How Rent the Runway CEO grew company from Harvard to $120 million – CNBC

Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman came up with the idea for her clothing rental company, fittingly, in a closet.It was 2008, and Hyman — then a Harvard University MBA student — was on Thanksgiving break. Her sister revealed she was in credit card debt after buying a $2,000 dress at Bergdorf Goodman, Hyman recounted at a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business event.Her sister bought a dress she couldn’t afford for a simple reason, she told Hyman: She’d already been photographed in all her other garments, rendering them obsolete for new events.”Whenever you walk into a store and buy something, knowing that you’re going to wear it once, twice, three times, then push it to the back of your closet, you’re renting it,” Hyman said at the Stanford event. “We’re already primed to rent clothes [from fast fashion]. [That] gave me confidence that the market already exists.”A year later, Hyman and her classmate Jennifer Fleiss launched Rent the Runway. The company garnered accolades over the ensuing years, helping spur the development of today’s clothing rental industry. It now has a market capitalization of roughly $120 million.A few days after the company went public in October 2021, Hyman’s
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