Good morning! Women buy Our rings, Trump’s cabinet picks face scrutiny — from his own mother, and Rent the Runway marks 15 years. Have a productive Monday.
– Don’t stop believing. Rent the Runway turned 15 last month. At the helm of the business remains CEO Jenn Hyman, who co-founded the clothing rental service when she was a 27-year-old business school student.
Hyman has seen Rent the Runway through its heydays – like the late 2010s, when it unlimited subscription service it began to become ubiquitous in certain markets—and its downfalls, like the cratering of business during COVID shortly after. In the years that followed, Rent the Runway struggled, and a real turnaround attempt is still in its early days. Through it all, Hyman asked herself two questions to decide whether she should stay at the helm: Is she tired? And, more importantly, “Do I still believe?”
The first problem is fixable, and while Hyman says she was deeply fatigued at many points along the way, that exhaustion was never enough to make her turn her company over to someone else. “It means I have to change things about our work to re-energize this,” she says.
To achieve this, Hyman started this year with a new strategy. “I joined the company in 2024 as if I were the new CEO,” she says. “If I were the new CEO, how would I look at Rent the Runway today?” She reorganized the company to return to its roots as a collection of “cross-functional startups” and eliminate some of the red tape she says she felt she should take on as the company matures. Instead, she wholeheartedly embraced “founding mode.” “The number one thing I wanted to change was pace and agility. I believed that we got into patterns that were slowing us down,” she says. She hired new managers, including the CMO to invest in marketing after years of crisis-induced ignoring in favor of business fundamentals.
Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Rent the Runway is now up against a a sea of competitors in the category he invented, from Nuuly to rental services of his own retailers and brands; the share price is down more than 90% from its 2021 IPO high (which Hyman admits is “incredible” but argues is separate from the health of the business itself); and consumer preferences forever changed by the pandemic.
Some changes in the business have helped with investor skepticism; once a tough business, Rent the Runway is now a small-cap business, having convinced brands to view the platform as a marketing channel (the average Rent the Runway customer tries 45 brands a year and buys from those brands 80% of the time). So brands are now giving away three-quarters of their inventory for free, rather than asking Rent the Runway to buy massive amounts of clothing. Hyman says the $320 million company is profitable, despite all the buzz about its challenges.
Through it all, Hyman says she’s stuck because her answer to the question “do I believe” has always been “yes.” “It’s hard to be in a company that’s in the middle of a transformation,” she admits. But she’s staying put “as long as it’s fun.”
Emma Hinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
– What to wear. Women in their 20s are the fastest growing customer segment for Oura, the popular wearables brand. Oura’s CEO claims its products can be part of a “shift away from the patriarchy,” an option for women who feel “let down” by the medical establishment to monitor their health. Wealth
– Emails from mom. Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, which he has denied. New reports show that in 2018, Hegseth’s mother sent him an email saying he had “routinely harassed women for years and demonstrated a lack of character”. Now she says that she apologized for the message and that she does not stand behind those statements. The New York Times
– Beige c. beige. Two influencers are embroiled in a lawsuit that could change the future of the influencer industry. Both are creators specializing in the promotion of products sold on Amazon, with a minimalist beige home aesthetic. The lawsuit questions whether the creator’s “vibe” can be protected. The Verge
– Children’s watch. The Chinese government is pressuring women to have children, including interrogating them over the phone. “It doesn’t seem like something that could happen in the 21st century,” one 28-year-old says of the campaign. Economist
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Vanessa Lau will become COO Hong Kong Stock Exchange HKEX. Her role also includes the position of CEO of SEHK and HKFE, entities within the HKEX.
Bumble CMO Selby Drummond and financial director Anu Subramanian they are leaving.
ON MY RADAR
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Cormac McCarthy groomed a teenage girl Guard
How our messed up dating culture leads to loneliness, anger and Donald Trump The New York Times
Why are women less likely to use AI? Bloomberg
PARTING WORDS
“We’re both seen as strong, but we’re actually very vulnerable and human.”
— Actress Angelina Jolie on acting as the legendary opera singer Maria Callas in the new film Maria
