‘People are looking for alternatives’: How fashion rental platforms are marketing for holiday parties

Many shoppers buy new outfits this time of year to wear to holiday dinners and other gatherings. But with some consumers pulling back on discretionary spending, rental platforms are working to position themselves as lower-cost alternatives to full-price stores. Rental services are also looking to reach consumers concerned about spikes in waste and energy use during the holidays. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generate about 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day than any other time of the year.

The holidays, while busy for retail as a whole, aren’t always the busiest time for rental platforms. Nuuly, for instance, says it gets most of its new subscribers during the first quarter and the third quarter, while Pickle says demand tends to rise during Fashion Week and Halloween. However, rental platforms are optimistic that people may be more open than they were in years past to renting outfits for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and other festivities due to how many events they might have to attend.

“We want people to fully grasp that a lot of these things [they are buying for the holidays] are one-time wears,” Tulerie co-founder Violet Gross told Modern Retail. “It’s not dissimilar to weddings… but in the same way that the bridal industry is shifting [to rental], shifting around holiday is happening, too. As soon as the invitations come out, people are looking for alternatives.”

Nuuly, which recently launched a thrift site, finds that its members are keeping their subscriptions for the holidays. “We do find that over holiday we have really high engagement from our active subscribers, and that is specifically related to holiday dressing,” Kim Gallagher, Nuuly’s executive director of marketing and customer success, told Modern Retail. “People are also less likely to pause at this time. We see that rate drop quite a bit during the holiday season.”

To further up interest in rental, Nuuly is plugging gift cards for the holidays. In the past, Nuuly offered gift cards via a third-party provider. Now, Nuuly is offering gift cards on its website. The terms and amounts vary — for instance, someone can gift $20 to cover a bonus item in someone’s Nuuly haul — and Nuuly plans to up its marketing around the offering in the coming weeks. Nuuly also plans to roll out a Black Friday deal for new sign-ups.

Meanwhile, for the holidays, Pickle is “definitely leaning into lookbooks because they’re super helpful for discovery based on current trends,” COO and co-founder Julia O’Mara said. Pickle doesn’t oversee inventory in the same way that Nuuly does; its users rent out clothes from their closets, and Pickle coordinates drop-off and delivery for them. Pickle, which launched in 2021, has “tens of thousands of monthly active users,” CEO and co-founder Brian McMahon told Modern Retail.

Pickle lists 120,000 items on its app, and its store has some 2,000 items available for rent. Lenders can use the new lookbooks to recommend items from their own closets, and stylists and influencers can make lookbooks of items they might want to rent in the future. Pickle also offers a service that crafts lookbooks for corporate holiday parties and themed events so attendees can comb through possible outfits. “An important feature of lookbooks is how shareable they are,” O’Mara said.

Rental platforms are hoping their new holiday tools will spark demand, but also sustain business going forward. Pickle, for instance, lets users tag items in its lookbooks, and it hopes to use those tags to improve its search algorithm over time. Tulerie, which was founded in 2017, aims to spread the word about its new partnership with Alts, a tailoring service, to any new users it gets at this time. It also hopes to highlight the other merchandise it has on its app, which lets users borrow designer fashions for four, 10 or 20 days.

“We hope that people come in looking for holiday and then realize they can use [Tulerie] in all aspects of their lives,” Gross said.