Drive Episode 7: Rent the Runway’s Jennifer Hyman on Realising Radical Ideas | Drive
The Business of Fashion Podcast
The Business of Fashion
4.5 • 813 Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2018
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In episode seven of BoF’s podcast series Drive, delivered by DHL, Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Hyman tells BoF how she executed her radical idea and attracted 10 million members to her platform.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion and welcome to Drive, |
| 0:06.7 | BOF's podcast series delivered by D.HL, where we hear the stories of fashion's most dynamic |
| 0:12.8 | entrepreneurs in their own words. This week, we explore the rise of Rent the Runway, which was |
| 0:20.3 | founded by Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer |
| 0:22.2 | Fleiss, with the radical idea of bringing the sharing economy to the fashion industry by creating |
| 0:28.3 | a closet in the clouds, allowing customers to rent and return designer clothes disrupting an |
| 0:34.6 | age-old business model. In this episode, BOF's chief correspondent in New York, Lauren Sherman, sits down with |
| 0:42.1 | founder and chief executive Jennifer Hyman to learn what it really takes to grow a global |
| 0:47.8 | fashion business from scratch. |
| 0:50.2 | I didn't start rent the runway because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. |
| 0:53.8 | I started rent the runway because I want women to feel incredible about themselves every single day. |
| 1:01.0 | We were some of the first people, let alone women, to raise money while being students, in decades. |
| 1:10.0 | I've always felt like it's weird that so much of fashion is cut off |
| 1:15.9 | to so much of the world. We're taught to aspire to a lifestyle that 99% of us will never be |
| 1:22.8 | able to truly afford. And what would happen to women's lives if they were able to feel like the best |
| 1:31.6 | versions of themselves every single day? Lauren started by asking Jennifer why she decided to go to |
| 1:37.8 | business school back in 2007. I went to business school because I really did not like the job that I was in immediately |
| 1:50.0 | prior to business school. I had worked really hard in the five years after college and had |
| 1:56.2 | got what I thought was a dream job. I was doing business development for the fashion division of IMG, |
| 2:03.4 | which owns all of the fashion weeks around the world and owned a modeling agency, and I was |
| 2:09.4 | meant to be there to innovate their business. And, you know, I was going into work every single day, |
| 2:14.9 | and the culture of the company at the time was highly cut |
... |
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