Is Leasing Apparel A New Bursting Point In The Fashion Retailing Industry?

 

Rapid rise of renting mode

 

H&M, a fast fashion giant with nearly 5000 stores in the world, said in August that it would launch part of its clothing rental service in a store in downtown Stockholm, mainly from high-end fabrics made of fiber. Internet rental clothing platform Rent the Runway has also expanded the renting service of physical stores in the past year, and customers can also get 25 bonus points in Losangeles's Rent the Runway stores as well as WeWork and Nordstrom.

 

The monthly rental and subscription costs of the major clothing brands range from $50 to $160. Users can rent several items per month, and enjoy preferential purchases. Most of these services are online, but there are also some physical stores that provide storage, browsing or recycling space for renting clothes.

 

Lisa Batitto, 54, said that since she started renting clothes, she had stopped buying clothes and rented clothes less than she used to spend. The New Jersey museum public relations company costs $277 a month to subscribe to three rental services, one of which is New York& Company, a mid priced women's clothing retailer with hundreds of stores in the United States.

 

Tiarra Phillips is a 18 year old college student from a small town in Georgia, South America. She pays $69.95 a month to subscribe to the rental business of fashion brand Express, which is provided by CaaStle. Tiarra Phillips said she had never been to any of the more than 600 stores in Express, but she rented it from the bottom pants to the dress. She said, "they even told you not to wash it, to send it back after crossing it, then you would get a new box, so I really don't need to do anything, everything can be done at home."

 

 

 

For the time being, the renting service is very satisfactory. According to GlobalData data, in 2018, the American apparel rental market, excluding costumes, was valued at $1 billion, less than 1% of the total clothing market. But in the past year, its growth rate has reached 24%, while the overall clothing market has increased by only 5%.

 

A spokesman for Rent the Runway said they could deliver a piece of clothing in one day. In addition to its factory in New Jersey, the company opened a 300 thousand square foot logistics center in Texas in July this year to cope with the increasing demand for renting clothes.

 

The San Francisco based fashion rental clothing monthly ordering website Le Tote bought the luxury department store Lord + Taylor last month from the troubled Canadian Department store operator, Hudson 's Bay Co. (see "ornate ambition": the oldest luxury department store in America, Lord & Taylor, will be bought by Le Tote, the fashion rental website). In the next 9 months, Le Tote plans to build some rented floor cabinets and large display areas in 38 Lord + Taylor stores.

 

In Le Tote, a month's regular renting service consists of up to 15 clothes. Once the order is returned, the clothes will be reassembled to serve the next employer immediately. Le Tote currently uses the US postal USPS Priority to send rental boxes to its online users. Le Tote CEO Rakesh To Ndon said that Le Tote has raised about $75 million over the past five years from investors such as Azure Capital, Sway Ventures and Google Ventures, and has been profitable for more than three years.

 

There is no doubt in the industry.

 

Although it looks promising, there are many doubts about this model. Some analysts say that renting services may reduce revenue in traditional sales areas. Over the past 30 years, the average consumer spending on clothing in the US has decreased by nearly half due to changes in shopping habits and prices.

 

In addition, the entity store also competes with Amazon (Amazon) and other big Mac online businesses. Coresight Research said in a recent report that so far this year, the number of entities that have been closed has exceeded the total in 2018.

 

 

 

CaaStle is a New York based company providing technical and logistics support for renting services of New York & company, Bloomingdale 's and Banana Republic. The company split out of its Gwynnie Bee women's clothing business in 2018 and began offering rental services to other brands.

 

Christine Hunsicker, executive director of CaaStle, said in an interview that the leasing service could bring more revenue than the leasing that analysts worried about, because consumers would buy clothes in addition to renting clothes every month.

 

In addition, this mode also helps to reduce brand inventory pressure. Cowboy brand Levi 's and American fashion brand Rebecca Taylo are all leasing more inventory items to open up new revenue sources and attract new customers. In the past, Rebecca Taylor's retail price of silk garments was as high as several hundred dollars.