Luxury Fashion, made for Sharing - Meet Rentierre

If the thought of lending a stranger your fave bag sends shivers down your spine, it might be time to reflect on your relationship with your wardrobe, because it’s looking ever more likely that rental fashion might be our future.

We spoke to Layne, founder of one of the new fashion rental platforms in the game, Rentierre, a platform listing designer goods available to rent for a small percentage of their full price, making high quality fashion available to more people and pretty much proving that sharing is caring.

So, Rentierre is pretty new, you founded it just last year?

It’s been about 6 months now! October 2024 is when we officially registered, but it has been going on for a little while before then. Just putting the team together in the background took a while, you don’t find people overnight unless you already have a really good network - which I didn’t!

Yeah the people behind the scenes are super important. But taking a step back what made you decided to found Rentierre in the first place?

I had a small business for a couple of years during my college and university years. I ran a second-hand store, focused on archive and rare fashion. And it went well, during that time I also got to explore shoe rentals, so I was working with a stylist and lending out some of my pieces, but I never saw it becoming a full blown marketplace. That was something I explored after my final year of university.

I was looking at the entire market and I've seen a couple of models that are there doing fashion rentals, peer-to-peer. So, that was interesting to me. Then, I spotted a couple of gaps from my research. And seeing those gaps, I decided to just, you know, get started. And once I started thinking about a marketplace it made sense for me, I’ve used marketplaces myself for about 10 years.

Okay, that background makes a lot of sense, you weren’t just jumping in blind! Did you study fashion too?

Yep - fashion management!

Ah, it’s all coming together! And so, doing your own second hand store and rental and now Rentierre, was sustainability a key issue you were thinking about, or was it more about access to items?

Sustainability is a focus that we’re working on for sure. It’s hard for start ups there’s no investment, and whilst we’re still so early on theres not too much to tackle. When we get to like 10,000 users that will be another story and we’ll have more means to me more innovative with our sustainability. Everything being already owned and rented out there isn’t much new product, one thing we do have are Rentierre bags, that the garments are sent in. They have a double seal, so basically you use one seal when you send out the item, then when it’s sent back they can reuse that same packaging without any tape or anything. We also have the carry bags made of recycled paper that are like an envelope but you can take handles out so it becomes a carrier.

OK thats actually really cool. It makes sense s you grow your team and budget get bigger and you can really start to dedicate more time and energy to things like that. So as you are in this growth phase, what’s the reaction from your first users?

Responses actually have been, yeah, pretty positive. We’re doing some little improvements like fixing bugs, but generally the reception is really good, we’ve just surpassed 150 items added to the platform, which for our first 4 weeks is pretty good!

Really good, congrats!

Thank you! The main worry people have when they come to the platform is the trust. Thats one of the main worries as well for us, we kind of have to convince people that, you know, it's safe and to show a demo beforehand as well, of the entire process and introduce a lot more details about the project.. selling is a lot easier, you complete the transaction and its done. With renting and lending there’s the return side of it too, it’s like two times the process and two times the risk. So we take all of that into consideration.

We’re building that trust with our existing lenders but we also have a partnership with a third-party payment platform so that covers us incase something did very go wrong on a lend.

instead of just like when you're selling and buying, it's a lot more easier, you know, people just like jump on the platform, they buy, and the transaction is done there. You sell and, you know, the transaction is done. But when it's renting and lending, there's returns as well, then it's like, you know, it's like like two times the process, and two times the risk as well. So, you have to take that into consideration. Um, but so far, um, we did address that and we're trying to build trust with existing lenders on the platform. And um, we do have a, we do have a partnership with a third-party payment, so kind of, you know, cover us in case something were to go wrong.

Do you also offer authentication of the luxury items for users?

Oh yes, we noticed that some existing marketplaces haven't really tapped into that authentication side of things yet, especially with peer to peer. So thats something we do. With my background in vintage I already have about 5 years experience in authentication and handling hundreds of garments. We have a group of experiences people in the team who all help each other with authentication.

It’s actually quite shocking how many garments are getting imported from other countries that then often get mixed up in secondhand markets, and once they’re there you cannot really tell if they are authentic or not unless you have quite a lot of experience. That’s why a group is really helpful, we can rely on each other, we’re all from different business within the same industry and can update each other about spotting counterfeits and new releases etc.

That's really nice, that you guys are also supporting each other like that, because it feels increasingly hard to actually spot fakes..

Yeah, and not only that, but the the number of fakes is rising as well, it was like something like, I might be wrong, but something like almost a billion pounds in counterfeit goods were raided in Manchester in 2023 or 2024, so not long ago. So that gives you an idea, there’s a lot of counterfeit out there.

Ok wow so maybe the future of fashion is counterfeit not rental! Do you see the future of fashion swapping to more circular models like this?

I could definitely see more of things like fashion swapping, fashion lending.. especially within the luxury sector. You see luxury brands just increasing and increasing their prices and our salaries are not reflecting it. So I can see more of that renting, lending, swapping and more vintage. Probably some totally new models as well… web3, AI, Blockchain, they’re going to have some effects..

Oh well, they’ll affect everything, I guess, wouldn't they? Thinking of the future.. if someone reading this wants to set up something of their own, have you learnt any hard earned wisdom that you’d want to share with them?

To be honest with you, there's a lot.

I can definitely say it’s not for everyone sometimes I look back and question if I’m doing the right thing or I should go back to the corporate world, but I wouldn’t choose another path. Building a marketplace is kind of more than some other businesses, in ‘normal business’ often you have to focus on providing the product, so you have to focus on building the product and and then you have to focus on you know selling the product.

But building a marketplace is, you have to build the marketplace or the platform. You have to focus on the lenders and the ‘product’, Then you have to focus on the renters as well.

If I were to give an advice to anyone who would be interested in starting out, I would say to really test the market before even like, you know, starting to build something, when it comes to testing, I would say that it's never l too much. So, test until like you feel a little bit more comfortable with your product.

However I would also say that something we actually made a mistake on, is with that testing, don’t use it to put off getting your product out there. Don’t focus on perfection. Put it out there, test it, get feedback on it, then improve it. If we could go back and launch even with just key functionality of the marketplace I would go back and launch earlier. It’s important to test a product before you go full scale on it.

One more suggestion - have a really good team. It's less about the headcount, but it's more about the people that you have in your team. If they have as much as much passion, as much energy as you and they are as open in terms of taking risks, then that's that's really good. You want to trust them to give their 100% otherwise you end up spending all your time checking in on them and worrying.

All very strong advice. OK Layne, I have one more question then I’ll let you go.. What’s next?

We are just working on getting our platform, our shipping system perhaps with a specific local partnership we trust, our Google ranking too so lots of SEO work. We want to be easy to find and easy to use.

We might have a pop up this summer, we’re thinking about it..

Oh exciting, can I come?

Yeah of course, you can sign up to our newsletter on the site, and then you’ll year all about it!

(We signed up immediately afterwards because we love a pop up)

Find Rentiere Online here and shop by occasion, by gender (including Unisex), by brand or by aesthetic and rent luxury fashion from a community of sustainable fashion lovers like yourself. We kinda love the sharing vibe of peer to peer rental, it’s like we’re all friends!

And if you want a bit more background info on the fashion rental world with some pros, cons, and my thoughts on some of the other rental platforms in the game, head over to this article I wrote for Vague Tomes.