Rent The Runway: Jenn Hyman (2018)

Hey, it's Guy here. So you know, we're all pretty used to the idea of storing our stuff in the cloud, right? Like our files and our photos and our music, it all lives up there somewhere. But when Jennifer Hyman launched Rent the Runway, she essentially wanted our clothing to live in the cloud, too. So she created a website with this huge inventory of women's clothing that you never had to own. You would just rent it and send it back. Jen calls it a closet in the cloud. Here's a story of how she and her partner built Rent the Runway. This episode first ran in August of last year. I said, you know, we should really call Dan van Furstenberg the famous fashion designer. Fast forward a few weeks and we're driving to the second meeting.

And her assistant calls and says Diane no longer wants to see you. She's not interested in this idea. And I said, Oh yeah, um, we're just around the corner, like we'll we'll just drop by for a second. And again her assistant. very firmly said, She doesn't want to see you. What do you not understand? And I said, Oh, we're cutting off, we're cutting off. And I hung up and then I s

Dead down the West Side Highway and we were At her office and we just showed up. From MPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. The built.

I'm Guy Raz and on today's show How two women who wanted high fashion but couldn't afford the price tag. Decided to make it possible. To rent the runway. So Rent the Runway is now one of the hottest fashion companies in the US. It's growing like crazy. It's doing more than a hundred million dollars a year in revenue.

It has something like Twelve hundred employees. But given that its core product is designer dresses, You might be surprised to discover as I was that just ten of its employees work in the fashion department. Most of the rest?

Well They work for a technology company, because that's actually what Rent the Runway is. Now the way it works is you go online or you go to the app and Well you rent a dress, a dress that might cost thousands of dollars to buy. Except you only pay a small fraction of that and you get to look fabulous for one night. And then in the morning, after you've recovered You mail it back.

It's kinda like Zipcar meets Netflix meets Sappos, if that makes any sense. Anyway, the co-founders, Jen Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, came up with the idea when they met in business school. And as you will hear, The path to building their company. Was fraught with all kinds of challenges, among them Rampant sexism? And even harassment.

Chen Hyman has only recently been opening up about that. But her story begins just after she graduates college. and gets a job working as a junior analyst for the hotel company. Starlet.

About a year into my time at Starwood when I was twenty two. I had this thesis that we had entered. the experience economy. And people were getting married and starting to value experiences like travel over owning things. And so I had an idea at the time to launch the first honeymoon registry in the world.

where couples could register for their honeymoons and their friends and family could contribute by, you know, paying for scuba diving or paying for a massage or a hotel night, as opposed to buying them pots and pans. So As a twenty two year old I was really passionate about this idea. I emailed the president of Starwood. And I pitched him on this idea to start a wedding business at Starwood, where the cornerstone of it would be with the first honeymoon registry. Just for a sec.

First of all, you're twenty two. I mean that's that's that's incredibly precocious, but was there anybody around you who was like, Hey, stay in your lane or you know, was there anybody who was trying to Tell you to uh keep your you know, keep quiet. Oh yeah. Several bosses of mine were telling me to keep quiet. And one of the experiences that really impacted me. was

I had a female boss. And at the time I think she was like thirty five or thirty six. So kind of about my age right now. And I would often

Raise my hand in meetings and speak and make points and I remember her grabbing me after a meeting one day and She said, You know, Jen, I really want to give you some feedback. It's really important for your career. And I said, Oh, you know, I'd love to hear what's your feedback. And she said

You really need to shut up. Wow. You're a girl. And It would be much more becoming if

If you acted sweet. in conversations because you know, you're you're too confident, you're too bold, and it's coming across the wrong way. And of course I didn't really know how to take this. I mean I don't even know how I would take this today, let alone as a twenty two year old. I started hysterically crying. I was in the middle of like an open floor plan. And a more senior man.

Saw me. I I literally credit this guy for my entire career. He took me aside, and because I didn't even understand office politics at the time and like what I should and shouldn't say. I kind of just blurted out, oh my God, like this woman just told me X, Y, and Z, and I repeated the entire conversation to him. And he said, you know, Jen.

You keep doing what you're doing because that woman's gonna be working for you one day. Well. And He in a sense gave me permission To just act like myself.

And Who I was as a twenty two year old is the same person as who I am today. It's the person who had a creative idea about The experience economy and I wanted to share it. So w what did you end up doing with the with the idea? I mean you you pitched this to the to the president of Starwood. Yeah.

I think he thought I was so A little bit crazy for going and and pitching to him that his response was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. And I took that as a yes. Wait, he he said He didn't say yes, he just sort of said, Yeah, that's interesting and you went back to your your desk and you started to Map out how this could happen?

I started to work on it. I spent the next three years working on it. And You know, Starwood still participates in The honeymoon registry to this day and has taken it to a whole other level since I left.

But it was such a fun experience for me to a work on something that I loved and was passionate about. And be be part of the process of creation. So you were obviously on the fast track to like if you were still a Star Wars today, you might be running the place. I mean you were doing this at such a young age. Why did you decide to leave after after a couple years. I always thought that I would go to business school.

Both of my parents had gone to business school And so I thought that the track was you work for four years between college and then you go to business school. So when I was at Starwood for three plus years, I applied to business school and I got into Harvard business school. So here here's a question for you about'cause we're gonna get I wanna ask you about, of course, what happened at business school which is Key and critical to rent the runway, but

You know? the vast majority of the of the entrepreneurs that but have been on the show did not go to business school. And you had all this incredible experience and you were really ambitious and you were entrepreneurial already. Um Why did you think you needed to to go to business school?

Well, first I have always had big dreams for my career, but I didn't exactly know what those dreams were. You know. Sarah Blakely was a guest on your program and she's someone who

has always been an inspiration to me. I remember being a Younger girl. And seeing her on Oprah. And she had this amazing business, but she also like seem like a real person who cared about getting married and having kids and having friends and having a social life and

Mm. That was really important to me. I was still fearful. that you had to make a choice between having an incredible career as a woman or having a family. And I've always wanted both.

So In a sense, going to business school was a chance for you to really think those things through. Potentially stamp of approval that I thought that I needed. I had lots of opportunities that I could go into different kinds of companies and different fields, but I really wanted the time to think about like Where do I want to spend my time?

Like what am I most passionate about? Yeah. You um while you were at at Harvard Business School, you met the person who had become The co founder of Rent the Runway, um Jennifer Fleiss. Yes. How did you uh how did you guys meet? So it's a really funny story. My sister Becky

uh, prior to me going to business school put a post it note on my pillow one night with Jenny Flice's made a name on it. Which was Jenny Carter. And she said that you have to meet this girl when you go to business school because a friend of a friend of hers knew Jen Carter. And my response to Becky.

At the time was, you know, I'll meet her if I meet her. Needless to say Jenny was one of the first people I met at Harvard Business School because we were placed in the same section. Because her name had been on a post-it note for me, I was like, oh my God, you'll never believe this. Like my sister told me we need to be friends. And we became really fast friends and You know, the rest is history. And w at what point did you say, let's do a business together when we leave this place? So we were friends. We actually threw our birthdays together in September of that second year of business school. And in November of the second year of business school, I went home for Thanksgiving and I was in Becky's apartment, and Becky had just gone to a store and bought a dress.

Uh that was higher costs than her rent? And As her responsible older sister, I was remarking how she should probably wear one of the dresses in her closet again, as opposed to being in credit card debt.

And her response to me was You know, everything in my closet is dead to me. I've been photographed in it, the photographs are up on Facebook, and I need something new. And you know, Becky was a twenty-five year old, like normal girl who lived in New York. She wasn't a celebrity, but she was talking about being photographed and not being able to wear something again. And I a light it was a light bulb moment for me because I realised I was having a conversation with my sister about the experience of wearing

an amazing dress of walking into a party, feeling self confident and feeling beautiful, and that's what she cared about. And she didn't care about the actual ownership of the items in her closet. The other thing she cared about was the Photograph that would exist after the party. That she could post on Facebook and kind of share with everyone she knew how awesome she felt and how confident she felt at that wedding. So anyway, this idea happened a Saturday night. I go back to school on Monday. I happened to have lunch that day with Jenny. We were talking about our weekends. I was like, Oh, I had this idea, like what if we rented dresses? Yeah.

She responded, Oh, this sounds fun. You know, let's like work on this idea together. Who do you think we should call? To figure out if it's a good idea. And

I said, you know, we should really call Dan van Furstenberg. And the uh the famous fashion designer. Jen said Do you know Diane von Firstenberg? Yeah. And I said obviously I don't know Diane van Furstenberg, but we could probably figure out her email address. You could at this point figure out anyone's email address in the entire world. Right. So Jenny and I wrote an email that afternoon to many different versions of Dan von Furstenberg's email address. And we basically said, Hey, we're we're two women at Harvard Business School, we have an idea, uh we'd love to

to come in and talk to you about it. And this is where luck plays into the situation because she or someone from her office opened that email. She responded, I'll see you tomorrow at five PM. Tomorrow at five PM? Yep, and we Drove down to New York. That next day

put on our DVF dresses, and walked into her office and introduced ourselves as the co founders of Rent the Runway. You You had the name at that point, you came up with the name. Yeah, we just We did everything very quickly.

Now we didn't really have a structured idea. So You know, we were kind of iterating the idea by pitching it. And the initial idea actually, which you know, we've never really told. The initial idea was what if we could rent the dresses that she is selling on her website. So what if we powered rental for her on DVF dot com?

Ah. And You know, when we went to chat with her, she The idea of renting clothes in general and thought that it would

Cannibalize her. her retail sales and it would dilute her brand and she was ready to end the meeting with us after a few minutes. And I started asking her questions about what she disliked about the idea, what was she scared about, and By the end of what was almost a you know hour and a half conversation, we learned that A lot of her customers were in their fifties and sixties.

And that If we were to build a business that could Make her relevant. to put her products into the hands of women in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties that that might be interesting to her and she might want to work with us. So was was she warm? Was she nice? Were you guys nervous? I mean you're st uh you're still business school students. I mean I I can't imagine like what

that would feel like to walk into that room and and try to you know keep her attention and get her excited. Well, it's a funny story, so At that first meeting I've always learned, you know, when you're in the first meeting, schedule the second meeting. So when we were in the first meeting, we scheduled a conversation for a few weeks later with her. Fast forward a few weeks and we're driving to the meeting. and we get a call while we're in the car from her assistant.

And we're on the West Side Highway we're about Forty bloc from her office. And her assistant calls and says, Diane no longer wants to see you. And I said, Oh, you know, well We're on our way.

We'll just come in and say hi. And her assistant's like, No. She really doesn't want to see you. Like She's not interested in this idea. And I said, Oh yeah, um, we're just around the corner, like we'll we'll just drop by for a second.

And again her assistant very firmly said, She doesn't want to see you. What do you not understand? And I said, Oh, we're cutting off, we're cutting off, and I hung up. And then I Dead down the West Side Highway and we were At her office and we just showed up. Most people in that situation would have just been like crushed, would have felt felt so dejected. Like I know I know I would and would have just said, Well, forget it, forget Diane, let's just move on.

H how did you not feel that? How did you how were you able to just say We're going. We're just gonna do this. We're gonna walk in there. Well, Jenny initially was actually started to cry and was a little bit upset about the situation. Which I think some people would. Yeah, which I think is the much more natural reaction and I was like, We're just gonna do this. What do we have to lose? Like, what's the worst thing in the world? We show up and she doesn't meet us. What if you walked in there and they were like security, please escort these women out?

Great. Then we have a story that we could tell all of our friends. When we come back. What actually happened when Jen and Jenny finally showed up at Diane von Verstenberg's office? I'm Guy Rod and you're listening to How I Built This. From NPR.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So before the break, Jen was talking about how she and her co founder, Jenny, basically busted into Diane von Furstenberg's office to have a second meeting. And amazingly, Diane agreed to meet with him. And in fact

She wound up giving them some Pretty good advice. Actually that was the meeting where she told us, you know, I don't want you to do this on my website You are gonna have to sell this idea to other designers and get lots of people on board if I'm gonna do this too. So in a sense in that meeting she gave us permission to make it a consumer facing business and to approach the rest of the industry. Wow. So so I mean it sounds like she she kind of rewrote your business plan right there. Yeah. So so did you walk out of her office with like names or or contacts or did you just walk out of the her her office s saying, All right, cool, this is this is clarifying. We now know w

Where to head next? Well, we did ask her for some introductions and I think that she introduced us to one or two people in the industry. We then would meet with those people and we'd ask them for introductions and so on and so forth. But we continued to just cold call people. So one of the next people that I called called was the President of Neiman Marcus. um because he was both a HBS alum so I had access to his email address.

And I thought that you know if this whole Rent the runway thing falls through like Maybe I could work for Jim Gold and Eman Marcus. And what did he say? He said yeah. This is a really good idea. Women have been renting the runway from my stores for decades. It's called buying something, keeping the tags on, and then returning it to the store. Which probably cost them

Millions of dollars. Yeah, it's kinda the dirty secret of retail. the the return rate, especially of dresses and and special occasion attire is extremely high. Can I just pause for a second a and ask this question, which is so I I'm wearing uh the outfit I'm wearing today, like I've worn this in the last few days. Uh I have no shame about it. And obviously there's different society has different standards for men and women But but w what is this about? Like what's this thing where where

women feel like they can't wear the same dress at at You know, two different functions. I really think that There's a value that women place on self expression. and that clothes make you feel a certain way about yourself. You put on an amazing outfit in the morning and it makes you feel powerful or beautiful or sexy or relaxed or however you want to feel that day.

There's just a general value in our society right now around individuality and self expression. And so the way that you're gonna achieve that with fashion is via variety. So I had seen At the time, and it's even more true today that the way that women were accessing variety and individuality was through Fast fashion and off price. Because the only place that you could buy a quantity of items was at a place that was selling them for a very cheap price. Exactly. So I think that when you don't have to buy something

It allows you to try new things, to constantly be playful, to experiment, to Try things that are in colors or in trends or, you know, different kinds of styles that you never would purchase because they're irrational. So with Run the Runway, it's like a willy wonka land of fashion. You could have whatever you want whenever you want it. Let's say you have a job interview, you have a party, you have a wedding you're going to. You're saying I want it to arrive at my home on September fifteenth and I'm gonna wear it and use it for a few days and then I'm gonna return it. And it's about ten percent of the retail price.

So how did you know for sure that you know, that women would be interested Doing this. I mean did you did you guys do any research? No, we never did research in an academic sense. We did real life research, which was we went to Bloomingdale's We bought about a hundred dresses.

All in. our own sizes so that if this whole experiment didn't work out we would have an awesome new wardrobe. We spent a lot of our savings on this. And we Host it a pop up.

at Harvard undergrad And we invited different groups of Harvard undergrads to the pop up and The idea behind this was to learn A, will women rent dresses? B, what do they rent? How much will they pay? What brands do they want?

And most importantly, if they do rent, what happens to these Um, can you send them through the mail? How do you dry clean these items? And so on and so forth. This is like still like w I mean, today this seems like a no brainer, but this is what, two thousand eight, two thousand nine? This

Our first pop up was in April two thousand nine. So I mean at that time Netflix was like mailing DVDs to the mail, so that was going on. I guess Zappos you could get shoes and you could mail them back, but it was still It wasn't like what it is now. I mean it was still new. It was and

It feels Both so long ago and also yesterday. So you got the the I the sense right away that This that this could work because these these undergraduates, these these women were like, Yeah, I wanna rent this

I got the sense that it would work because I saw the emotional effect. So in this pop up I saw girls You know, stripping down, trying on these amazing dresses, and feeling Beautiful. And you saw

Their facial expressions change and they threw their shoulders back and they tussled their hair and they walked with a new sense of confidence and You know, I really thought, wow, this could be a business that isn't just about offering her a rational or smart choice, but it also can be a business that is Delivering Something emotional to her making her feel Beautiful every single day.

Jen I a lot of founders. choose to do it on their own. like you know like Gary Erickson from Cliff Bar or even Sarah Blakely from Spanks. I mean she she owns a hundred percent of her company. But You you guys went for venture capital pretty quickly, pretty early on. Why?

We had to raise money because we needed to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory to even launch a business or to assess whether it was A viable. idea. And I don't come from a family that has hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings.

especially, you know, savings that they're gonna invest in their daughter's Crazy idea. And so when you were pitching venture capitalists, h how much money were you looking to raise in in that first round? We raised one point seven five million dollars. Wow. So I mean with that money What could you do? I guess build a website, right?

You could buy initial inventory in various size runs with some depth because we knew we needed many different designers. We needed a selection, right? You weren't gonna come and start renting if There were only five units of inventory on the site. We could hire some people. We could launch a website. That was about it. And take photos of the dresses and put'em on the website. Yeah, that's another funny story. Until two weeks before the website launched, we didn't realize that we would have to take photos of the inventory. We thought of course in this industry There's some centralized place that takes photos of this. How ridiculous is it that every retailer would have to photograph this inventory over and over again. Needless to say, we we figure out like right before the website's meant to launch that we have no photos. And we

put together a impromptu photo shoot where we Found a photographer on Craigslist. Who ended up working with Rent Through Runway for six years. Wow. And We bring our own shoes and our own accessories to this photo shoot and

our you know initial team Of Five employees and many interns at the time kind of figure out how to do it. So once you launch, how do you get the word out? How do you how how do you get people to even know what this is?

Hustling. So what was the hassle? The hustle was we wanted to build A list of as many women as Possible.

You know, the Sex in Them City movie had come out that summer, and we would Go to movie theaters with women who were attending that movie and we would get their email addresses. We would convince friends to send us email addresses of other friends of theirs. So like we were really doing anything and everything. So one of the names that was on this list that we had built at Randway had A at New York Times dot com And I was like, oh, like there's someone who works at the New York Times on this email address. And I looked her up and I saw that she was a twenty-two year old technology reporter. I was like, oh let's invite her in. Maybe she could write about Run the Runway. So we met with her and we decided we were gonna give her a story.

And I thought That if Jenny and I were photographed for this article, potentially we could be on the front page of the business session. If there was a photo of the two of you. Yes, because it was a technology reporter. And no women are ever covered in the technology section. So

I say to this reporter, Oh, maybe you know, you should take maybe you could take a photograph of us At the quote unquote warehouse, which was a dry cleaner at the time. So we put on like these craces and We showed up when the photographer

Uh showed up to the dry cleaner. And we stood on ladders, and we told the photographer to take a photo of us on ladder in front of array of of dresses that were on the kind of dry cleaning Machine.

And Because the photo was so Utterly absurd. It ended up on the front page of the business section and the headline A1 photo on NYTimes.com. So we had a hundred thousand people sign up for Rent the Runway off of that story. Wow.

So you had did you all of a sudden have people m making orders? Yes. Did you have the inventory to handle all the orders? No. So what'd you do?

We raised more money. So because of of Hustling. to get this story in the luck. Avenging up on the front page of the New York Times.

We met our first year sales projections in three weeks, and we had a clamoring of Venture capital investors who were kind of coming into our office pitching us on Series A. So we got we had gone from you know, a very undesirable investment to Like people showing up at the elevator in our building to meet with us unannounced because they wanted to pounce on the deal.

I mean B both you and and Jenny. um are, you know, unfortunately still rare in in the start up world in that you're you're two women. Um leading a huge company and and

But at the time when you were raising money Did you ever get the sense from venture capitalists who presumably most were mostly men, that I don't know, they were like a little bit dismissive or condescending or You know I don't know, treated you differently.

Yeah, we had several different very condescending conversations one in which a partner at a very prestigious firm took my hand into his and he said, You know, this is so adorable. You're gonna get to wear such pretty dresses. This must be so fun for you. How did you react? We both froze a little bit.

Um I we were very polite. And we walked out and we said, you know, thanks for the feedback. No, of course we never interacted with this firm or this investor again, we never pitched them on any subsequent round. We were like kind of good riddance to these people. So there's an element of

You know, we ha We had access to капітал. We had choices because the business was growing. And That's a privilege.

I I read in in an article about you that w one investor says to me like Oh, you know, let me let me talk to my wife about about this idea. Well that's something that we heard all the time. That wasn't one investor that was most. Let me talk to my wife. My daughter. Or my admin. Those were the three

You know. target customers that we would hear. And let me tell you why each is problematic. Number one, the wife of a venture capitalist is a billionaire. So the wife of a venture capitalist is not my target customer. The daughter of a venture capitalist in most cases is about twelve. Because most venture capitalists are

When they're in the prime of their careers, they're kind of forty five to fifty. So You know, their daughter's not a great target. either. And their admin, the admins who work in the venture capital industry, because it's such a prestigious job, are often women who were in their fifties and sixties. Again, not women who were in my target demo. So We would preempt

That by showing videos and inviting these investors to some of our pop ups, show them who the customer was so that they really got a sense for who we were catering to. Th there's been a lot of um a lot of uh attention recently to um to the the broish culture of of venture capital in Silicon Valley and

Um and how women are are finally, you know, publicly being able to come out and talk more about their experiences. Um Did you experience some of that? culture in in this process. I through the process of building

rent the runway was sexually harassed. Um by one individual. And I'm happy to Share that experience. H however, I will say that

I've had interactions with Dozens and dozens of venture capitalists at dozens of firms and this was just one individual So The

Far, far, far majority of my interactions have been incredibly positive. But I was in a situation once where I was kind of propositioned, sent sexual text messages. trying to raise money for rent the runway? While I was building the company, yes, from someone in the investor community.

That and things that are more explicit than that. Were you shocked to to to see to get those? I was. I thought that it was Inappropriate and and fairly bizarre given that it was happening over text message. So there was Evidence created?

You know conversations that were happening. In person. That

were also threatening and Very bizarre. Yeah. Did you just Ignore it? Did you feel like you couldn't really do anything about it except just ignore it?

So I initially Ignored it. And that was the plan. I was planning on ignoring it and you know, decided, you know, I was gonna keep it silent. And then this person

decided to call one of my board members up on the phone And say you know. Jen never responds to me. And I think that this is a real problem. And she's a really unresponsive CEO, and she's probably if she's doing this to me, she's probably doing this to other people. And he really challenged my behavior as a CEO.

Wow. Board member came into my office to give me feedback. And say I need to be more responsive, which was My instantaneous reaction was Oh my god, I can't believe.

That this person, after being rejected by making these sexual advances, is now trying to ruin my career. And just a minute, how Jen handled that very tricky situation. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR.

I'm Guy Raz. So in those early days of Front the Runway Chen Hyman faced the situation where One of our investors was harassing her. And when she ignored his advances

He took it out on her. He actually complained about her to a member of her board. And so when that board member asked Jen about it, She decided to be totally transparent about what was going on. I I showed this board member the text messages.

At that time. And Basically. You know, ask my board member how how they'd like me to respond. What the board member say? I mean the board member was shocked. I bet.

And I proceeded to tell everyone else on my board. As well as some key executives who were working with me at Rent the Runway at the time and The board was unbelievably supportive.

And we decided that we were Not gonna do business anymore with this individual or his firm. Well. So there's that form of sexual harassment and I think that that's a lot of what's been getting recent media coverage. And hopefully by nature of a lot of very brave women speaking out right now, the

that sort of sexual harassment will be stamped out of the industry in one way that I think over time that it needs to be stamped out is by diversifying the sources of capital, making sure that fifty percent of investors are women. But let's put that aside just for a second. The second form of sexual harassment slash Gender discrimination is way more subtle. And it's way more difficult to prove.

But for instance, overall, I have seen male founders receive, you know, sometimes More mentorship. Or more They get more

strikes against them before their investors kind of pull the plugs. And in a lot of cases women are only given, you know, it's a one striker year out as the CEO and founder. Um there are situations where I've now come to understand that a lot of how deals get done and how companies let's say get acquired is someone is saying something like Oh, you should really meet this guy. He's a visionary. He's incredible. You should get to know him. And I think across the board more of those

Comments are being made about male entrepreneurs than they are about female entrepreneurs. We as a society feel uncomfortable. Using the words visionary or brilliant To describe women. That's not always intentional, I think it's Just

Ingrained in people. I would say in in in a lot of different instances People have actually genuinely been trying to be helpful. To me, like there was a time early in my career where An investment firm. You know, said to me.

Oh, Jen, you know, you should really meet these other entrepreneurs, they're around your s your own age, they're brilliant, you could learn a lot from them. They're building incredible companies, they're gonna change the world. На all of those. entrepreneurs were men and they were kind of prefaced as being geniuses, brilliant, et cetera. And

This same firm never introduced me in that same way to those same entrepreneurs, even though we were at similar tenure and similar stages in our company. The irony is a lot of those guys, their businesses You know, aren't around anymore. Yeah. And You know, I'm the one who's still chugging. Now

I don't n think that they were trying to be intentionally sexist. It's just that there's a shade to which we all operate that puts women at a bit of a disadvantage. Yeah. It's really amazing. I mean you it it it speaks to the this like perception of of power dynamics that that's so prevalent in in the in the venture world.

I think that those power dynamics exist in so many different industries and I don't think that it's just a silicon valley or technology problem. And that's why I think that the more Agregious Sending you a text message in the middle of the night Asking to sleep with you sort of

sexual harassment. Hopefully. Can Peace. Damped out via just being more vocal about it.

I think though that the more subtle form of harassment slash discrimination or just lack of opportunity is actually the harder problem to solve. It's the more pernicious problem. It's the reason why only four percent of venture capital dollars are going towards women and you know very, very few investors are women. So You know, we need to fundamentally diversify who has access to power, who has access to capital, in order to get a diversity of ideas and entrepreneurs out there. Yeah, I in and you obviously you have had incredible success despite the challenges that that you faced and that women in in in tech face.

And as you sort of began to develop as a leader, as a CEO, how did you how did you sort of make that transition? How did you figure out how to, you know, manage lots of people? I think that It is a continuous work in progress. I had never managed people across the diversity of functions that we have at Rent the Runway. You know Rent the Runway is primarily a technology and logistics company. Yeah. We have twelve hundred employees, ten employees are in my fashion department and

You know. hundreds are in my logistics department, hundreds are in my engineering department. And these are areas in which I had had no experience. And you know One thing that I've learned is that Leadership evolves over time. First of all, being a leader of a twelve hundred person company is different.

than being a leader of a hundred person company. And so I have to really evolve, even though I've had the same title. For eight plus years, like There's so many things that, you know, I've done wrong along the way And I think that the thing that has

made me grow and develop is The рекогніш Of Failure. And

The desire to improve and the desire to get better. I don't want people to have the impression that this was all You know, you just fleeted from success to success and it was easy and there were no low points. Because there w there have been, like with any company And and in two thousand fifteen You got some some tough press about

some people who left the company they were quotes in newspapers calling it a a a mean culture and and um And things like that from from some of these employees who left. Did that Were you hurt by reading that stuff? Some people were Criticizing you and and your s and your management style and leadership.

It was the most difficult experience of my life, actually. It was such a difficult time. Because A as a woman Th there's two things they could really call you as a woman.

They could call you the B word. Or they could say you're an idiot. Hm. And I've never really had a f had a fear of someone calling me an idiot. But I do value myself.

For how I treat others. So to be called mean and to, you know be quoted as having a mean girl's culture at the company was so unsettling and sad and horrible to me because it's the thing that's the most important to me. You know

What had been happening at the time was The company was going through Uh Quite. painful and difficult transition from being a

You know w one phase of a startup to trying to develop some sense of entering our our teen years or our adolescent years. And I started to realize that I needed to Make the tough calls and Fire some people. That

was very unsettling to people. Because we give men permission. as leaders and as CEOs to make the tough choices. You know, with women we don't give them as much permission to make those tough decisions. And we often when when we do make those decisions, we're often labeled as the B word or

You know Et cetera so It certainly was a low point, but It led to the biggest outpourings of support I've ever had.

It led to more courage around my own decision making. Because I led the company into the best place it's ever been. Yeah. And In a sense

It makes the future less scary, yeah, because that article or a version of it. It will come out again. And The next time it comes out. It's just not gonna have the same impact.

On me. You mentioned earlier in the interview how you always wanted to run a successful company and and or start a successful company, but also have a family and and a kid and uh and you did that. You you have a child and a and a partner and H how have you

To do it in the way you want it to do it. Well, first of all, let's backtrack to being twenty eight and having the idea for Rend the Runway. And I just wanna tell the real story here. And because I think that a lot of women go through this and and They don't talk about it.

Оновнер консервація с ай. In starting rent the runway. was Is this a smart idea for me? Because if run the runway is successful

Will I ever be able to get married? I was always confident that I would turn rent the runway into a consumer behavior that millions of people did and that I would build a You know, I I still believe we're gonna build a multi-billion dollar company.

But At the very, very beginning when Red Thrunway launched. I had been dating someone from Harvard Business School who I was very much in love with and The day that When the runway came out and we were on the front page of the New York Times.

He broke up with me shortly thereafter. And he told me. That hiz. That he didn't want to be with his equal.

Wow. So that was really sad and disheartening'cause I was very in love with this person. Еннат сір. Now

It ended up that the sphere was completely unfounded and I had no issues, you know, falling in love while building Rent the Runway. I just think that It It paralyzed me. Because the number one priority in my life has always been having a family and having kids. So

The amount of happiness that I have now having a daughter, I just got back from maternity leave last week. I'm engaged to the love of my life. I can't even describe to you the level of joy that it brings into my life on a daily basis to truly have all of my dreams have come true. I I guess last year you guys Had um you you you became profitable, which I I should point out is very is ex exceedingly rare so quickly.

Um And I mean you're Revenue is over a hundred million dollars according to

Public reports. the valuation of the company's I don't even know what it is. Do you know what it is? But you can't say what it is. Yes. But it's it's probably higher than you ever imagined. Even though it it it may

Still be on paper. Th this thing that you built that you and and and Jenny built has made both of you rich. I mean you are even though maybe Just be on paper. You are rich. You're a rich person. You did not grow up that way. Well, being rich on paper is very different than being rich in reality. So let's talk in a few years. Because I didn't grow up saying I want to found a company. I had this idea for Rent the Runway. I saw that it was mission driven. I saw that it was driving self confidence and making women feel incredible about themselves. And I knew that I had to commit my life to that. And I'm really proud

That's We have had many Different women. leave rent the runway and then raise their own venture capital and start their own companies and go after their own dreams. And

Jenny and I Two years ago, decided to start a foundation where we've raised millions of dollars to support. other female entrepreneurs scaling their companies and we've now helped Thousands of women throughout the United States in in scaling their organizations. So

this mission of empowering women and making women feel confident is the actual thing that I care about. Now, if it happens Rent the Runway brings me The ability to provide for my family and thank my parents, that would be wonderful, but honestly, if it amounts to nothing, it is the absolute best experience of my life and I would do it over a million times. Jen Hyman, founder of Rent the Runway. By the way, her co-founder, Jennifer Fleiss, recently left the company. It was amicable. Both Jen and Jennifer each own 13% of the company, and it's put them on Forbes list of the richest self-made women to watch. Rent the runway isn't just profitable.

It's also become America's single largest tri cleaner. Dresses from five hundred different designers, including So it took a while to convince her. Diane von Furstenberg. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building.

Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're gonna update a story we ran a while back with Monica Misraci in San Diego, California. And her story starts a few years ago when her daughter Leah was packing to go overseas on a gap year program. She was gonna be traveling to fourteen different countries, which meant that she was gonna be living out of a suitcase. So we needed to find the system. where she would be very organized in her travels to be able to survive out of a suitcase pretty much for the year. Okay, if this were me, or maybe even you, you know, we could just throw a bunch of clothes into a suitcase and forget about it. But Monica She is incredibly organized. I was a mathematician in college.

And I was Always very into order. Like in math, there's one solution. But when it came to packing? I just couldn't find the system we've tried. With ziploc bags, we tried many other packing cubes.

But you couldn't see your things. And I wanted to turn a suitcase into a set of drawers. And what Monica came up with was a modular set of clear, squishy plastic cubes that you could stack inside a suitcase and pull out by a handle. When you open your suitcase, you can see Everything in your suitcase. And eventually Monica ran into a friend at a barbecue who happened to work with factories in China. So of course she showed him her plans. Then he says, This looks really interesting. And he took it to China. And he made a prototype for me. I told him I want it clear, I want the piping, I want it to have a handle. And he made the first prototype.

Soon after that, Monica scraped together some money and placed an order for 14,000 of these packing cubes. And a few months later A truck driver pulled up in front of her house. I thought it was getting maybe fifty boxes or something.

We had a twenty foot container full of boxes and I'm like Oh my god, what? Did we do? And that was the precise moment when Monica realized she'd forgotten one very crucial detail. She had not gotten the word out about the packing cubes. No, I didn't have a single client. I hadn't sold a single cube. Fortunately, her son Solomon had studied business and marketing in college.

And so he stepped in and he said, Mom He said, We are going to work really hard. We're gonna put it online and we're going to sell it. So Solomon started to email mommy bloggers about the cubes and one of them posted it on Pinterest. And sure enough, he says, We just got you know Six or seven orders and like that was a big deal at the time. That was like wow like this is working, you know. And he actually liked the idea so much that Solomon bought the company from his mom. And he called it easy packing.

Now she still helps out with the accounting and her husband does the legal work. And her other kids help out too, but Solomon, he now does the bulk of the work. You know what, it's been an amazing honor. to work with my son. I never thought I would work with my son. I if it hadn't been for him, I would not have been able to do it.

That's Monica Misrachi of Easy Packing. Today, her son Solomon and his fiancee run the company full-time, but Monica still helps out. And since we first ran this story, they've expanded to selling in Europe and have basically doubled their business, selling over 10,000 packing cubes in the past year alone. If you want to learn more about easy packing or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuilthis.npr.org, and of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write us directly at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this.

Our show is produced this week by Rund Abdelfata, with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanas Meshkinpur, Lawrence Wu, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Mia Venkat. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this? from NPR.

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