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The Briefing: Lesson of Rent the Runway

The Briefing
Some companies should never go public—or maybe even exist. Rent the Runway might be in that group.͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­
Aug 21, 2025

The Briefing

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Some companies should never go public—or maybe even exist. Rent the Runway might be in that group. The clothing-rental subscription service—one of a bunch of mid-sized online shopping companies to go public in recent years—says its mission "is to power women to feel their best every day." How about trying to make money? After years of steady losses, funded in part with debt, time is running out for the company. On Thursday, its main lender said it had taken control by converting much of that debt to equity. 

Co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman will stay in the job, but she has given up her supervoting shares—which provided her an outsize share of the vote—ensuring she'll no longer have control of what happens at the company. In a note to staff, Hyman cast the developments as "very positive news for our company's future," which in a way it is. Rent the Runway at least hasn't filed for bankruptcy or shut its doors. But otherwise, it's hard to see a lender takeover as anything more than a step toward a sale of the business, most likely to a traditional retailer, which might be better able to turn the rental operation into a sustainable enterprise. Certainly, Hyman hasn't been able to pull that off. (More details are here.)

Rent the Runway has burned cash every year at least since 2019, the first year for which it disclosed its financial performance. When the company went public in 2021, it described signing up more subscribers as key to growth, which seems obvious. But that growth has been minimal. The number of active subscribers stood at 147,000 at the end of April, an increase of just 10% since 2019. As a result, revenue between 2019 and 2024 rose just 19%. 

Sure, Rent the Runway managed to survive the calamity of Covid-19, when people stopped going out and hence didn't need to rent clothes, but that's all. It had to borrow money to keep operating, and that debt has weighed on it ever since. With active subscribers never getting above 200,000, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the market for people willing to rent clothes is too small to make it a viable business, at least for a company that isn't part of a bigger retailer. The contrast is perhaps the clothing rental business owned by Urban Outfitters, Nuuly, which by all accounts is successful. 

Rent the Runway has its fans, including some of my colleagues. It's known for its good customer service. That's admirable. But winning over customers doesn't do much good if a company can't figure out how to turn a profit, which is the only way to guarantee it can keep the doors open. 

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy isn't impressed that archrival Databricks, which is privately held, is raising a new funding round from existing investors at a valuation of more than $100 billion.

In a companywide email, Ramaswamy said Wednesday that Databricks' announcement was "designed to make headlines" and said its private valuation can't be fairly compared to that of Snowflake, which went public five years ago next month.

"Private company valuations (especially small rounds done entirely by insiders) are negotiated behind closed doors, often with terms that inflate the headline number," he said in the email. Snowflake, which reports its second-quarter earnings Aug. 27, currently has a market capitalization of around $65 billion.—Kevin McLaughlin

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Tesla for not reporting crashes quickly enough to comply with federal regulations. 

• President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday establishing a "national design studio" that will focus on improving government websites and physical spaces and plans to appoint Joe Gebbia, Airbnb's co-founder, to oversee it, Bloomberg reported.

• Anthropic is in talks to raise as much as $10 billion, double the amount it was previously seeking, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The company has been in fundraising discussions with investors for raising at a $170 billion valuation, up from a $58 billion-valued round that closed at the beginning of this year.

• Disney's ESPN finally became a fully fledged streaming service on Thursday, complete with its own app. Its features include a multiview to watch up to four games simultaneously. All this is available for $29.99 per month for a year. Also on Thursday, Apple raised the price of its streaming service, Apple TV+, by $3 to $12.99.

Check out today's episode of TITV in which Acrew Capital's Lauren Kolodny walks us through her predictions for agentic commerce.

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