But sadly, before you get too excited at the prospect of renting handbags by the dozen and ending up rolling on a bed covered in $$$ - you need to be the rentee, not the renter!
There’s an article by Catherine Jhee on the GreatReporter website about the two Handbag Rental sites, Bag, Borrow and Steal and Bags To Riches. (You can read it here)
In that article, Catherine has interviewed both companies and there was an interview with Patricia Hambrick who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Bag, Borrow and Steal (BB&S).
BB&S run a monthly membership system where members pay between $5 to $9.95, depending on which level of membership they want to have. They then pay extra per week to rent a bag, the amount depending on which bag they rent.
During her interview, Patricia said that they have 450,000 members live on their books.
450,000!!!!!
Let’s do a bit of maths.
Let’s imagine that the true figure is 70% of what Patricia said. (No, I’m not saying she’s lying, just allowing for non payers, problem accounts, drop offs etc.)
So - 350,000 live members.
350,000 members X minimum monthly charge of $5.00
=
$1,575,000.000 minimum monthly gross turnover!
If you then estimate that a low amount of members, 10%, have bags on rental and are paying say, 20$ a month extra ($20 will be low but it helps to underestimate when doing this type of assessment!)
350,000 X 10% = 35,000
35,000 x $10.00 = $350,000.00 per month
So the estimation has to be that, if the figures given in the interview ARE correct - the handbag rental business generates at least $2,000,000 PER MONTH!!
That’s an outstanding amount to be turning over each month from a rental business where the actual monthly cost is so low.
Wish I’d thought of it!
July 30, 2007 — Karen Nepacena, San Francisco-based
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