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(BNS) Jennifer Hyman Of Rent The Runway

43 min episode · 2 min read
·
Jennifer Hyman

Episode

43 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Relationships, Startups

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Designer Partnership Strategy: Cold emailed Diane Von Furstenberg within days of concept, turned initial rejection into partnership by reframing rental as customer acquisition tool for younger demographics her brand couldn't reach through traditional retail channels.
  • MVP Testing Framework: Ran three sequential experiments at Harvard and Yale pop-ups, testing variables like try-on availability and PDF catalogs to measure conversion drops, which informed launch feature of free second size to address fit concerns and secure conversions.
  • Geographic Advantage Selection: Built in New York specifically to access fashion industry expertise, merchandising talent, and designer relationships rather than Silicon Valley engineering talent, recognizing not every startup needs hardcore technical focus over domain expertise and industry proximity.
  • Recession Timing Opportunity: Launched November 2008 when Saks went 80% off and traditional retail struggled, making brands desperate for new business models and open to disruption they would have rejected during stable market conditions.

What It Covers

Rent the Runway founder Jennifer Hyman shares how she launched a fashion rental startup by winning over skeptical designers, building community in early New York tech scene, and validating product-market fit through iterative testing.

Key Questions Answered

  • Designer Partnership Strategy: Cold emailed Diane Von Furstenberg within days of concept, turned initial rejection into partnership by reframing rental as customer acquisition tool for younger demographics her brand couldn't reach through traditional retail channels.
  • MVP Testing Framework: Ran three sequential experiments at Harvard and Yale pop-ups, testing variables like try-on availability and PDF catalogs to measure conversion drops, which informed launch feature of free second size to address fit concerns and secure conversions.
  • Geographic Advantage Selection: Built in New York specifically to access fashion industry expertise, merchandising talent, and designer relationships rather than Silicon Valley engineering talent, recognizing not every startup needs hardcore technical focus over domain expertise and industry proximity.
  • Recession Timing Opportunity: Launched November 2008 when Saks went 80% off and traditional retail struggled, making brands desperate for new business models and open to disruption they would have rejected during stable market conditions.

Notable Moment

Hyman reveals she chose Bain Capital Ventures over Benchmark for seed funding because she had never heard of Benchmark, while Bain seemed prestigious from business school connections, illustrating how naive founders can miss top-tier investors.

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Episode Transcript

Hi. This is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC two or ISO 27,001 or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at vanta.com. Jen Hyman is going to tell us about the founding of Rent the Runway today, and this is actually a super important story if you're a founder entering a space where your natural partners might be antagonistic to you at best in the marketplace, so you have to win them over. And also how product market fit might work for the other side of the equation and how you can overcome that. Fashion, Rent the Runway, Jen Hyman. Enjoy. Jennifer, thanks for coming on to talk to us today. Hi. Was there someone in your background, family member, teacher, whatever, that had sort of a entrepreneurial or a business bent, that maybe sent you in that direction at some point? Father has been very entrepreneurial in his pursuits throughout his life, but, nothing related to, you know, building a tech company or raising venture capital in the way that, like, we think about traditional entrepreneurship today. But certainly, like, the spirit of, you know, having a crazy idea and going after it and having the resilience comes from him. What about the Internet? I don't know if you were one of those people for whom, you know, once they're in their teen years or whatever, the Internet is just everywhere. But, do you remember early usage of the Internet, AOL, screen names, things like that? Oh, yeah. I mean, I am made fun of still to this day for my AOL instant messenger screen name screen name, which I chose, like, probably I was in, like, third or fourth grade. So Mhmm. You know, I chose the name Broadway Jen because I wanted to be some Broadway star, but it it stayed with me for so many years that, you know, that was no longer cool. Like, even three years later, let alone, like, in high school, that was definitely bringing me down. But I, you know, my uncle, like, had worked in a Prodigy in the early days, and so, like, there was I had another uncle who was working at IBM in the eighties. So, like, part of the whole, move to kind of PCs and then the Internet was, like, always a part of my life. We were one of those families that, like, always had a computer room and had the latest kind of computer in it. And I I think that I was at that interesting college years between 1998 and 2002 where we were not it was pre social …

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