Clothing rental: a business idea for beginners, for women, at home

Initial Investment	Profit per month	Payback period
From 600 thousand rubles	From 60 thousand rubles	From 9 – 18 months

In the life of every girl there are special days, festive events, and important events. At this moment you need to look beautiful and elegant. Fashion trends change with each season, so it is not always possible to purchase a dress from the latest fashion collection for a particular event; in this case, renting a fashionable look can be a solution. Organizing a dress rental salon is an interesting and fairly new direction in the field of fashion services.

I found the idea because of a traffic accident

Almost a year passed after graduating from university, I was 22. All my fellow students found jobs, but I sat and didn’t know where to move next. It got to the point of absurdity: she was either going to open an online store of household appliances, or buy a car wash franchise, or sell Nordic walking poles. But not a single thing went well. After several more months of searching, cash reserves began to approach zero. Realizing that I had to live on something, I submitted my resume for a manager position at Velcom, got through, but on the way to them I got into a small accident and didn’t get there. And on the way home from the service station, I got stuck in a traffic jam in a place where they never happen - and right next to the windows of a wedding dress salon. “Purchase and rental,” the sign read. “Yes, rental is convenient. It’s a pity that when I graduated from university, there were no rentals of evening dresses. Or were they?” I thought. I started googling right in the car, and it turned out that there really was no rental of evening dresses: a couple of “dinosaur” salons, which, on the basis of a wedding salon, offered old-fashioned dresses with corsets at a cost comparable to renting a car.

Photo from the personal archive of Nadezhda Anisenko

I devoted all the following days to studying the sharing economy: Airbnb, Uber, bike sharing, rental of household appliances... It turned out that in 2010, TIME even named collaborative consumption one of the ten ideas that will change the world. I believed with all my heart that rental is a convenient, simple and ethical solution to the eternal women’s problem of “a closet full, but nothing to wear.” It was 2020.

Starting a business

After analyzing the market, I decided to create a salon in which the cost of dresses would not exceed 20-30% of the purchase cost. I identified the main advantages of my LoveDressMagic rental salon:

Free accessories for dresses: earrings, bags, pendants
Free dry cleaning and minor repairs
Casual and cocktail dresses costing 20−60 rubles (at that time $12.5−37.5)
Working hours 24/7
Lack of collateral, which discourages clients

The problem was that there was still no money to open it. I immediately decided: from the first day I will work officially, I will register an individual entrepreneur. No loans or debts - only self-financing, only “hardcore”. I sold my old car and with the $1,500 I received, I purchased the first 20 dresses from a wholesale supplier from Russia, and sewed another 5 myself using simple patterns from the Internet - my grandmother, a seamstress, taught me how to sew at a basic level since childhood.

For a studio, I allocated a room of 9 square meters in an empty apartment inherited from my family; no one lived there. I purchased furniture and decor from the Minsk “field of miracles”. Completed a course on sales and maintaining pages on social networks. There was no money left for the site and promotion, so for the first six months it was advertised only through free channels - VKontakte, Instagram and second.by.

Photo taken in the first room of the studio

The most difficult thing was to create an atmosphere conducive to fittings in the old “Stalinist” apartment. So that she would not look lived in, she removed all the attributes of everyday life and left only what was related to work. Not a single painting, a pair of shoes, a closet of clothes, no smells of food - everything was securely hidden from prying eyes. I was very embarrassed about meeting clients at home, so I always tried to dress formally, wear shoes around the house and provide great service.

I will never forget my first order: a student needed a dress for an event. They asked me to deliver the dress to the hostel. They didn’t let me in, citing my lack of student appearance and youthful appearance. Then I went home, put on a jacket, stilettos and flew into the building like lightning: “So, I’m the director of the salon. I brought a dress for a concert. There’s no time to explain, take me through.” Now there are no questions. So it was the university that paid me the first 20 rubles.

The rest of the clients came from friends. The first month's revenue was less than one hundred dollars. Good orders started coming in from the second month - it was June, graduation season. And by July the initial investment had paid off and I was in profit. The money earned was used to purchase new dresses and develop a website, with which my sister helped. Clients left positive reviews, recommended the studio to friends, and by the fall of 2020 the profit was at least $500-1000 per month.

Photo from the personal archive of Nadezhda Anisenko

It turned out to be difficult to find not clients, but partners - a dry cleaner and an atelier. With the average cost of renting a dress being 40 rubles, it was impossible to pay 25-30 rubles ($15.6-18.7) for dry cleaning. They also refused to give a discount for the number of dresses under the partnership agreement; they didn’t believe that I could bring 10 dresses a week. According to the deadlines, everyone gave 5-7 days to clean one product. Then I studied professional products and learned how to clean dresses myself: dry cleaning, aqua, with perchlorethylene. Everything worked like clockwork, and a month later one dry cleaner agreed to my terms - seeing that I understood the process and brought dresses regularly. We agreed to complete the order in a day instead of 5-7, reducing the cost of cleaning by 2-3 times depending on the volume and regularity.

Selecting a room

To try on clothes, you need to open a showroom with an area of approximately 30 square meters. m.

The room needs to be renovated, installed good lighting and come up with a festive design. This is necessary to create an atmosphere for customers. Consider the placement of mirrors in the showroom. The client must easily see himself from different angles in order to appreciate the outfit.

Divide the room into zones: a dressing room with demonstrative outfits, a fitting room and an area with mirrors. In the last area, install a sofa for relaxing and a coffee table with your catalog.

An example of clothing rental for special occasions

New competitor and relocation

In October, unexpected news broke: a popular Ukrainian dress rental franchise came to Minsk. And I, fool, thought that I was almost the first to come up with such a concept. Realizing how cool they are, their budgets and capabilities, and how small I am in my room, I thought all night and told my husband: “That’s it, I’m closing LoveDressMagic. If I go to them as a hired director or manager - I know all the processes like no one else, they will definitely hire me.” He helped a lot, convinced me to wipe my snot and move on. As a result, the arrival of a major player on the market only played into their hands: they promoted themselves so actively in the media that even those who had no idea about it found out about the rental service.

A year later, I had fittings scheduled for a week in advance, singers and actresses began to come to buy outfits for performances, several publications wrote about me. How did it happen? I have identified several reasons:

Work 12-14 hours a day
Word of mouth and online advertising
Unoccupied market at that time
Good assortment and focus on the needs and interests of the client.

But I didn’t know whether to rejoice or cry: after all, the studio that was so praised was still a 3 by 3 meter room with one 22-year-old employee - me.

There were calls from clients 24/7 (yes, dresses were also booked at night, mostly by casino administrators), I alone did fittings, took dresses to be cleaned and atelier, ironed them, delivered them to clients, did accounting, published advertisements and ran pages on social networks. .

After 2 years of working non-stop, I realized that I needed to expand. I found a room on . Everything was as I dreamed: four-meter windows, the city center, a lot of light.

New studio space. Photo from the personal archive of Nadezhda Anisenko

It was scary to move. The additional costs of €7,000 for repairs plus €400 for rent every month were scary - what if I couldn’t afford it? I outlined all the financial costs, analyzed revenue, turnover, forecasts for the year and decided that I could do it.

Setting up business processes

After opening a new studio, I realized that moving was not enough. It is necessary to delegate and improve processes, expand the range. For example, it turned out that a lot of lost profits were due to refusals or “forgetting” to come for the reserved dress. There was no non-refundable advance payment at that time.

Photo from the personal archive of Nadezhda Anisenko

I began to solve this and other problems.

1. Automated processes. I introduced online registration with Yclients, the cost of subscription and mailing was up to 50 rubles ($25) per month. Friends helped us create a self-written CRM in PHP to record dresses and booking conversions, which integrates with YC via API. Added automatic reminders for fittings and bookings, and a booking analytics system.

2. Introduced mandatory prepayment - and the percentage of refusals and “no arrivals” decreased by 7 times.

3. Hired three employees and wrote out detailed instructions. For example, smile, help sincerely, do not ignore requests, clarify all the details: what event, what dress code, what preferences, what you feel comfortable in, offer water and candy, entertain clients’ children - play cartoons or give coloring books, do not use the phone during fitting.

4. I canceled the 24/7 work schedule and started working from 12 to 20. I increased the amount of useful working time by introducing express fitting (not an hour, but half an hour). This has increased the number of clients we manage to receive per day.

How much can you earn?

As for profit, the business of renting wedding dresses and evening dresses pays off quite quickly. So, renting one wedding dress will cost 200-1000 dollars per day, and an evening dress will cost at least 100-200 dollars. Taking this into account, you can earn at least 1-1.2 thousand dollars per day, even if you rent only one wedding and evening dress. If the number of your clients grows, your profits will increase significantly. On average, a clothing rental studio can earn 20-30 thousand dollars per month (this is the minimum amount, the maximum is 50-80 thousand). This means that you can recoup your initial costs in 2-3 years. If desired, this period can be reduced to 1 year, because the opportunity to open a dress rental also implies participation in numerous exhibitions and events, where you can further advertise your studio and attract more new clients who will definitely come back to you again! Similar articles:

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Dress rental studio in numbers

Now we have:

Team of 5 people
6 manufacturers and suppliers of dresses from Russia
More than 250 dresses
Rental cost from 25 to 190 rubles ($12.5−95)
Every week 15-40 dresses are rented. During graduation season (June-July) 90% of the assortment is sold out at the same time
75% of fittings result in a booking. Every fifth girl leaves with a dress that she didn’t even notice at first
10−20 positive reviews about the service per week
Profitability is 20−30% depending on the season (more in spring, summer, winter). Revenue is growing steadily compared to similar periods in the past
Advertising budget - 400−700 rubles per month ($200−350). We promote ourselves through contextual advertising, SEO, and, of course, word of mouth - every third client returns a second time or brings friends. On our Instagram page we maintain a magazine for girls about dresses, films, diets and beauty, articles from which are often copied by Russian and Ukrainian distributors.

Relevance

In the USA and Europe, this type of service is in great demand, as evidenced by the millions in profits of rental salons. In the Russian service market, dress rental is only gaining momentum and popularity. Therefore, at present it is quite possible to occupy your niche, since the market is not yet completely saturated.

The most relevant area is the rental of wedding and carnival dresses, prom dresses and related accessories.

It is advisable to open a rental salon in large cities with a population of at least 500 thousand people.

Increased competition and plans

Competition is growing, and my decision is to diversify the range and avoid overlap with colleagues as much as possible. However, this is not always a mutual desire. Over the entire period of work, 4 of our clients, inspired, opened their own rentals - purchased identical dresses, copied the content and design of our website and accounts and began dumping. Three of them have already closed and came to us with a request to buy their assortment.

Photo from the personal archive of Nadezhda Anisenko

Why might this business fail? Many “fall off” just when they need to “plow in” non-stop. Relations with ateliers and dry cleaners have a strong impact: as I noted, if you don’t come to an agreement, it will turn out to be expensive and cause downtime. There are also nuances with employees - at a minimum, they need to be trained so that they know about styles, figures and what will suit the client, almost better than the client himself. You can have 1000 beautiful dresses, but not know how to offer them correctly.

And we work, because I perceive the studio not only as a business, but as a matter of life. Every day I look for new suppliers, negotiate favorable terms, monitor trends and fashionable dresses. I teach employees not to serve the client, but to sincerely help. Dry cleaners and ateliers are fighting for us: we provide a large volume of work and are one of the key clients for small companies. And if one of them wants to raise prices or extend terms, we move on to others.

We plan to open retail outlets for dresses that can be purchased, and we are considering options for our own production.

Personnel

If the salon owner does not have experience in this area, it is necessary to hire a manager. This employee must understand the specifics of the work and have sufficient qualifications to purchase goods.

To work with clients, you need two sales consultants who can work in shifts. If you plan to provide fitting and tailoring services, you need at least one experienced seamstress. You will also need irons, an ironing board and a set of clothing care products.

The capital for the purchase of a minimum set of equipment is 200,000-250,000 rubles.

After each order, items must be washed. It is better to entrust this part, on the basis of an outsourcing agreement, to a company specializing in dry cleaning and hand washing of expensive items.

You can entrust financial reporting to a part-time accountant.

Advice for those who want to start their own business

1. Be prepared to do everything yourself at first. Study every process inside and out: from cleaning to finance.

2. Don't rely on loans, investments and friends-partners as a magic pill that will save your business. I am convinced that only a self-financing business can survive for many years.

3. Don’t allow yourself to harbor the illusion that working for yourself is always better than working for someone else.

4. Don’t start a business without detailed calculations: forecasts, risks, possible changes in legislation.

5. Don’t mark time and don’t be afraid of changes - optimize business processes, implement customer and expense accounting systems, become more convenient and mobile for the client.

6. Keep feedback with the client and don’t let feedback go unanswered and bugs fixed.

7. Delegate everything that can be delegated, but do not allow yourself to relax and become an outside observer rather than a manager.

Conducting an advertising campaign

Organizing a dress rental business requires large-scale advertising. The success of the project depends 50% on this, so it is recommended to use all available methods:

commercials on TV and radio;
articles and notes in printed materials - here you can highlight both advertising publications and special women's magazines;
social networks - creating your own groups and public pages, as well as purchasing advertising posts in large urban communities;
your own website is a prerequisite, because not a single profitable business involved in the sale or rental of goods can do without a website; it helps promote services and attract customers;
outdoor advertising – billboards, banners, banners, pillars, leaflets.

After 1–2 months, it will become clear which area of advertising provides the bulk of clients and where you need to invest again. You can safely refuse other options.