Younger consumers embrace rental services
For years, college students followed the same start-ofsemester ritual: Trudge to the bookstore, load up on textbooks and empty the checking account in a single transaction.
Now it’s possible to do that shopping with a few clicks of a smartphone and still have money for pizza.
Welcome to the rental economy, where stuff is cheaper and possession is a temporary concept.
Renting has been around since long before Avis, but the trend has ballooned in recent years. Today, you can rent handbags, prom dresses, even kitchen gadgets or a suit for a job interview.
Trend watchers say renting is especially strong among younger consumers who embrace trying new things and don’t want to be saddled with unwanted goods. Some are motivated by an ecological desire to reduce manufacturing and consumption.
“More and more people are not desiring to fill their lives with things,” said Nathan Schultz, chief learning officer for Chegg, an online company that rents textbooks and provides a range of other services. Especially with younger consumers, “ownership is not one of their values,” he said.
It’s probably no surprise that young adults raised on Netflix and cellphone contracts would drive this rental trend. They’re accustomed to upgrading their technology on a regular basis and renting everything from the last season of “Orange Is the New Black” to a guest room in a stranger’s house. And most of them are comfortable with online transactions, which is how most new rental companies do business.
“I think Americans are just more open to shared services,” said Michelle Korchinski, marketing director for clothing-rental company Gwynnie Bee. Consumers have developed an appetite for ever-changing experiences, and renting makes that affordable, she said.
Besides, who doesn’t love a bargain?
Kay Caprez, a senior at Ohio’s Kent State University, does, which is why she has rented most of her textbooks from Chegg since the first semester of her freshman year.
Caprez said she’s motivated by the savings, which Chegg’s Schultz said can be 60-70 percent off list price for a just-released book to as much as 90 percent for older, used tomes.
Chegg users choose their books online and have them delivered in a couple of days. At the end of the semester, they ship the books back in the same box, using a prepaid shipping label.
Chegg discourages writing notes in books, but highlighting is OK. That’s fine with Caprez, who admitted with a laugh that a previous renter did some of her work by leaving “some very helpful highlights” in one of the books she’s using.
One growing segments of the rental industry is clothing, which Akron, Ohio, resident Angela Cain first experienced about a year ago when she took advantage of a 30-day free trial from online business Gwynnie Bee.
She’d heard about the company, which specializes in plus-size women’s fashions, from some YouTube personalities she follows. “I thought, you know, that would be really neat to have access to so many designer dresses,” she said.
Cain’s subscription allows her to borrow one item at a time, which lets her rotate her wardrobe without paying store prices.
She said she likes having access to stylish, goodquality clothing, which can be hard to find in plus sizes. She also likes the site’s discounted prices for the items she chooses to buy.
Gwynnie Bee charges a monthly fee, which varies by the type of subscription, Korchinski said. The most popular subscription is three items at a time for $95 a month, but users can opt for as few as one for $49 or as many as 10 for $199.
The clothing rental trend even extends to wedding gowns, the specialty of online retailer Borrowing Magnolia. Co-founder Ashley Steele said she and her sister, Cali Brutz, started the company after hearing complaints about wedding-dress shopping from clients of a wedding photography business they also run.
The company rents and sells designer gowns from the last five years, Steele said. Dress owners pay the company a yearly fee to offer their gowns for sale, rent or both, and brides generally rent dresses for about 30 percent of the retail price.
Borrowing Magnolia’s customers tend to be early adopters of technology, and many are from big metropolitan areas such as Chicago and New York, Steele said. Some, however, are from rural areas without easy access to bridal boutiques, and some are getting married on too short a timeline to order a dress months in advance.
The company lets clients rent dresses short-term to try on at home, and it allows alterations as long as they’re reversible, Steele said. The bride returns the dress dirty after the wedding, and Borrowing Magnolia cleans it and, if needed, makes repairs.
To date, she said, the company has never had a dress come back that was beyond its staff’s ability to clean and repair it, and Steele thinks that’s a testament to the rental culture.