Your newsletters are like eating a bowl of ice cream; I literally consume so fast I give myself (or your words!) a brain freeze. Like, this is gold. I’m most struck by where you ended this; rental effects on our personal style.
To be fair to RTR, I know women who use it on while doing a low buy to be able to get a pair of designer jeans without spending $300. I’ve known people who rent and then like the piece so much, they purchase and it becomes a lasting part of their wardrobe. My friends who used Nuuly (on the other hand) end up being much worse for the wear. The URBN brands make them look like they are playing dress up; an Anthro aunty one day and a Free People Boho the next. These are usually friends who haven’t quite found their personal style yet and then renting random items make their style that much more chaotic. An offering like StitchFix would be a small step in the right direction. (Tangent: can you talk about where StitchFix lands in this mix?)
To land this plane, as someone who cares about style and likes to think about it a lot, I have found the best way to find your style is to (1) use what you already own as much as possible (2) invest in new things wisely and treat them as pieces you’ll wear forever. Obviously clothing rental is (usually) counter to both of these things.
Kelly, you flatter me again! I'm going to be holding onto "like eating a bowl of ice cream" for awhile.
And yes to all of the above! I feel like Nuuly has juuust enough variety to appear to be "for everyone" on a surface level, but ultimately funnels you into a pretty specific Anthro aunty aesthetic. Which again: confusing! Especially if you're trying to use it as a springboard to 'figure out' your style. All you're figuring out is what you like best out of the URBN portfolio of brands (which, is exactly their hope).
And oh boy do I have big feelings on Stitch Fix's trajectory. They've just...fallen so far out of the conversation that I struggle to find a relevant time to even bring them up. But maybe I will anyways.
I remember (years ago) being so obsessed with this one stylist at StitchFix who was based in Chicago and it was such a revelation that you could have someone *like* her styling you. Now, I associate it with junk mail fliers 😭
I didn't even realize Stitch Fix was even around!! Honestly another situation where if they had interesting, high quality clothing that fit me I would be very interested in the service... unfortunately that was not at all the case when I tried it (see also, trunk club, which I believe died a while ago).
wow, thanks for the write-up. This makes me realize I would love a newsletter that was JUST a narrative take on fashion industry public filings. Excited for part 2!
First, your footnotes are gold, and I really need substack to make it easier to go back and forth between the footnote and it's place in the article. As it is, I read the whole piece, then jump back and forth to read all the footnotes with their context and it's the icing on the cake.
Footnotes 12-15 are especially good. I had just enough leftover knowledge from fashion school when I was shopping the anthro sales racks in the late 00s to realize what they were doing creating "brands" that were just their own in-house labels. Living in Philly at the same time meant that I started to hear from folks who worked at their headquarters here about their business practices, and thanked the fickle job gods for not getting me the position there that I had wanted right after I graduated. I *wish* I still had insider knowledge because I'm also dying to know how they square those balance sheets between clothing produced on one side and then used by Nuuly. I don't trust it AT ALL.
I used RTR once for a short time when I had a wedding to attend and the piece that I bought for the occasion didn't end up being shipped in time. I kept RTR an extra month so that I could have fun options for my birthday, and ended up wearing that special piece that I had ordered for the wedding because guess what? It was something I had thought about and carefully considered before buying, and was way more *me* than any of the clothing I could find sifting through the piles of "meh" at RTR
I'm torn on footnotes. On one hand, they're kind of annoying (?) for a reader to reference. On the other hand, if I packed all these asides into the main piece it seems like it would end up feeling way too meandering. I land on "yes" to footnotes because it gives those who just want to skim through without so much extra the easy option to do that. I am honored by those who enjoy my personal commentary enough to wade through the footnotes.
But, as Kelly mentions, I think Substack makes them pretty easy to reference on desktop (hover to expand) and mobile app (tap to bring up a bottom modal). They do suck on email.
Another thing that struck me in research for this (but just didn't make it into the narrative!) is just how much TIME rental subscribers seem to spend - as you say - "sifting through the piles of "meh"". It becomes a full-on obsession to figure out what's going in your box every month. I guess for some people it feels more fulfilling to spend time optimizing within a constraint (a $144/month plan) than open-ended "should I buy this? or this? or this?" browsing. Maybe gamefied is the better word? But the way I see it is: at least my browsing and consideration time goes into something that stays with me. I can't imagine that time spent just being washed away every month when it all goes back in the box.
The TIME!!! As somebody who loves a hunt on eBay or poshmark, your comment about the pay-off for that time hits the mark.
Part of the reason the secondhand hunt is so satisfying is because I can find detailed measurements and compare those across a few listings for accuracy (and those pesky size differences between the same jeans but in different colors). I can ignore the listings with AI generated descriptions and no measurements. There's a sense of weighing the quality, even though I can't touch the garment. The closest I got to that on RTR was a few helpful reviews by people who shared their own dimensions, but even that was tough to parse. If I'm doing that much hunting for treasure, I do want it to be MINE at the end of it.
I’m not sure if you are reading in the app but if you are, you can click the footnote and it comes up in a little pop up (bad description) that you can minimize and keep reading 👍
I am reading in the app and haven't had any success getting the footnote to pop up or respond to clicking on it. I'm on an android - perhaps it isn't supported? I tried to go poke around for substack feature descriptions or android vs iOS details, but no luck yet. Thanks for letting me know it exists though!
Devon, this is excellent. I’ll be honest. I did think RTR (and later Nuuly) were more economically efficient, until I realized they weren’t. And worse, they were holding my style back, not moving it forward. I was cycling through too much, getting distracted, and losing sight of what actually felt like me. I am still recovering from that. It is getting better, but THAT is what got me to the worst point clothes cycling wise because that is literally the model.
This piece was such a satisfying read. Sharp, thorough. I was a ride-or-die Unlimited user back in the glory days, and reading this felt like both a eulogy and a group therapy session. You laid out the economics so clearly that I can finally stop wishfully hoping for its return. It makes sense now why it felt like a dream: because it was.
Fantastic article! The only truly sustainable way to get new clothes, continually, is to host *free clothing swaps* with friends/communities on a regular basis.
I’ve been doing them for 20+ years now, and the dopamine hit of getting FREE clothes, which I know I can gift in a few years (if my body/style changes) or few months (if I don’t end up wearing it before the next swap) is both freeing and invigorating.
But of course, that would take a lot of community-minded organisation on a macro level to pull off. Still - we can try!
Devon, this is so good! I will second some of Kelly’s thoughts—I do think RTR is a useful way to experiment with sizing in different brands and “trial run” good quality denim that, while I might still be able to afford, would have taken me a lot of orders from different websites and a lot of return shipping. I’ve also found that my rent-to-own purchases are the ones that end up staying in my closet for longest. But ultimately I have to return to your underlying point—maybe this is a more sustainable way to shop than I used to, or would want to, but that still doesn’t make it sustainable on its own! The real question (that RTR gives me a convenient shortcut out of) is do I need that new pair of jeans at all?
I feel like after all this, perhaps I am obligated to at least try it myself? I hate to be so content-brained, but at minimum that would probably be a good follow-up. Maybe I'd be surprised by its utility. Or maybe I'll just write again about how right I was haha.
And the truth is that we ALL make tradeoffs on sustainability. Pick your poison: some people love driving a big SUV around town. Some people love to travel and fly themselves around the globe on a regular basis. Some people love to have new clothes. And if that last one's you, then yeah rental is maybe a slightly better way to do it. But I just think we should be aware that new clothes all the time IS a poison of a certain type.
I also appreciate how in-depth you go about the business decisions, something I’m always fascinated by but often don’t have the industry context or background knowledge to interpret in full.
the time and effort involved in a monthly subscription is also a huge cost to the customer! to have to sift through all their inventory and try to find things i liked and that were available and in my size….. every month!! and then the package drop offs(my personal hell). it was so much admin for items that weren’t maintained very well and may or may not fit but with no recourse if it doesn’t. feels like the value prop for the customer is just not there for regular, non-event clothing rental.
I really loved this piece and your analysis of RTR's history and business model. It's a common story with VC-backed companies whose market sizes never justified the massive fundraises and valuations. The Nuuly example makes a depressing point clear: profitable innovation in fashion is possible, but it requires the resources of a company that already has significant scale and is looking for ways to increase that. So at that point, they're really just innovating on their business model to increase market share. Benefits to the consumer, let alone the environment, are secondary at best.
I'm new to your work and don't know much about Indyx and your goals for the company. What kind of scale are you aiming for? The fashion industry seems like a particularly challenging one for start-ups. I don't see a clear path forward for RTR or The Real Real, especially if/when a recession hits. But to your point about Nuuly, there are obviously lessons to be learned from the past decade. Is that part of your pitch, or are you aiming for something smaller that is more focused on sustainability and consumer experience?
A very meaty (and, interesting!) question. One that justifies its own post, but I don't know if or when I'd ever get around to that so I'll try to answer it in short:
I think venture only makes sense when the natural end point of the business is scale. Not that you as a business owner want to FORCE it to scale. That the product itself THRIVES at scale. Typically, at least two things are true for a product to thrive at scale:
1. It is a tech product capable of scaling without incurring direct operational costs. Rent the Runway is *tech-enabled*, for sure. But fundamentally their product is tied to direct, real-world operational costs (clothes, shipping, dry cleaning, etc.) that also scale right along with topline. By comparison, say, Canva is a pure tech product that can scale its topline infinitely faster than whatever incremental engineers they need to hire to support it.
2. It is a product that many, many people want to use (and, find value in paying for in whatever way it's monetized). Rent the Runway is quite limited by a TAM of "U.S. college-educated working women". They have to be in the U.S. because RTR has real-world operations to fulfill. They have to be college-educated working women because those are the only people who find value in / can afford to pay for RTR's rather expensive product.
I think that Indyx could fulfill both of those criteria. We are a tech product. We believe our TAM is...well, basically anyone who gets dressed. Which is everybody. And so, we don't think we should rule out venture for Indyx.
Our unique hurdle is getting everybody over the hump of creating a digital wardrobe (i.e., translating the physical into the digital). This is currently a bit of a PITA, which is why our early users are somewhat niche. It's also why many VCs (IMO, those without vision) have viewed us as somewhat niche. But crack this open and everything changes.
That being said: we can't risk our business by waiting for VCs to finally "get" that. Which is why we've made it a priority to make our business financially sustainable on our own from the very beginning, too. Are we slowing our potential growth by running on a freemium subscription model? Yeah, probably. If we optimized purely to user growth, everything in the app would be free. But that would mean being beholden to the whims of the VC market, which as we all know can bite you directly in the ass.
If the right VC with the conviction of a shared vision ever comes along, that's great. If not, we're good, too.
Fantastic breakdown, which I would never have the patience to write myself. Working in the fashion industry really helps you understand the reality of clothing consumption. I've never been a fan of clothing rental, for all of the reasons outlined here. The vertically-integrated and P2P options make more sense, but only on a hyperlocal level (same city/neighborhood), which is not VC-fundable. Yet all the P2P apps are VC-funded, which does not bode well for their futures.
Totally. While I like the P2P model much *better* than managed rental, I worry that taking the VC route will force them into the exact same conundrum as Rent the Runway faced: on it's own, one-off event rentals are not enough topline to justify the investment. But, I also don't really see how it's even feasible to enable closet subscription under P2P. So, where do you go from there?
So good!! Appreciate the deep analysis but also your clear and accessible writing style… as a newbie to the behind-the-scenes world of fashion and rental specifically you made it really easy to absorb the content, and I actually had a few chuckles along the way.
Devon, I love these business analysis pieces! Thank you so much! All of this is spot on AND we really need to figure out financially profitable models for making enjoying fashion truly sustainable. I’m really curious to see what you build next on the Indyx platform! Loving the app for driving up my usage and driving down my consumption. Have also been loving the stylist options! ❤️
Thanks so much for the in-depth analysis—really enjoyed! As a former client of RTR I can confirm that I ultimately landed where you did—it was neither sustainable nor helping me to know my style deeply or invest thoughtfully in my wardrobe. And it took a LOT of time.
As a former employee, this nailed what I've been explaining to friends/colleagues about why RTR has been on the decline ever since their IPO. Great points about Nuuly's second-mover advantage over RTR & green-washing
Thank you for this insight. I have been using Nuuly for years now and have gone back and forth about how I feel about it. Your writing has helped me evaluate my subscription and I think I will be making a change.
As someone who has shopped RTR sample sales... can confirm, there's a lot of junk. This was such a great post and really challenged my perception of rental services as sustainable!
Your newsletters are like eating a bowl of ice cream; I literally consume so fast I give myself (or your words!) a brain freeze. Like, this is gold. I’m most struck by where you ended this; rental effects on our personal style.
To be fair to RTR, I know women who use it on while doing a low buy to be able to get a pair of designer jeans without spending $300. I’ve known people who rent and then like the piece so much, they purchase and it becomes a lasting part of their wardrobe. My friends who used Nuuly (on the other hand) end up being much worse for the wear. The URBN brands make them look like they are playing dress up; an Anthro aunty one day and a Free People Boho the next. These are usually friends who haven’t quite found their personal style yet and then renting random items make their style that much more chaotic. An offering like StitchFix would be a small step in the right direction. (Tangent: can you talk about where StitchFix lands in this mix?)
To land this plane, as someone who cares about style and likes to think about it a lot, I have found the best way to find your style is to (1) use what you already own as much as possible (2) invest in new things wisely and treat them as pieces you’ll wear forever. Obviously clothing rental is (usually) counter to both of these things.
Kelly, you flatter me again! I'm going to be holding onto "like eating a bowl of ice cream" for awhile.
And yes to all of the above! I feel like Nuuly has juuust enough variety to appear to be "for everyone" on a surface level, but ultimately funnels you into a pretty specific Anthro aunty aesthetic. Which again: confusing! Especially if you're trying to use it as a springboard to 'figure out' your style. All you're figuring out is what you like best out of the URBN portfolio of brands (which, is exactly their hope).
And oh boy do I have big feelings on Stitch Fix's trajectory. They've just...fallen so far out of the conversation that I struggle to find a relevant time to even bring them up. But maybe I will anyways.
I remember (years ago) being so obsessed with this one stylist at StitchFix who was based in Chicago and it was such a revelation that you could have someone *like* her styling you. Now, I associate it with junk mail fliers 😭
I didn't even realize Stitch Fix was even around!! Honestly another situation where if they had interesting, high quality clothing that fit me I would be very interested in the service... unfortunately that was not at all the case when I tried it (see also, trunk club, which I believe died a while ago).
wow, thanks for the write-up. This makes me realize I would love a newsletter that was JUST a narrative take on fashion industry public filings. Excited for part 2!
That's exactly my happy place, so I'm glad to hear you'd like more of that!
First, your footnotes are gold, and I really need substack to make it easier to go back and forth between the footnote and it's place in the article. As it is, I read the whole piece, then jump back and forth to read all the footnotes with their context and it's the icing on the cake.
Footnotes 12-15 are especially good. I had just enough leftover knowledge from fashion school when I was shopping the anthro sales racks in the late 00s to realize what they were doing creating "brands" that were just their own in-house labels. Living in Philly at the same time meant that I started to hear from folks who worked at their headquarters here about their business practices, and thanked the fickle job gods for not getting me the position there that I had wanted right after I graduated. I *wish* I still had insider knowledge because I'm also dying to know how they square those balance sheets between clothing produced on one side and then used by Nuuly. I don't trust it AT ALL.
I used RTR once for a short time when I had a wedding to attend and the piece that I bought for the occasion didn't end up being shipped in time. I kept RTR an extra month so that I could have fun options for my birthday, and ended up wearing that special piece that I had ordered for the wedding because guess what? It was something I had thought about and carefully considered before buying, and was way more *me* than any of the clothing I could find sifting through the piles of "meh" at RTR
I'm torn on footnotes. On one hand, they're kind of annoying (?) for a reader to reference. On the other hand, if I packed all these asides into the main piece it seems like it would end up feeling way too meandering. I land on "yes" to footnotes because it gives those who just want to skim through without so much extra the easy option to do that. I am honored by those who enjoy my personal commentary enough to wade through the footnotes.
But, as Kelly mentions, I think Substack makes them pretty easy to reference on desktop (hover to expand) and mobile app (tap to bring up a bottom modal). They do suck on email.
Another thing that struck me in research for this (but just didn't make it into the narrative!) is just how much TIME rental subscribers seem to spend - as you say - "sifting through the piles of "meh"". It becomes a full-on obsession to figure out what's going in your box every month. I guess for some people it feels more fulfilling to spend time optimizing within a constraint (a $144/month plan) than open-ended "should I buy this? or this? or this?" browsing. Maybe gamefied is the better word? But the way I see it is: at least my browsing and consideration time goes into something that stays with me. I can't imagine that time spent just being washed away every month when it all goes back in the box.
The TIME!!! As somebody who loves a hunt on eBay or poshmark, your comment about the pay-off for that time hits the mark.
Part of the reason the secondhand hunt is so satisfying is because I can find detailed measurements and compare those across a few listings for accuracy (and those pesky size differences between the same jeans but in different colors). I can ignore the listings with AI generated descriptions and no measurements. There's a sense of weighing the quality, even though I can't touch the garment. The closest I got to that on RTR was a few helpful reviews by people who shared their own dimensions, but even that was tough to parse. If I'm doing that much hunting for treasure, I do want it to be MINE at the end of it.
I’m not sure if you are reading in the app but if you are, you can click the footnote and it comes up in a little pop up (bad description) that you can minimize and keep reading 👍
I am reading in the app and haven't had any success getting the footnote to pop up or respond to clicking on it. I'm on an android - perhaps it isn't supported? I tried to go poke around for substack feature descriptions or android vs iOS details, but no luck yet. Thanks for letting me know it exists though!
Boo!! I’m sorry! I- too- love a footnote.
Devon, this is excellent. I’ll be honest. I did think RTR (and later Nuuly) were more economically efficient, until I realized they weren’t. And worse, they were holding my style back, not moving it forward. I was cycling through too much, getting distracted, and losing sight of what actually felt like me. I am still recovering from that. It is getting better, but THAT is what got me to the worst point clothes cycling wise because that is literally the model.
This piece was such a satisfying read. Sharp, thorough. I was a ride-or-die Unlimited user back in the glory days, and reading this felt like both a eulogy and a group therapy session. You laid out the economics so clearly that I can finally stop wishfully hoping for its return. It makes sense now why it felt like a dream: because it was.
This might be my favorite comment of all time. Thank you, Aastha.
Fantastic article! The only truly sustainable way to get new clothes, continually, is to host *free clothing swaps* with friends/communities on a regular basis.
I’ve been doing them for 20+ years now, and the dopamine hit of getting FREE clothes, which I know I can gift in a few years (if my body/style changes) or few months (if I don’t end up wearing it before the next swap) is both freeing and invigorating.
But of course, that would take a lot of community-minded organisation on a macro level to pull off. Still - we can try!
Devon, this is so good! I will second some of Kelly’s thoughts—I do think RTR is a useful way to experiment with sizing in different brands and “trial run” good quality denim that, while I might still be able to afford, would have taken me a lot of orders from different websites and a lot of return shipping. I’ve also found that my rent-to-own purchases are the ones that end up staying in my closet for longest. But ultimately I have to return to your underlying point—maybe this is a more sustainable way to shop than I used to, or would want to, but that still doesn’t make it sustainable on its own! The real question (that RTR gives me a convenient shortcut out of) is do I need that new pair of jeans at all?
I feel like after all this, perhaps I am obligated to at least try it myself? I hate to be so content-brained, but at minimum that would probably be a good follow-up. Maybe I'd be surprised by its utility. Or maybe I'll just write again about how right I was haha.
And the truth is that we ALL make tradeoffs on sustainability. Pick your poison: some people love driving a big SUV around town. Some people love to travel and fly themselves around the globe on a regular basis. Some people love to have new clothes. And if that last one's you, then yeah rental is maybe a slightly better way to do it. But I just think we should be aware that new clothes all the time IS a poison of a certain type.
Agree!! Also I would obvi read a post about your experience (honestly would be curious about your opinion using Nuuly vs RTR!)
I also appreciate how in-depth you go about the business decisions, something I’m always fascinated by but often don’t have the industry context or background knowledge to interpret in full.
the time and effort involved in a monthly subscription is also a huge cost to the customer! to have to sift through all their inventory and try to find things i liked and that were available and in my size….. every month!! and then the package drop offs(my personal hell). it was so much admin for items that weren’t maintained very well and may or may not fit but with no recourse if it doesn’t. feels like the value prop for the customer is just not there for regular, non-event clothing rental.
YES! The time spent and admin seems immense to me. Like, who needs another thing to manage?! Evidently, some enjoy it.
Loved this incredibly interesting read. Part 2, part 2!
I really loved this piece and your analysis of RTR's history and business model. It's a common story with VC-backed companies whose market sizes never justified the massive fundraises and valuations. The Nuuly example makes a depressing point clear: profitable innovation in fashion is possible, but it requires the resources of a company that already has significant scale and is looking for ways to increase that. So at that point, they're really just innovating on their business model to increase market share. Benefits to the consumer, let alone the environment, are secondary at best.
I'm new to your work and don't know much about Indyx and your goals for the company. What kind of scale are you aiming for? The fashion industry seems like a particularly challenging one for start-ups. I don't see a clear path forward for RTR or The Real Real, especially if/when a recession hits. But to your point about Nuuly, there are obviously lessons to be learned from the past decade. Is that part of your pitch, or are you aiming for something smaller that is more focused on sustainability and consumer experience?
A very meaty (and, interesting!) question. One that justifies its own post, but I don't know if or when I'd ever get around to that so I'll try to answer it in short:
I think venture only makes sense when the natural end point of the business is scale. Not that you as a business owner want to FORCE it to scale. That the product itself THRIVES at scale. Typically, at least two things are true for a product to thrive at scale:
1. It is a tech product capable of scaling without incurring direct operational costs. Rent the Runway is *tech-enabled*, for sure. But fundamentally their product is tied to direct, real-world operational costs (clothes, shipping, dry cleaning, etc.) that also scale right along with topline. By comparison, say, Canva is a pure tech product that can scale its topline infinitely faster than whatever incremental engineers they need to hire to support it.
2. It is a product that many, many people want to use (and, find value in paying for in whatever way it's monetized). Rent the Runway is quite limited by a TAM of "U.S. college-educated working women". They have to be in the U.S. because RTR has real-world operations to fulfill. They have to be college-educated working women because those are the only people who find value in / can afford to pay for RTR's rather expensive product.
I think that Indyx could fulfill both of those criteria. We are a tech product. We believe our TAM is...well, basically anyone who gets dressed. Which is everybody. And so, we don't think we should rule out venture for Indyx.
Our unique hurdle is getting everybody over the hump of creating a digital wardrobe (i.e., translating the physical into the digital). This is currently a bit of a PITA, which is why our early users are somewhat niche. It's also why many VCs (IMO, those without vision) have viewed us as somewhat niche. But crack this open and everything changes.
That being said: we can't risk our business by waiting for VCs to finally "get" that. Which is why we've made it a priority to make our business financially sustainable on our own from the very beginning, too. Are we slowing our potential growth by running on a freemium subscription model? Yeah, probably. If we optimized purely to user growth, everything in the app would be free. But that would mean being beholden to the whims of the VC market, which as we all know can bite you directly in the ass.
If the right VC with the conviction of a shared vision ever comes along, that's great. If not, we're good, too.
Fantastic breakdown, which I would never have the patience to write myself. Working in the fashion industry really helps you understand the reality of clothing consumption. I've never been a fan of clothing rental, for all of the reasons outlined here. The vertically-integrated and P2P options make more sense, but only on a hyperlocal level (same city/neighborhood), which is not VC-fundable. Yet all the P2P apps are VC-funded, which does not bode well for their futures.
Totally. While I like the P2P model much *better* than managed rental, I worry that taking the VC route will force them into the exact same conundrum as Rent the Runway faced: on it's own, one-off event rentals are not enough topline to justify the investment. But, I also don't really see how it's even feasible to enable closet subscription under P2P. So, where do you go from there?
So good!! Appreciate the deep analysis but also your clear and accessible writing style… as a newbie to the behind-the-scenes world of fashion and rental specifically you made it really easy to absorb the content, and I actually had a few chuckles along the way.
Devon, I love these business analysis pieces! Thank you so much! All of this is spot on AND we really need to figure out financially profitable models for making enjoying fashion truly sustainable. I’m really curious to see what you build next on the Indyx platform! Loving the app for driving up my usage and driving down my consumption. Have also been loving the stylist options! ❤️
Thanks so much for the in-depth analysis—really enjoyed! As a former client of RTR I can confirm that I ultimately landed where you did—it was neither sustainable nor helping me to know my style deeply or invest thoughtfully in my wardrobe. And it took a LOT of time.
As a former employee, this nailed what I've been explaining to friends/colleagues about why RTR has been on the decline ever since their IPO. Great points about Nuuly's second-mover advantage over RTR & green-washing
Thank you for this insight. I have been using Nuuly for years now and have gone back and forth about how I feel about it. Your writing has helped me evaluate my subscription and I think I will be making a change.
As someone who has shopped RTR sample sales... can confirm, there's a lot of junk. This was such a great post and really challenged my perception of rental services as sustainable!