Luxury Brands Aren't Thrilled About Rent The Runway's User-Submitted Photos
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The e-commerce site Rent the Runway is the the ready-to-wear couture equivalent of Bag Borrow Or Steal: for a fee dependent on how long you’d like to keep the piece, you can rent — let’s say — a Badgley Mischka dress for $125. But one of the downsides of Rent the Runway, and even luxury flash-sale websites like Gilt Group, is that it’s highly likely you don’t know the fit of your body type with this particular designer, and the models don’t particularly help in that area.
Rent the Runway’s innovative solution (one already being employed by Anthropologie.com in the products’ review section, I might add) is to put the models on the back burner and focus on the shots submitted by their actual female clientele, complete with height, weight and chest size. They made the move after finding that “the conversion rate for shoppers who clicked on real photos was double that of shoppers who clicked on model photos.” Now some women don’t rent their dress without looking at the user photos or going through a “Women-Like-Me” body-type search through the submitted shots—then return the favor by posting one of their own. As a result, over 300 user shots have been submitted for some dresses, and the users themselves are widely varied. One sample:
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