Q&A with Lucy Hall, Co-founder of Loanhood Fashion Rental

Loanhood is a circular fashion solutions business which is all about driving people towards a more circular economy, and we do that through three avenues. We have our peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace and that is a two-sided marketplace where people can rent out products that they own at home or if they’re a young designer or independent brand, they can rent out their collections and on the flip side, you can borrow from people in your community or from across the United Kingdom. There are two ways that you can receive those clothes. You can either have them delivered to you, or you can pick them up in person and that’s something we’re keen to develop because it reduces the emissions and reduces the cost of sending things back and forth. Then we have another route for the circular economy, and that is our ‘rent now’ button, a widget that we provide to brand partners which enables them to add a little bit of code to their website. Underneath the ‘add to cart’ button, the ‘rent now’ button which we power is a widget pops up so that brands can ‘white label’ our circular solution and offer rental to their customers. ‘White label’ means that they can keep their customer within their whole brand experience and then they can either send them the product or the customers can come in store and pick it up themselves and it looks like it’s our client’s technology when it’s actually from Loanhood to facilitate rental transactions. Finally, we have an event side of the business, so how we started was through clothes swaps. We started with a contract with Hackney Council, which is still on-going, and we offer this kind of rental and clothes swap concept to different partners, so either that’s a council and very community-driven initiative or it’s a high-end kind of luxury businesses like Selfridges, which we did across the summer, or we do them internally in an organisation. We’re doing one for Net-a-Porter soon. We go in and create the clothes swap concept just for their employees, to bolster their sustainability strategy and also spread the message and give them a kind of employee benefit. Sustainability is at the core of everything that we do, which is why we started the business (Fig. 10.2).