FEATURE
Rent a Trend!
Samir Alam assesses the rising graph of rentable fashion and how it is playing out for the
industry today.
If 20 years ago, someone had pitched a business
idea that was about shared services and goods,
we would not quite have believed them. The
traditional customer of the yesteryears was
someone who took pride in owning a private car
or vacation home. But given that the nature of the
global economy has changed, so have the buying
behaviours of today’s customers. The current era
has given birth to the ‘sharing economy’, which
is made up of multibillion dollar players such as
Uber and Airbnb, which have changed the way
in which people consume goods and services.
In this article, we will analyse the nature of this
shifting economy, how it has given birth to the
trend of renting apparel, and what it really means
for the industry.
52
I APPAREL I
December 2019
RENTING VERSUS BUYING
In the pre-2010 era, nearly every traditional
business model was a viable reality. At that time,
the benefits of lower competition and simpler
market structures created a middle class. For
most developed and developing economies,
the rules of trade were straightforward. But as
the internet and mobile devices proliferated, we
rapidly discovered that the middle class also
changed, and was no longer capable of making
long-term commitments in the face of global
economic disruption and instability.
In fact, it was in the wake of the Great
Recession of 2007–08 that we truly started to
see the rise of the sharing economy. Companies
such as Uber, TaskRabbit, Lyft, and many others