Trying out Rent the Runway: How did it go?

For awhile now, I’ve been curious to try out Rent the Runway – an online service where you can rent designer clothing and accessories.

With fast fashion being a problem these days, and our landfills filling up with clothing we no longer want, renting clothes is an attractive idea. It allows us to enjoy the novelty of new clothing, without creating more waste because the clothing will be used again by other people. In particular, it can be worth it to rent special occasions dresses, which we only wear a couple times anyways.

Well it turns out, my friend Wendi had a code for a 1-month free trial, so I happily accepted! Thanks Wendi!! I captured photos along the way and took notes of my thoughts, so here’s my experience with Rent the Runway (RTR).

The Plans

To use RTR, you browse the online shop and select items that you want to rent. They get shipped to you. You wear them. You return them. Oh and they take care of dry cleaning too, which is nice.

You can do a one-time rental for a certain time period. Or there are 2 types of monthly subscription plans offered. More details here.

• With the cheaper RTR Update plan, you can have up to 4 items rented at any time, and you’re allowed to swap once a month. A swap means you send back the items you have, and then pick 4 new ones.

• With the RTR Unlimited plan, you still can only rent 4 at a time, but you have unlimited swaps. So after you wear the items for a couple days, you can immediately swap them back for new items.

They have free 2-day shipping each way, but it takes a little bit of time to do each swap. My coupon code was for 1 month of RTR Unlimited, so I got to rent as many clothes as I wanted!! Woohoo!

Getting Started

Once I signed up, I started browsing the catalog.

They have lots of cute items and they try to put them in categories like outfits for the weekend, outfits for work, etc.. You can search / sort by the normal filters like tops, pants, dresses or color or other features.

Checking out the catalog for the first time was so much fun. I was like a kid in the candy store. It also took me a lot of time – I think I pretty much looked through the whole catalog LoL. But the best part was that everything was $0!! Hahah because it’s for rent – but seriously, wouldn’t you love to shop when everything’s $0?

They have accessories as well – jewelry and handbags.

Clicking on an item gives you more details. It will show you what sizes are available for renting and whether it runs large/small/true to size. You can also check out photos of real customers wearing that item. That last one is actually pretty helpful!

You can bookmark items you like by tapping the “heart” button next to each item. Then you can view “My Hearts” to see them all together.

Checking Out

Okay the hardest part comes when you must make decisions about which 4 items you want to rent. Ahhh only four!?!?!

I hummed and hawed before deciding on these 4 items for my first shipment!

They also give you some styling ideas on what to wear it with. Cool!

Then it was time to wait for my shipment to arrive. *Eagerly anticipating my new clothes!*

Opinions So Far

At this stage, these were my opinions of the shopping process.

The Good

• Renting items can help you plan your outfits ahead of time. At the time, I had a couple special occasions coming up, so I could plan what I was going to wear by picking out a dress for it.
• It’s fun to try designer brands that I would not normally splurge on.

Areas for Improvement

• There could be more diversity in the types of models they used for the clothing. They seemed to use a lot of lighter skinned models.
• Improved styling of the clothing on the models. Sometimes when I’d hover over the item to look at the photo of the model wearing it, I would change my mind about the item. It didn’t look as flattering as the item on its own, which seemed a little counterintuitive. Hmm *shrug*
• They could hide the summertime prints or make them harder to find. Scrolling through them, it was the wrong season to be wearing them, so I just skipped over them.
• They could have more sunglasses options. They had some designer sunglasses options, but I wasn’t too excited about them.
• The engineer in me found a bug in their interface, lol. When you scroll through the user photos of an item and tap to view one of them, it keeps jumping back to the beginning, which makes it very hard to see all the users’ photos. Maybe they’ve fixed this bug by now.

First Shipment Arrives

Ok back to the excitement! Finally a black bag arrived at my doorstep! I was pleasantly surprised that it was eco-friendly packaging – a reusable cloth garment bag that folded in half. The dresses were in plastic garment bags and the purse was in a cloth bag.

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The purse was a little smushed though – as you can see, and it still was a little smushed even as I wore it. So I wish they had kept the stuffing inside the purse (when you buy it brand new) so that it would maintain its shape even through the shipping process.

Wearing My New Clothes

Here is dress #1! I wore it to Thanksgiving dinner. You can tell how overdue this post is (it’s now January as I write this lol).

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At first I really didn’t like it. It was baggy and looked a little quaint on me. I did some adjusting, unbuttoned some buttons, rolled up the sleeves, added a belt and then it looked a better. You can still tell that it’s a little big on me.

Here’s dress #2! Date night. Sexy one sleeve dress. It’s got a mesh panel across the midsection and back too, and an asymmetrical hem line.

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The problem was that it was also too big for me. It could barely zip on the side, but the length was too long and sleeve was too long too (not a big problem, I folded it in). Here are some of the unflattering angles of the dress. It actually looks like a very conservative dress when you see it from the left side of my body. Not quite the look I was going for.

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But regardless, I wanted to get some use out of it so I wore it to dinner. I threw my own jacket on top of it, and used the new snakeskin purse as well.

It’s a cute purse! I liked it. It has personality to it. I also wore it out and about for casual stuff like going shopping.

Oh and the sad thing was that the fourth item I had picked (a cape) was not available in stock anymore. (They had emailed me earlier about that.) So I only got 3 items in this shipment.

I ended up picking this skirt instead. It has a whimsical flower design on it. I selected it because I was doing a storytime of my children’s book at the bookstore. It kind of went with the whole artist / illustration vibe – at least in my mind it did! It was stretchy in the waistband, so that fit fine, but the skirt was really long. I thought it would hit my mid-calf or something, but it was longer than that. Without heels, it looks too big for me. Short people problems.

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So that wraps up my first 4 items. They were fun to try! I wore the dresses once each, the skirt once, and the purse a couple times. After about a week or so, I returned them in the same black bag. And waited until RTR received them.

Second Shipment

A couple days later, I received the email that it was time to order again! After more endless browsing, I decided on these 4 items.

Here are the cute styling ideas they gave with my selections. Nice!

This time I wasn’t so diligent about taking pictures of everything, lol sorry.

I liked the red dress. It was classy and very holiday-themed. It was December at this point. I wore it with tights for a little holiday get-together. Again though, it was big, so I had to adjust it so it wouldn’t look as baggy on me.

The gray dress was not flattering on me at all. It was very “square” in that there was a somewhat high neckline and the sleeves were long, and the skirt part was long too. So it wasn’t the cute look that I had hoped for. It was sad considering I liked the brand and have another dress from them. I guess it’s hit or miss. I ended up not wearing this out.

The purse and coat were cute! I wore them several times. The coat was a tad big on me, especially the sleeves, so had to roll those in too.

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Pics with the purse!

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Ok I know this is a really long blog post, but the saga isn’t over yet!

The In-Person Rent the Runway Store

I heard that there was in-person RTR store. They apparently have them in Chicago, SF, NYC, Topanga, and DC. (Where’s Topanga?)

Anyways. I made the trek up to the in-person store in SF. I was curious to see if it’d be easier to find items that fit me in-person. The store is small and near Union Square in downtown.

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I returned my current 4 items, using these fancy kiosks. After you scan each item, you drop them in the bins underneath.

I could rent 4 more items, so I browsed around. You can see there are lots of clothes – many of them holiday outfits (because it was mid December at that point), accessories, and handbags.

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To be honest, I spent a while looking, but I had a hard time even finding things to try on. I didn’t have any fancy holiday parties to go to, so maybe that ruled out a lot of the dresses. I looked for more separate items (tops / bottoms). Many times, unfortunately they didn’t have my size – my numeric size or an XS. I did find some items to try on – but even after I tried them on, they weren’t too interesting. I browsed the purses and handbags too, didn’t see anything I absolutely loved. So ultimately, I decided not to rent anything. Sad! :'( I felt like the inventory was better online. Or at least it’s easier to see what’s available in my size.

But if you do get something, these are the kiosks to checkout. Oooh fancy!

Anyhow, it was nearing the end of my trial month, and I didn’t end up having time to browse for new items for a third shipment. So here’s my final verdict.

The Verdict

After some careful thought, I decided not to continue with the RTR subscription. It was such a fun experience though – so much joy and anticipation throughout the process and enjoying the novelty of new clothes, new brands, new purses. As time went on though, I grew a bit tired of the items not fitting like I had hoped for and got tired of having to adjust / fold things in to make it look like it fit.

I know they have a petite section, and I forget if I picked items in there or not, but if I did it again, I would focus on that section of their inventory. I avoided all the long dresses / pants because I knew I’d have a hard time fitting those (4’11” over here).

My feeling is that these designer items are great for the runway and for women who are taller. They did have a range of sizes and even maternity clothes, but somehow the items just didn’t fit me that well. I did have better luck with the accessories that work for all body shapes.

It also does take time to browse through and find items each time. I wanted to make the most of each shipment, so I took a little longer to be sure of the items I selected.

In addition, for the price of $159/mo, I didn’t feel like it was an expense I could afford in my budget. The cheaper plan is $89/mo but same issue.

So in the end, I actually prefer shopping and buying items from stores that I already like, so things fit a lot better. I actually appreciated going back to my regular wardrobe because everything fit me just right.

Fit is no easy task. Finding something online and having it fit is already a hard problem in itself (i.e. as part of the normal online shopping process). It takes a lot of time and patience to find things that fit correctly. Even for the brands/stores I shop at, sizing can vary, and many times something from the same brand won’t look as good.

Note: From looking at the RTR website, they do have additional support to help people with sizing, which I haven’t tried yet.

I have to say though, I think RTR will become increasingly popular as will the idea of renting clothing. My friend who is petite actually really likes RTR, so I think for certain demographics of people, this model will work out quite nicely. Living near an in-person location would be great too. I appreciate that RTR is thinking of the environment as well – in terms of reusing clothing and how they ship the clothing.

As the RTR brand grows, they’re already seeing more popular clothing brands come to them and want to work with them. And that will help boost their value for customers. All in all, they’re definitely a company to keep an eye on. I think they’re quite disruptive in the fashion world!

Well, if you got this far in my post, congrats! That was a novel haha. I tried to be as thorough and fair in my review as possible. This post was not sponsored, so take what you will of it.

If you want to check it out, use this link for $30 off your first order.
Rent the Runway

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