Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital podcast where we reveal the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we focus on a single topic. Today? Fashion.
Natasha, Danny and Alex have teamed up to delve into the world of reselling and renting fashion. It’s not a small market that produces public companies, unicorns, and startups. Well-known fashion retailer Rent the Runway recently went public and gave us a glimpse of their own numbers.
Those numbers have led us to some questions about how best to make money in clothing in retail. From our chat:
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Selling vs. Renting vs. Reselling: First, we wanted to help you group startups into three categories: those who sell clothes to people, those who rent goods to customers, and those who resell used goods to customers.
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Rent the runway numbers: We have had some issues with Rent the Runway’s business model as it appears that the company is simply underestimating its apparel items given its cost structure. How Wall Street will price the company or whether Rent the Runway is hoping to sell to a bigger company came up.
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Who else should we keep an eye on: Finally, Natasha described a number of startups, including Queenly, Curtsy, and Rebag. Oh, and Depop (which recently sold $ 1.6 billion to Etsy).
Startups are tearing up old trading models, which is what we’re here for. We’re less here for Adjusted EBITDA, which reads like magical realism.
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