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Comment by sageabilly | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the CEO sounds extremely out of touch with the company culture. If your company has a Facebook group for ex-employees to come together and process their terrible experience working for you, there's a problem regardless of if you're able to admit it to yourself.

[Edit] Also, what happens if I rent a dress and hate it? Suddenly I'm two days out from an event with a dress that looks terrible and that I've spent $150 on with nothing to show for it. I'd rather take $150, go to Nordstrom, and buy a dress that I know looks good on me because 1- I've tried it on and 2- I have gotten it tailored. Off-the-rack dresses/formalwear rarely looks amazing on anyone without a little tailoring.

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I also fail to see how this service could possibly work. Based on my observation it is not like women walk into a store and know exactly what will look good on them just by looking at some dress hanging on the rack. The more fancy the dress the more fussy the whole process.

I have often wondered if a book-of-the-month type model would work with dresses. Lots of women have no real interest in following fashion, but they still want to look good. Just ship a new dress you know will fit and suit the women once a month (or week) and they keep it or ship it back.

This exists already: https://www.trunkclub.com/

Very interesting (glad my wife and I are in Australia). This seems to be more aimed at the selling side rather than the dress rental side. A model more focused on just renting and not keeping each dress might appeal to a different market.

I've used it a few times and loved it (I know, this sounds like an ad. I promise I have no personal involvement or investment in the company). They have a system where you can rent an extra size of the dress for no charge, so if you're unsure, or between sizes, you can almost always get the one that will fit you best. You can also get an extra style of dress for an extra $25, along with an extra size in that one too. So you basically get four dresses. I've never had a problem finding one that worked out well, but it also helps that they have extremely detailed fit notes, lots of photos, and encourage people (I think they offer discount promotions and things) to post photos and additional reviews of the dress. There have been times where I've seen a dress and thought "yes! That will work great!" got to the reviews and some "in the wild" photos and immediately changed my mind. And vice versa!

So, yeah, I think their system does work, it just takes a little effort, and you have to ship a lot of dresses around. I've been happy with it though!

I am wondering how cost effective all this shipping is especially if people are using it as as a de facto rental service.

They ship all four of the dresses in a single priority delivery bag. They actually pack fairly tightly -- most of them are sheath and cocktail dresses, not "big ball gowns" (It's the style now, and I imagine they probably consider it for shipping cost reasons as well). The dresses get sent out three days before your rental starts, you have them for a few days, you send them back on the last day in the pre-stamped priority bag they provide. Shipping, altogether, is probably around $20, and the dresses are out of commission for likely 8 days in total, including dry-cleaning.

So a rental for a $1200 dress might be $120, and if they're renting it out half the time (dresses are often unavailable in certain sizes/days because they keep things fairly densely rented), you can see how they'd make their money back pretty quickly.

I still can't wrap my head around renting dresses - some kind of specialized costume I can understand (like spiderman or predator), but dress? They seem to be doing some revenue so it does look like a workable idea.

What happens to RTR if the big name brands with multiple physical stores start renting dresses too (I don't know if they already do it or not)?

Prom dress rental is already fairly common.

Another designer dress rental. http://frockshopchicago.com/

Though doing this online when you can't verify something fit's seems risky. Unless, you have a very common body shape.

My wife has rented several dresses online and usually orders 1-2 dresses and they offer free 'backup' sizes. Great for fancy events, themed parties, weddings, etc. where you'll realistically spend several hundred dollars on a nice dress that for some reason you can only wear once.

Heaven forbid your friends see you in the same designer dress twice...

It's not all that different from renting a tuxedo.

Those almost universally look bad, because you can't tailor them. That's fine for the sort of people that rent tuxedos, because they don't care - they need a tuxedo because a dress code calls for it, but they aren't into it.

On the other hand, people that like designer fashion are into it. So, they will want to get their pieces tailored for their body, because if they don't, it'll generally look meh. You can't do that if you rented it.

The value proposition is that girls can show off a new dress for each (facebook picture of) event they attend.

So they're not renting dresses, they're renting the dream/perception of a huge designer dress collection.

Renting dresses for special events is a solid business.

When you hit a certain age there will be 4+ weddings every summer. Women can feel very pressured at these events, because people can be real status obsessed judgmental jerks, and even worse when it's directed at a woman's appearance. On the flip side, buying a new $500+ outfit for each event isn't workable for most people.

Renting name brand fashion items is a great solution. Look killer in a unique look at every event, feel confident, spend 15% of the money.

Now, going from that, to some sort of netflix scale business... I don't really see that.

Two reasons come to mind:

- You want a distinctive dress for an event. You don't want to be seen wearing the dress at another event. Or: you don't go to formal events often enough to justify buying a formal dress that might be out of style next time you need it. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to use a dress beyond one evening.

- Your $150 will get you the use of a dress that would cost you close to 10x that at retail.

Basically, RTR is a hack on how fashion works.

Big-event dresses are specialized costume.

It makes sense -- a nice evening gown can run upwards of $1000 but if you only have occasion to wear one once a year, it makes more sense to rent it for $150. Even if you wear one more frequently, you probably don't want to be seen in the same one too many times.

And there are a lot of physical stores that do this already, but RTR can benefit from the scale of a national client base.

Chances are the CEO doesn't know about such a group.

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