Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Fashion.
Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the world of fashion resale and rental. It’s no small market, giving birth to public companies, unicorns and startups. Most recently, well-known fashion rental player Rent the Runway filed to go public, giving us a window into its own numbers.
Those figures led us to a few questions about how best to go about making money from clothes in a retail context. From our chat:
- Selling vs. Renting vs. Reselling: To start, we wanted to help you group startups into three buckets: those who sell clothes to people, those who rent goods to customers, and those who resell pre-owned goods to customers.
- Rent the Runway’s numbers: We had some issues with Rent the Runway’s business model given that it appears that the company is simply underpricing its clothing items given its cost structure. How Wall Street will price the company, or whether Rent the Runway is hoping to sell to a larger company came into the conversation.
- Who else should we have an eye on: To close, Natasha detailed a number of startups including Queenly, Curtsy and Rebag. Oh, and Depop (which recently sold to Etsy $1.6 billion).
Startups are tearing up old retail models, which we are here for. We are less here for adjusted EBITDA that reads like magical realism.
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