Would you treat your wardrobe like a Netflix DVD subscription? Rent the Runway, a company known for renting out special-occasion dresses and ugly holiday sweaters, has been testing a service that they call Unlimited for a few years now, finally letting it out of beta. The idea? You rent three pieces of designer clothing at a time, receiving the next one in your queue when you send one back to be dry cleaned, or just because you’re tired of it.
The service is targeted to women who like high-end clothing, dislike cleaning out their closets, and who want to have a theoretically unlimited wardrobe. It also helps if you’re willing to spend $1,668 per year on clothes that you won’t necessarily get to keep.
In an interview with the Washington Post, CEO Jennifer Hyman pointed out that the money customers would normally spend on fast-fashion pieces they might wear once or twice could go toward the rental service instead, simply borrowing and disposing of on-trend pieces in a different way, with less waste.
“Your closet no longer has to be a graveyard for questionable purchases and bad trends,” Hyman said in the company’s statement announcing the service.
The subscription price includes shipping, dry cleaning, and insurance, but would not make an acceptable alternative to doing laundry. Insurance covers minor clothing mishaps, and customers will have to pay 70% of an item’s retail price if they seriously trash it. They will also have the option to buy items that they want to keep forever at a discount.
Incidentally, some of those “designer” brand items include Rent the Runway’s house brands, which the company says are of comparable quality to items from designers that you’ve actually heard of.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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