Introduction of the issue
According to Strijbos at Fashionunited.com, the global apparel market is valued at 3 trillion dollars, 3,000 billion, and accounts for 2 percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product (Strijbos, 2018). Everyone is a participator in this huge industry, people keep buying clothes and getting rid of the old ones, because they are out of style or there are few chances to wear like wedding suits or dresses. However, nothing can stop people spending money on clothing, especially women. Women are more active than men in buying clothes, in order to have a nice appearance or to follow the fashion, clothing is, and will always be the first priority for most women.
What is the issue:
Fashion, an endless popularity …show more content…
Which is honored as one of the best companies to work for in New York State in 2014 by The New York State Society for Human Resource Management ("Winners - Best Companies to Work for in New York", 2014).
Who owns the platform:
It was founded in New York City by Jennifer Hyman (CEO) and Jennifer Carter Fleiss (Head of Business Development) in 2009. While at that point of time, they were 2 graduates from Harvard Business School with no background about fashion or technology. Hyman came up with this business idea when she saw her sister spend thousands of dollars to buy a wedding dress by a new designer. However, she has already bought several designer dresses, only because she wanted to post her picture to Instagram with her new dresses. Hyman and Fleiss realized it could be a potential idea if they could rent designer dresses to people who are willing to wear differently every day. As a purely electronic-commerce company. Indeed, RTR is highly regarded as the leader of fashion rental services in the USA (Bertoni, 2014). According to crunchbase.com, RTR has raised $176.2 million funding from 2009 to 2016 ("Rent the Runway | Crunchbase", …show more content…
But buying a new dress will cost money, it is not worth buying a new dress just for a post on social media. What if people can rent a dress? That is the demand of RTR's business model, people are more willing to rent a dress at its 10 percent of original price, instead of owning it, because the opportunity cost of owning this dress now means losing the chance of putting on the next beautiful dress. Meanwhile, the demand of renting dresses is huge, because the dresses of RTR are designed by a large number of designers, people can rent their favorite designers' work such as Vera Wang at a much lower price compared with buying. Being partners with all the designers makes RTR an ideal platform for designers to showcase their works. This makes more and more designers encouraged to work with RTR in order to increase the