Rent the Runway Teams Up with Nordstrom

Rent the Runway, an online service that provides designer dress and accessory rentals, has teamed up with Nordstrom.
The company is bringing its drop boxes to Nordstrom stores. Initially Rent the Runway is putting drop boxes in four Nordstrom stores in Los Angeles, with the goal of scaling beyond that.

This is the company’s second tie-up to expand its reach after it started putting drop boxes in certain WeWork locations last year.

The drop boxes will be at three of Nordstrom’s small-format neighborhood locations on Melrose Avenue, in the Brentwood neighborhood and downtown. There will also be a drop box at Nordstrom’s full-line store at The Grove in Los Angeles.

According to COO Maureen Sullivan, the move is being done to acquire more subscribers and attract new ones, rolling out more spaces where users can drop off rented clothes is helping Rent the Runway to scale.

“We wouldn’t be doing this unless we thought we had the potential to scale,” Sullivan said, so the company can “really understand what [our] respective customers want.”

The company said it has seen an 180% increase in the number of returns it receives since launching in WeWork.

“Our philosophy is we are only going to do things that are convenient,” Sullivan said. Rent the Runway is going where “our customers shop or do spend time,” said Sullivan.

“We believe that Rent the Runway and Nordstrom customers share a lot of the same qualities,” said Shea Jensen, senior vice president of customer experience at Nordstrom. “Customers have told us that convenience matters to them.”