The Transformational Bliss of Borrowing Your Office Clothes

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/business/rent-the-runway-office-clothes.html

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On a Friday morning in August, Sushma Dwivedi, a senior vice president at Edelman, the global marketing conglomerate, bustled around her Harlem apartment in a blue-and-white-striped cotton dress. With her toddler and newborn out with a nanny, Ms. Dwivedi, who was on maternity leave but preparing for a meeting with a senior colleague in a few days, intended to get some things done. High on her list: assessing the contents of a recently delivered dark-blue garment bag.

Ms. Dwivedi, 37, is a member of Rent the Runway Unlimited, a service that, for $159 a month, allows subscribers to borrow up to four pieces of clothing and accessories from a designer-laden library of more than 450,000 items and keep them for as long as they want. If subscribers can’t bear to part with something, they can buy it, generally for about half the retail price. (A cocoon-like wool cardigan from Jil Sander Navy sells in stores for $1,275, but costs $765 through Rent the Runway.) When members buy an item, or return it, via a prepaid shipping label in their garment bag, a spot for something new opens up.

Though Rent the Runway was originally conceived as a solution for women who didn’t want to invest in party-wear they might use only once, Unlimited has become a strategic solution for professional women such as Ms. Dwivedi, who manages 30 employees in Edelman’s food and beverage department and regularly gets called into the offices of clients like Pepsi and Chobani.

“The wardrobe thing, when I was trying to lose the baby weight, was frustrating,” said Ms. Dwivedi, recalling her first pregnancy. “I knew what I could buy when I was pregnant. I knew how big I was, but afterward, what was I going to do? Buy an entire wardrobe at five pounds thinner, five more pounds thinner, and on and on?” She added, “I don’t ever want to look frumpy or have someone turn around and say, ‘Wow, she looked a lot better before.’”

Working women of all ages know a certain stance: athwart the closet, brow furrowed, mouth drawn, listlessly dismissing garment after garment. A wardrobe full of clothes, and not a thing to wear. Despite the advances of workplace equality movements, women who show up at an office still face a pressure that their male colleagues mostly do not. There is an expectation to appear poised, professional and, if not trendy, at least aware of trends, which generally means a never-ending cycle of outfit accumulation. Dressing for work is work, and the cost — in dollars, time, distraction — is borne disproportionately by women.

Since Rent the Runway introduced Unlimited two years ago, the service has amassed tens of thousands of subscribers in part by promising to solve the problem of what to wear to work, for everyone from new hires to C-suite executives. (The company declined to confirm its user numbers, but analysts said that perhaps 50,000 people are active subscribers.) It is fast displacing the start-up’s original business model. Rent the Runway was founded in 2009 as a way for people to borrow couture on an item-by-item basis. This year, Unlimited, which also has an $89-a-month tier, will account for the majority of revenue.

“I just have too much stuff: stuff that I bought, that I don’t like anymore, that I don’t wear anymore,” said Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase and a self-described Unlimited “superfan” of two years. On a recent Wednesday morning at her office, on the 36th floor of a glossy Park Avenue monolith, she wore a flouncy, frilly black dress sprayed with pastel-colored daisies. Lemkau, 51, who helps oversee a $5 billion budget, routinely speaks at conferences on her firm’s behalf, sometimes in places like the South of France or the Swiss Alps, which come with their own, rarefied dress codes.

Before signing up for Unlimited, she regularly met with a wardrobe consultant near her Rye, N.Y., home. “I’d go to her house and pick out stuff,” Ms. Lemkau said. “I was never thrilled with the clothes. It was the same old black dress and black pants, and I started looking like I was in mourning all the time.”

She ruffled her daisy-printed hem. “I don’t know if I would’ve bought this, but it’s super cute, it’s fun. I look forward to getting dressed every day instead of, ‘What thing am I going to wear? Is my dry cleaning back?’ I don’t remember looking forward to getting dressed, ever.”

Unlimited frees mental space for women to think about more important matters: what to say in that big meeting; how to describe their employment history in a crucial job interview; how to, in the grand scheme of their professional lives, get ahead. “Women spend more time, more energy, more, just, time being distracted with shopping and thinking about the way they look compared to men,” Ms. Lemkau said. “Even at work, men were basically just deciding what tie to wear, and now, for the most part, they don’t even wear ties. Is this service another way to potentially level the playing field?”

Before joining Unlimited in 2016, Ms. Dwivedi spent untold hours rifling through fast-fashion stores like H&M and Zara, searching for a trendy blazer or statement necklace to liven up her work wardrobe. These days, she typically “shops” on Rent the Runway’s iPhone app, scrolling through silk blouses and floral dresses as if they were Spotify songs, assessing member-submitted photos of the clothes out in the real world.

“I’m having drinks with my mentor on Wednesday. I wasn’t sure what to wear to that, so I gave myself a couple of options. If this is as flattering as I think it could be, I’ll probably wear this,” Ms. Dwivedi said, holding up a striped, sleeveless linen shift dress in a clear plastic sheathe. “And if not, this maxi” — a floor length, flowy black dress emblazoned with tropical blossoms.

She went into her bedroom with the linen option. The sound of crinkling plastic filled a few minutes. She emerged wearing the same cotton dress she wore on the way in. “I can’t get it over my chest, so I definitely can’t get it past a hip,” she said. “Sizing can be really misleading.” Ms. Dwivedi dropped the linen shift onto the couch, changed into the black maxi, came out and did a little twirl. “This will work,” she said. She glanced down at the discarded linen. “I’m bummed about that dress, though. It doesn’t look small.”

This is the trade-off. While Ms. Dwivedi luxuriates in the designer clothing that does fit — she received a steady stream of compliments from co-workers on a pink, plaid Trina Turk coat that she wore while pregnant with her first child — the stuff that does not must be sent back to the warehouse before she can order something new. The process generally takes a day or two.

The Rent the Runway app and website regularly prompt users to review what they borrowed, and with a few taps, Ms. Dwivedi could report that the dress was not true to size. Despite the inconvenience of waiting for another shipment, she prefers this process to trying on outfits in a store. “I would rather have the shaming of it all and the judging experience on my own,” she said.

“Over 50 percent of our customers provide data back to us after they rent, every single time,” said Jenn Hyman, 38, who is Rent the Runway’s chief executive and co-founder. “Without an incentive, our customers want to make this service better for other women, and they’re telling us because they want us to fix the problem.” She was standing in the company’s 250,000-square-foot warehouse in Secaucus, N.J. — a structure it says is the largest dry-cleaning facility in the world. Rent the Runway calls it the Dream Fulfillment Center.

It is garment-tracking infrastructure of staggering proportions. Unlike companies that have democratized access to movies (Netflix) or music (Spotify), Rent the Runway peddles in touchable, feel-able, not-streamable material goods — garments that lose buttons and rip and stain and go through God knows what after they slide onto the bodies of their temporary owners.

“There are three times during the process where we’re doing a quality inspection,” Ms. Hyman said. Next to her, an employee was sniffing the contents of a garment bag, one of hundreds that UPS and FedEx deliver to the warehouse each morning. “Customers sometimes tell us that there’s an item they didn’t wear, but our smell test is more important,” Ms. Hyman said. “Every single item goes through a cleaning and sanitation process.”

Industrial washers spun, dryers tumbled and garments on hangers clicked as they made their way through a maze of scaffolding, en route to a machine that would spit them out encased in plastic. “The system knows that that blouse needs to wait for a pair of jeans to come in,” Ms. Hyman said. “It won’t send it over to shipping until all of the items in that order have been brought together. That’s something someone’s wearing to an event,” she said, gesturing at an off-the-shoulder gown of salmon-colored chiffon. “Vegas!” she trilled, pointing at a white-and-red-sequined bomber jacket.

Of Rent the Runway’s 1,200 employees, 770 are in Secaucus. A second such facility is due to open in Dallas next year, to speed up delivery times to users not on the East Coast. An additional 130 people work on the company’s engineering, information technology and analytics teams. They continually tweak algorithms to identify pieces that customers might like and highlight them on the app’s home screen, similar to recommendations offered by Amazon and Netflix.

“We’re collecting hundreds of thousands of data points every week: style, fit of the garment, what occasion you wore that to, what else is going on in your life, who are you?” said Ms. Hyman. “We’re creating one-to-one style personas for every user we have, which is helping us create an individual home page for you, where we can recommend clothing that you might like. Part of that is not just to recommend the things that you’re already comfortable with, but to help you discover things that you didn’t know you’d love.” Essentially, they’re using data to engineer whimsy — that feeling of seeing something in a store window and rushing in to plunk down a credit card.

Rent the Runway shares its findings with the designers whose clothing it stocks. (The company buys wholesale, like a department store.) “It’s an amazing amount of data that traditional retailers don’t always share: What other brands is she wearing, how many times do our dresses get dry-cleaned and still come back as new?” said Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann, the C.E.O. of the high-fashion label Derek Lam. “You learn a lot from that and from reading the comments the clients make online. It’s great market research, frankly.”

Mr. Schlottmann said he doesn’t worry that rentals will cannibalize sales. “The Rent the Runway customer is not a customer we’re losing,” he said. “She’s not going to spend $1,500 on a dress, because she doesn’t understand the value. We kind of think we’re taking money away from fast fashion by letting her try on and rent clothes. Instead of having her buy Zara’s copy of our dress, I’d rather have her experience our construction, our fabric. Hopefully, she will buy it when she’s ready.”

As a private company, Rent the Runway declined to share its revenue or profit. Ms. Hyman also declined to specify how many Unlimited members there are, but said the subscription business was up 150 percent year over year. In March, an investment of $20 million, in part from the founders of the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, reportedly put the company’s valuation at $800 million.

Even if Rent the Runway is small compared to established fashion brands, the NPD analyst Marshal Cohen considers the company’s impact significant. “They are a disrupter. They have really changed the dynamic of what goes on in the marketplace,” he said. “We’re not building wardrobes the way we used to, we’re not buying as many shoes, as many bags, we’re wearing a few staple items and mixing and matching them. We’ve gotten so casual in the workplace that we’re basically wearing loungewear.”

Seventy-five percent of the clothing that gets shipped out to Unlimited members falls into the broad bucket of business casual. Members have written in asking for more tailored options, and as a result, this fall, the company’s business formal assortment — suits and pencil skirts by labels including Theory, Tibi and Iro — will increase 250 percent. “It’s attire that a conservative lawyer could wear to the office everyday,” Ms. Hyman said.

Before joining Unlimited in 2016, Ariel Cohen, a 29-year-old account director for the New York public relations firm Magrino, spent about $500 a month at shops like Club Monaco and Anthropologie. She’s cut that to $100 a month — and eliminated her monthly dry cleaning bill, also around $100. “I make investments in things now that I consider ‘forever pieces,’” she said. “I’m able to have the more colorful and loud parts of my wardrobe be things that I can wear once or twice, post a pic to Instagram, and move on.” She gestured at her Jason Wu pants: white, wide-legged, emblazoned with big, blue flowers. “Like these, I’d never buy.”

The hashtag #OOTD, or outfit of the day, is linked to more than 200 million posts on Instagram. “There’s such a pressure to depict your fashion sense through your photos,” Ms. Cohen said. “I’ve heard friends say before, ‘I’ve worn something and I’ve already posted in it, so I don’t feel compelled to wear it again.’”

For women entering the job force, Unlimited has been a crucial hack. “To go from college to my first career, it was really challenging,” said Elisabeth Armstrong, 24, a former television reporter in Tennessee who recently transitioned to a finance job in Colorado. “My salary was not really conducive to buying a new wardrobe.”

“I found myself falling into this pattern of fast fashion, buying a blazer here, a dress there,” before signing up for Unlimited in 2016, Ms. Armstrong said. “It’s really challenging for us, as women. Men have the standard suit. With the emphasis on your personal brand, your presentation, I think there’s more weight on appearance than there ever has been.”

“I had exhausted the options that I own — my co-workers had seen them all,” said Caroline Peck, a 25-year-old advertising associate in Birmingham, Ala. “Recently, I was in San Antonio for a big client meeting. I rented this beautiful dress, and even my client complimented me. Then I told them about Unlimited.” Ms. Peck ended up buying the dress, a black, full-skirted Erin Fetherston number with a white Peter Pan collar.

Sarah Joyce, who works at a major technology company in Los Angeles, joined Unlimited last December, feeling frumpy and uninspired by her wardrobe. Her initial attitude, she said, was: “Rad. I’m going to take more risks, I can send it back, I’m going to do the Chloé, the Veronica Beard.”

“I was like, now I know how female baller executives look hot,” said Ms. Joyce, 40. “You’re faking it till you make it. It’s awesome.” She got so much praise on a maroon Cinq à Sept maxi dress that she ended up buying it for $500. Then it happened again. “I ended up buying everything,” said Ms. Joyce. “I bought a romper, blouses. It was a problem. Ninety percent of the stuff I rented, I never returned. Then it occurred to me this stuff has been worn by other people so many times, that’s probably why it’s cheap.”

In June, wary of devouring Unlimited’s collection of designer purses, Ms. Joyce canceled her membership. She also grew weary of attracting attention at the office. “It made such a fuss at work,” she said. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, is that also Rent the Runway?’ I felt like a walking billboard.”

Some women don’t mind this, like Elizabeth Derby, a 29-year-old senior product marketing manager at Artsy, an art start-up. I spoke to her this summer, when she worked at Betterment, a financial services start-up in New York. “The funny thing is, there are a lot of men that work here, more men than women, and way more guys in the office know that I use Rent the Runway because they’re always commenting on stuff and saying, ‘I wish they had that for guys,’” Ms. Derby said. At the time, she was part of a Slack channel that Unlimited subscribers at Betterment use to rate outfits and collect garment bags for drop-off at a showroom Rent the Runway keeps on West 15th Street in Manhattan. (Returns taken there get processed faster than those sent to the warehouse.)

“A lot of times, I don’t even know what I’m wearing,” Ms. Derby said, seated at a reclaimed wood conference table in Betterment’s Chelsea office. She had on one of her Unlimited items, a marigold blouse embroidered with white birds by Hunter Bell, but the label was unbeknown to her until a co-worker assessed the tag. “I just go through the list of what they think I’ll like. I don’t have to love it. It’s like watching a movie on Netflix.”

“There’s also the sustainability factor,” said her tag-checking co-worker, Danielle Shechtman. “If you keep buying clothes and not using them, it’s pretty harmful for the environment.”

Ms. Derby nodded. “Every year I get rid of four or five garbage bags of clothes. I don’t even know how I accumulate them.”

With unlimited options comes a kind of perverse pressure: There’s no excuse to not look good. I discovered this myself in April, when I signed up for Unlimited. One major upside: Since enlisting, I’ve purchased only one piece of clothing, a dress I initially rented through Unlimited. But on the app, I routinely went down the rabbit hole of comparing one potential rental to another, reading review after review, scrolling through top picks, new arrivals and categories like “Dress Spotlight” and “Trending: Statement Tops.” I had to force myself to stop.

It happened again in real life in August, when I visited Rent the Runway’s New York showroom, a Willy Wonka-esque emporium for fashion fiends. Intending to be in and out in 20 minutes, I instead stayed for more than an hour.

When I got there, a smiling greeter prompted me to sign up for a fitting room on an iPad, so I could spend time browsing and not standing in line. Salespeople — if they can be called that, since none of the merchandise had price tags — went out of their way to unload my arms as they filled with hangers.

In the fitting room, I found myself in the same predicament that has played out in dozens of H&Ms and Forever 21s. I was visiting from Los Angeles, where I live, and had packed poorly; I needed something to wear to a meeting the next day that was professional, and could withstand Manhattan’s nearly tropical levels of heat and humidity. The summery dresses looked too beachy. The mere thought of jeans made me itch. I tried on a roomy, gray, sweatshirt-like Marni dress that I had eyed on the app; it looked chic but was made of wool. I talked myself into it: It’s sleeveless, you’re always cold, you’ll be fine. I left, thrilled at the thought of wearing the Italian luxury label for the first time.

But when I got to where I was staying, I tried the dress on again and started sweating almost immediately. I ended up wearing a cotton dress I’d owned for three years to the meeting. Later, I inelegantly stuffed the Marni into my suitcase and eventually sent it back to the warehouse unworn.

Rent the Runway can’t be expected to solve the paralysis of choice or irrationality that plagues some of us; if anything, its future plans will exacerbate those tendencies. Ms. Hyman wants customers to be able to borrow more items, from an ever-expanding library of brands, at any time they choose.

“The vision is that within a few blocks of where all of our subscribers live, all over the country, our members have access to a magical closet that has inventory that’s personalized to them, that they can access 24 hours a day,” said Ms. Hyman. “We’re building out the technology to make seamless access to that closet as delightful and frictionless as possible.” She added, “Rent the Runway closets should feel as organic in your day as going to Starbucks.”

As she spoke, I couldn’t help but wonder about that scene from the first “Sex and the City” movie, when Carrie swoons over the walk-in closet that Mr. Big has built for her — a space that is supposed to symbolize something like total victory. But the reality for most of us is that bigger closets just start to resemble archives, with sad reminders of jeans that used to fit and dresses that used to be in style.

The ephemeral, on-demand closets of Ms. Hyman’s dreams would be something altogether different, and freeing. They would allow us to use our old-fashioned physical closets, and our time and energy, for something else.