fash­ion rental rev­o­lu­tion.

In the Unit­ed States, fash­ion rental is far more estab­lished; last year, Rent the Run­way closed a whop­ping $125 mil­lion in fund­ing. In the UK, the pot is bub­bling. From con­sign­ment and sub­scrip­tion-based to peer-to-peer ser­vices, these fash­ion rental mod­els are prov­ing var­ied and pop­u­lar, and a key part of the solu­tion to fashion’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty prob­lem.

“I came from the car indus­try, where for every one car shared, eleven are tak­en off the road, so sus­tain­abil­i­ty was a dri­ving force – excuse the pun – for My Wardrobe HQ,” says Sacha Newall, co-founder along­side Tina Lake, of the design­er rental plat­form, which holds stock on con­sign­ment for indi­vid­ual lenders and brands.

“If we could apply this met­ric to the fash­ion indus­try, we could start to make a dent in the hor­rif­ic waste that is blight­ing the plan­et. We all have a moun­tain of clothes sit­ting in our wardrobes that we don’t wear and most brands are sit­ting on top of huge ware­hous­es of stock. Our plan was to get all these items back into cir­cu­la­tion and stop exces­sive amounts being pro­duced.”

The impact of fashion rental on luxury brands

Much of the ini­tial attrac­tion to fash­ion rental mod­els was the abil­i­ty to rent design­er clothes for a frac­tion of the cost to buy which, as the mar­ket grows, begs the ques­tion: how will fash­ion rental affect lux­u­ry brands in the long term?

“Gone are the days when rent­ing was seen to can­ni­balise sales,” says Vic­to­ria Prew, co-founder and chief exec­u­tive of HURR, a hybrid mod­el where an indi­vid­ual lender can upload their own wardrobe peer to peer or opt to con­sign items so rentals are man­aged on their behalf.

“In fact, it does the oppo­site. It’s an addi­tion­al rev­enue stream for brands and HURR also opens up a mil­len­ni­al audi­ence, high­ly engaged in sus­tain­abil­i­ty. HURR intro­duces lux­u­ry brands to future shop­pers who will go on to have the pur­chas­ing pow­er to buy.”

Indeed, this sum­mer up-mar­ket depart­ment store Sel­f­ridges began a col­lab­o­ra­tion with HURR by bring­ing the platform’s tech­nol­o­gy to a pop-up rental store with more than 40 brands.

“As a data-dri­ven tech plat­form, data informs every part of our deci­sion-mak­ing process, from the brands we choose to work with through to the prod­ucts we fea­ture,” says Prew. “Rather than build­ing a high­ly com­plex plat­form, fash­ion brands should utilise exist­ing rental tech­nolo­gies to access the shar­ing econ­o­my.”

HURR uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered attri­bu­tion and item tag­ging, real-time ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion and a car­bon cal­cu­la­tor in part­ner­ship with CoGo.

A solution to fast fashion

Yet for all the focus on fash­ion rental’s rela­tion­ship with the lux­u­ry indus­try, its impact on fast fash­ion is arguably more per­ti­nent to con­ver­sa­tions about sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Dubbed by Forbes as the “cloth­ing rental app that wants to end fast fash­ion”, By Rotation’s mis­sion is to trans­form how peo­ple con­sume fash­ion, accord­ing to founder Eshi­ta Kabra-Davies.

“Fast fash­ion is the space we are dis­rupt­ing with our afford­able price points so peo­ple of all socio-eco­nom­ic back­grounds can share high­er-qual­i­ty items,” she explains. “We want peo­ple to buy less, buy bet­ter and share more.”

Rotaro, the cult label rental plat­form, has intro­duced a more afford­able range of rental gar­ments, start­ing from £15 for a four-day rental peri­od. “We want to offer a viable alter­na­tive to pur­chas­ing fast fash­ion,” says co-founder Georgie Hyatt. “We also ensure we are stock­ing items of high qual­i­ty. The ini­tial chal­lenge of cus­tomer acqui­si­tion is to get con­sumers com­fort­able with the idea of rent­ing. We [then] have an over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive response and a deep desire to rent rather than buy dis­pos­able fash­ion.”

Peo­ple of all back­grounds can share high­er-qual­i­ty items. We want peo­ple to buy less, buy bet­ter and share more

But be it a side-hus­tle or full-time rev­enue stream for lenders, what is stop­ping indi­vid­u­als from reg­u­lar­ly buy­ing new items to upload and lend, thus adding to the exces­sive pro­duc­tion of fast fash­ion?

“As we only allow mid to lux­u­ry brands on the app, the expec­ta­tion is that you can only list pieces of high qual­i­ty. Since such items are usu­al­ly priced high­er, we believe peo­ple are pre­fer­ring to save up for an invest­ment piece and then share it with oth­ers on the app,” says Kabra-Davies.

“This is far bet­ter than buy­ing knock-off, low-qual­i­ty pieces from high street retail­ers that pro­vide such a short­cut at the expense of work­ers in nations like Bangladesh, Viet­nam, India.”

Is fashion rental really as green as it seems?

Oth­er crit­i­cisms of the rental mod­el include the impact of reg­u­lar dry clean­ing and trans­port on the envi­ron­ment. “Our logis­tics facil­i­ty is using an advanced clean­ing tech­nol­o­gy called Ozone, which is a nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring gas offer­ing med­ical-grade clean­ing with lit­tle-to-no envi­ron­men­tal effect,” says Hyatt. “We have also part­nered with a pre­mi­um car­bon-neu­tral deliv­ery ser­vice.”

HURR, mean­while, has just announced a part­ner­ship with Oxwash, a dry clean­ing com­pa­ny with a cold-wash process. “All HURR man­aged rentals will be dry cleaned through Oxwash, whose water con­sump­tion is 60 per cent less than any oth­er laun­dry in the world, fil­ter­ing out 99 per cent of the poly­ester – plas­tic – microfi­bres nor­mal­ly released into the envi­ron­ment,” adds Prew.

By not rest­ing on their lau­rels, these fash­ion rental busi­ness­es are reap­ing rewards. HURR has seen an 850 per cent growth year on year of reg­is­tered mem­bers while By Rotation’s users have rock­et­ed by 5000 per cent in the same peri­od. Since lock­down, Rotaro’s rentals have increased by almost 25 per cent.  

At My Wardrobe HQ, stock hold­ing has increased by 50 per cent, with a 60 per cent increase in traf­fic to the web­site. “We offer cus­tomers the chance to keep the items they love so that now 70 per cent of our sales come from resale rather than rental,” says Newall. “Many peo­ple are using the rental oppor­tu­ni­ty as a ‘try before you buy’. It’s a ful­ly cir­cu­lar econ­o­my.”

---