When I had the idea for Rent A Dress in late 2020, our country was a very different place. I believed and confidently pitched my friends that we were entering The Experience Economy — where rental and access would dwarf ownership.

As I am getting ready to launch Rent A Dress in the 4th Quarter, 2021, I observed some key changes in the ways we work and live that drove my vision for the company. First, more women were working than ever before, and 70% of women were returning to the workforce after having kids, thereby putting an enormous premium on women’s free time. Second, people were trading larger living spaces for the convenience and access of large cities. The percentage of Nigerians living in cities is now at 63% and continues to rise particularly among millennials who are 50% more likely to live in urban neighborhoods. Finally, as Tiktoks emerged, we became our own personal brands, defined by the things we did and the places we went. Today, as a society, we take over 1 trillion photos each year and 75% of those photos are taken on mobile phones. Together, these cultural forces prompted a shift in our values where people wanted to experience things over owning them — The Experience Economy is here.

And while The Experience Economy emerged, the retail landscape was undergoing a radical transformation of its own, with Covid 19. The market didn’t anticipate the decline of physical retail and how quickly this would occur, especially Nigerian boutiques and malls. Today the data is irrefutable — Nigeria boutique foot-fall is down 8% YOY and retailers are shuttering their doors. In the first quarter alone, retailers including MRP, Shoprite, and many more have announced 6,375 store closings. Meanwhile, Jumia is projected to surpass offline stores to become the number-one apparel retailer in Nigeria this year.

Ahead of launching Rent A Dress, our challenge is twofold: getting investors to buy into our vision for how the world was changing and getting women to understand that renting was a viable — let alone a smarter — alternative to spending thousands of nairas on dresses they would wear just once.

It’s wild to think that just a few years ago, you might’ve walked into someone’s home to find racks of CDs, DVDs, and boxes filled with family photos and videos. Today, if you saw a rack of DVDs in someone’s home, you would think they were perhaps slightly crazy. Can you imagine still having to purchase and keep physical copies of every single song that you wanted to listen to? Our lives today demand for access over ownership, as our society becomes increasingly more fast-paced, mobile, and on-demand. 52% of internet traffic is mobile, and people spend an average of 5 hours per day on their mobile phones. Today, we choose to put so many of our belongings in ‘the cloud’ — our identification, music, personal notes, family memories — so we can access them whenever and wherever we need to. Why don’t our closets exist in the cloud, too?
At Rent A Dress, our team is focused on building the ‘Closetless Future’ — that dream state in which a woman can wake up, choose from unlimited options, and dress for exactly how she feels every single day. In this world, you don’t need a physical closet to house hundreds of items you don’t even use. People regularly wear only 20% of their closets, leading to an average of 81 kg of clothing waste per person every year (this is insane). Instead, you can access the closet in the cloud to call upon the clothes you want to wear at the moment and return them when they’re no longer useful.

We’re used to a world of so many constraints when it comes to getting dressed. There’s the financial constraint of what we can afford, the physical one of what can squeeze into our packed closets, and the emotional one of feeling forever committed to the things we end up buying. In this constrained world, women have avoided taking risks on what they wear and make compromises on how they present themselves each day. If you take a look at your own closet, it is likely filled with the color black, a lot of pieces that are ‘rational,’ a lot of pieces that you no longer wear and may never wear again. When I traveled around the country visiting women in their own homes and talking to them about their closets, every woman lamented about ‘settling’ for many of the dresses in her closet. She had wanted the bright red printed top but settled for the navy one. She had dreamed of the feathered miniskirt but settled for the play-it-safe black dress.
But access to an endless closet changes everything. Women who are liberated from the closets of the past can more freely express themselves through style and dress for the incredible lives they lead. As a result, they feel more confident, and confident women are changing the world.

I dream of a not-so-distant future in which every woman can wake up, decide what she’ll wear from the millions of styles in her digital dream closet, and have her outfit magically delivered to her before she finishes her makeup. Today, we are at just the beginning of the renting revolution. There is so much more coming, and we are so excited for you to join us as we usher in The Closetless Future.

Abiola
Founder (Rent A Dress)
rentadress.com.ng