Unicorn Alert - Rent The Runway
Last year some time in the fall I got tired of constantly buying new clothing for work - unfortutnalty women’s workwear isn’t just suits and dress shirts. I signed up for Rent the Runway, at first I was hesitant sharing clothing… but then I was blown away at the connivence of this service.
They dry clean the clothing so I don’t have to do laundry
It is so easy to return clothing and pick out new pieces, either through their flagship store, Wework Drop Offs, or UPS
It is affordable, for 175 you have access to all of their pieces, personally I know I can spend that at Jcrew and get a pair of pants and one button down
Its good for the environment, since the rise of fast fashion we have created so much textile waste which is very toxic and harmful to countries where we ship our old clothes
What Jennifer did was address the most common complaint women have “I have nothing to wear” “I hate spending so much on a dress I’ll only wear once”.
Now to the fun stuff… the funding!
Jennifer launched RTR in 2009 with 1.8 in seed money. In one year she raised 15M for her Series A round, by Series C she was raising 44.4M. Which is a lot, so the next question is how much equity did she give away. While the world may never know, her Series C and Series D rounds both had 6 investors (e.g., either the OG investors got more equity or new investors got some).
Lets assess why investors are willing to give her so much funding
Source: https://stocksnewsfeed.com
1) Subscription Growth: as the article mentions RTR rapidly scaled in a market worth 2.4 trillion
2) Other markets to tap into: RTR recently announced they will start offering children’s clothes as well as a partnership with West Elm for furniture, I wouldn’t be shocked if they moved into the mens space
3) infrastructure: RTR has fulfillment centers which they use for sorting and dry cleaning. They also have partnerships with WeWork to act as return centers
Overall, RTR is changing how we view fashion it is taking the taboo out of sharing clothing. Personally I am super excited to see a female founder join the Unicorn Club… I’ll save my views on VC funding and female founders for another post!
You can see some of my looks from Rent the Runway on Insta linked below!