YouSaid · the spoken record

Jenn Hyman

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-03-13
most recent: 2025-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I go back to school on Monday. I happened to have lunch that day with Jenny. I was like, oh, I had this idea. Like, what if we rented dresses? And 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 Diane van Furstenberg. Now, we didn't really have a structured idea. So, you know, we were kind of iterating the idea by pitching it”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say two things. Number one, don't focus as much on the future. You're doing something that's so fun. Don't have anxiety about what's going to happen next quarter. Enjoy today. Number two, get yourself a video camera and start videoing this unbelievable period of time in your life because as much as you think you're going to remember every single moment, you're not. And these are going to be the best times of your whole life.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jen, before I let you go, now that you have 15 years under your belt, if you could go back to when you started this thing, what do you think you would say to you 15 years ago about advice or maybe a pep talk or something that would make it a little easier?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put spaghetti sauce on yourself and do all the things to show people like those extreme product values that you're trying that you're talking about. Like it doesn't matter in words. You got to show them in images and video.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing you got to get on TikTok immediately. Like right now, any product can become a multi-million dollar business overnight with the right kind of Content and just get out there and just start talking about the product and showing it on yourself and showing it on your friends. Like don't wait for a miracle, create it.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You gotta be scrappy, right? So, like, I'm not telling you to license it to Joe Schmo around the world. I'm saying go to some really awesome reputable brands with founders who are in New York, with founders who get Design as well, and see if you can collab with them because they might have the capital, you need working capital in order to manufacture your product. Like maybe that working capital can come from someone else. And so, if it's true that people actually love the product, you also need distribution beyond your own D2C because you can't afford marketing. So you need to leverage someone else's whole channel and ecosystem. Yes.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the case. Have you thought about going to brands that traditionally target this workwear customer like MM Lafleur or Argent and almost licensing your design? Because it sounds like it's an innovation. From the way that you describe it, but licensing it to them so that they can produce a line of shirting that utilizes your fashion tech, basically.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have traction? Like, how much have you sold of your line thus far? Because I think that it's not about volatility. People are looking for markers of success.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to get funding, if not from him, from someone else. So I think that networking to figure out who those people are and to get in front of them is critical.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it is it's very much relationship based and there are a few folks who hold a lot of sway as to whether you as a designer are the right designer if the product is great if they want to invest in you and there are networks especially within New York that you can be a part of like even if you didn't go to Parsons or you didn't go to FIT a lot of the top designers in New York have actually come out of those two ecosystems. So getting involved in what they do and really networking to get in front of the Andrew Rosens of the world. So Andrew Rosen is a super famous fashion entrepreneur who founded theory but is the primary investor behind many, many businesses like Rag and Bone and Alice and Olivia. And he's one of those people that if he says I like you.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the investor base for fashion and apparel specifically is completely different than an investor base around what I do, which is like a tech enabled e-commerce company. So I'm interestingly less familiar with the world of apparel investment. And I know that it's very difficult because I work with close to a thousand brands.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are they going to do? Like, bring 50 samples in, go to the freaking 305 dance class and the Barry's boot camp class and just leave it there and have some beautiful packaging. And like people are going to take it. We're New Yorkers. We like free stuff”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can kind of go door to door, meet the people, build the relationships, and just show up. And so just do whatever you need to do, be a hustler, and the very best thing that beauty companies have done from the beginning is free samples. And what my co-founder and I would have done, and I would suggest you do as well, just go to the class and leave your product behind. Don't ask permission.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have something here, okay? $300,000 in sales is significant. You've got something people like this product. You got to get it out there more. The margins of the repeat business are so much better that even if you can get 25% of your user base to repeat, you know, once a quarter, like you're in a completely different business, you've suddenly taken your business from 300 to 750. So if you divide up the 300 that you're at now, getting to a million, you need 700K additional dollars. I would goal you at getting 400K of that from repeat revenue and 300K from, I think, some scrappy, community-oriented partnerships with fitness studios and gyms. And I would keep it in New York. I mean, there's enough of a demand here and enough of a culture of classes and gyms.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how you're going to figure out what your next hero product is. You're going to have a cohort of repeat users who then are actually demanding that you create a XYZ new product. You don't want to go to people that have kind of used you once and gone away to figure out what the next thing in your assortment is going to be”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Jen, this point that you made about customer retention versus acquisition, it comes up all the time, and I know you have to be a master, ninja master at this with what you do, because that's really where the value is. The cost of acquiring a new customer so much higher than retaining an existing customer. And Carrie has to really focus on that person buying it again and again and again and again.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they're basically like they're doing the body shower, and they're like, okay, this is the solution for my hair so that I don't show up to work with sopping wet hair.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But not shower. So I need that in between. When is that in my life? Like, are there enough use cases to ensure product market fit here? And if there aren't, is there still a way to create an active beauty brand? You know, there's different kinds of skincare that you might need because you're producing more sweat and you want to think about your pores in a different way. But I'm not sure that the reason why people are buying you today is because of excessive sweat. I need to like, I'd have to dig into that a little bit more.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it depends on whether you want people to be around you in the future. So I think that I'm trying to gauge the following. Like, Barry's boot camp, you got a shower afterwards, or you got to go home and be around your people who already love you. Like, what is the use case for I actually need this product because I can't take a shower? I need something that's better than dry shampoo”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to challenge what you said, Guy. I think that Someone goes to orange theory or they go to Barry's boot camp, they are a pool of sweat afterwards, like that person cannot go and be around another human in any sort of social environment without having to take a shower.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we just really started to get behind email marketing, especially as paid ads were becoming less effective trying to do more with the customers that we already had. So that's been something that we've really been focusing on and we are seeing really great returns. And we actually also just launched subscriptions. So I feel like we're moving in the right direction.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the secrets of beauty is that you make your money in the repeat. You don't actually make as much of your money in the first time trial. And so the big three in beauty LVMH L'Oreal and Este Lauder win on creating products that have enough love and efficacy that people repeat with them for years and years because cost of customer acquisition in beauty is fairly high. You do have to adjust that repeat rate right away and think about it could be the packaging, it could be once a customer has that first experience, do you upsell them into a once a quarter subscription or new bottle?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what do you have metrics on your loyalty rate? So once someone purchases from you, how many other purchases do you get in the next 12 months?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. I've got some. Jen's got some. Before I have a question for you, which is how are you acquiring customers? Are you guys able to spend on ads, on advertising, social media ads, and things like that?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are cool, really cool patterns. It's brought fashion to pickleball and it's kind of now a status symbol to have one of their rackets. Yeah, I think that they have to lean into that sailing market”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, these have become products around interests have actually become status symbols. And so there's an awesome company based out of Austin called Recess, which actually makes pickleball rackets.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A million percent. I was thinking about how can you personalize for that club so that it feels really exclusive and And chic and cool. So, I do think that there's something really interesting from a marketing perspective in diving into these kinds of communities.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely makes sense that a scale goes up, your cost of production should go down, but Sarah had mentioned that it's such a difficult material to work with that it probably doesn't follow the exact same rules of like, yes, increase scale by 50% and costs go down by 20%. I think that you bring up some really great marketing ideas of how to leverage community to build your business. And there are passionate communities around saling that exist in many different ways. They exist via actually sailing clubs. They exist via sports teams. They exist via country clubs. There are regattas.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reach out and try and get in those hotel gift shops. The other thing I keep going back to is there's low hanging fruit with certain kinds of social media, right? So there are YouTube channels and podcasts that don't have thousands or hundreds of thousands of viewers or listeners, but maybe have hundreds or a few thousand that focus on sailing, women in sailing, coastal lifestyle living, where you might be able to get your product to them and maybe pay them a small amount of money under a thousand bucks to promote it. Because I think that part of the downstream solution is volume, right? Does that make sense, Jen?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jen, when it comes to the production cost, inevitably those will fall as their volume increases. Where I think you have an opportunity, Sarah, is people who are interested in the sort of coastal sailing lifestyle. Like I think that if your stuff is non-consignment and gift shops and places like Newport, Rhode Island, the Hamptons, Kia Island, Del Mar and San Diego, it should be.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers will never tell you that they're willing to spend more From a price standpoint, I think the way to do it is via an online AB test where you can have some pretty simple software on your website that enables 50% of people to see one price and 50% to see another price and to understand the nocta conversion and whether that's margin accretive or margin negative for you.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put on my cell phone just so that it doesn't fall and that I could carry it around. They're amazing. So, you think about the mix of margin across your business, and are there like product lines that you could bring in that are higher margin that would bring your overall cost of labor down?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think consumers might be willing to pay a price premium, but regardless of whether they will, you cannot make money if labor is fifty percent of the cost of P&L. So you have to figure out a solve for that. And potentially it could be solved via product line extensions. If you used rope to create cell phone holders, is that actually just a higher margin rope-related product than bracelets? I think that's a huge market, by the way, because, I mean, here I am sitting here on my cell phone like I have this thing I paid $100 for.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wouldn't be as concerned. What I am very concerned about is that your labor costs alone are 50% of your revenue. That's unsustainable in any business because as you continue to scale, like you think about all of the other costs of your operation, there's going to be no margin there.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the product is king. A customer will speak about their value of sustainability or local, but in reality, when they take out their wallet, what they care about is They just like the way that product looks and they value it, the way they feel. They like the way they feel in that product and it's the right price point for them.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a take on this, and Jen, I really can't wait to hear your take because I've got the answer to that question is the data suggest that American consumers do not really care about made in America, but I have another completely different story on this, which I'll get back to in a sec. But Jen, I mean, to this question, I mean, do you think that is enough of a value proposition to get people to be excited about a product?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that we found, so just the nature of rope and splicing and whipping, it can't be machine done, so it has to be done by hand. Could we source it elsewhere to have it done less expensively? Probably. But again, we're kind of trying to grapple with does that story matter to the consumer and does it matter to us? And it allows us to control a lot of other things like lean production runs, which is important to us as a solely self-funded business to date.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's interesting. I'm looking at your website and the braces are really cool. And these are not inexpensive, but these are all handmade, right? You're paying, you've got to pay artisanal folks to, you know, whatever they're charging to make these, right?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I would figure out a way to get that information, and it could be as simple as like talk to a hundred of your customers. What do you value about our products? And if you hear from those customers that I just like this product aesthetically, like I just want to buy it because I think it's a cool bracelet and you don't hear I'm buying it because the rope itself is from down the street, then you've got yourself an answer. I think sometimes people think that data has to be big data in order to matter. And I found even at the size that we are that sometimes it's the small data, it's the conversations with eight women at dinner that give you better insight than the Surveys of millions.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that using a PR head. Is tricky because you don't know whether people responded to that because you are founders that are based in Massachusetts or whether the product itself was made and sourced locally.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, Sarah. Nice to meet you. I would love to understand what data you have both either qualitatively or quantitatively that makes you feel that the customer values that the product is locally made.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have enough happiness in my life and confidence in myself to not let what someone else might think affect how I think about myself. It's a simple lesson that we try to teach every kid as they're growing up. All we want for our children is for them to have that level of confidence no matter what someone is saying around you. I think that rent the runway will have many chapters because I'm going to keep on playing the game.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Competitive and intense and passionate, and I'm a believer, but like I don't need that validation. That I think a lot of CEO's need, and I think that that is my competitive advantage because I think that most people in my position would have quit at this point in time. And my biggest belief over 15 years is the person who stays in the game the longest wins.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned our stock price, and I want to address that because I do think it's unique that here I am. It's 15 years later. Actually, our business is in better shape than it's ever been before. But because of the stock price, like people tend to not get into the details of how the business is actually performing. And most people, I think who are CEOs, might have a tremendous ego hit from continuing to run a business that is valued very poorly externally. And one of the things that I've learned and recognized about myself, and this was actually a bit of a surprise, is that I'm very low ego.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I'm curious just from a leadership perspective, 15 years, right? I mean, there aren't that many founders we've had on the show that run their business that long, oftentimes they leave after it's acquired or whatever. But I'm wondering just sort of if you can give us a sense of some of the leadership lessons that you've kind of developed over the last year or so. I mean, you guys went public and running a public company, it's all out there for everyone to see. And, you know, you've got, like many companies, your stock price goes up and down and up and down and people can see it. And so”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really therefore marketing on behalf of our brand partners and coming into 2025, the vast majority of the inventory that we have on our platform we don't pay for anymore and we don't pay up front. We just revenue share with our designer partners because they view rent the runway as a significant part of their marketing. It's very organic. And the brands have discovered that significant portion of their new customer acquisition is actually driven via rent the runway.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're constantly adding to the inventory that's available because inventory is what drives our customer acquisition and our customer loyalty. People come to us because we have this incredible value proposition of this limitless closet. And what we've discovered and what's really unique about how the business model has changed over the past five years is that The customer is really using rent the runway as a discovery channel to find new brands.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, fashion obviously changes, right? And trends change very quickly. So how do you kind of handle the shifts and the changes? I mean, are you constantly almost a daily or weekly basis just changing the, maybe not daily, but regularly changing the inventory that's available?”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the business started with a la carte rentals for special events. You can still very much do that, and that is a significant part of our business. And then we added subscription in 2016 at the beginning was about giving people access to rotating closet primarily for work in special occasions. Now it's really about casual everyday life, including work in special occasions, but rentals become so much more normalized now that you would be shocked at the amount of customers who rent denim from us and who rent casual clothes to wear on the weekends. So I think we've reached a different point in the cycle from early adopters into more of a mainstream behavior.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing. And obviously, there have been pivots throughout the time that you've been around. I mean, there were different models and different collaborations. But essentially the core of the business remains the same, right? You basically can, there are different tiers of subscriptions and you can get a certain amount of clothing per month based on what your subscription is.”
2025-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Advice Line with Jenn Hyman of Rent The Runway · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT