To: RTR co-founder

Subject: Rent the runway

Date: 03/11/2021

In November 2008, Hyman had the idea of a dress rental business and recruited her friend Fleiss.
Hyman graduated from Harvard business school and showed her talent and insight in marketing.
Hyman and Fleiss both have startup experience but not in fashion or technology management.
Overall, Hyman and Fleiss have complementary characters with each other.

December 2008, DVF received a cold call from a fashion influencer and considered a formal
proposal from RTR. Hyman and Fleiss’s idea intrigued prestigious designers to support them and
had their turning point. If Hyman and Fleiss were not seen by the designer, they would have
gotten this far.

In February 2009, the team hired a designer to develop RTR's website, marketing, and packaging
concepts for "look and feel." RTR is recommended to a small Canadian company that claims
extensive experience in website development, retail management, and inventory control/logistics
systems. An investor recommended RTR transferred development work to an Indian company
Two weeks after launching, RTR hired Sachdeva as technical director

In February and March 2009, Heyman and Fleiss met with 20 designers, and they consulted the
designers and carefully listened to concerns about the erosion of the retail market and brand
dilution. By the end of March, they had developed a response that they can position RTR as a
new customer access channel that gives young women access to designer brands for the long-
awaited experience.

In February 2009, Hyman and Fleiss sought legal advice on the merger of RTR. RTR needs a
large amount of inventory to continue the launch, they choose the VC instead of the angel
investors.

In the spring of 2009, Fleiss and Heyman also hired an advisory board to give wealth
management advice in the early stage of RTR.

In Summer 2009, Guillmette was an experienced Bloomingdale's fashion buyer who joined RTR.
Guillemette enhanced the relationship with designers and trained the team in buying know-how.
Crystal and Hartmann also brought their experience in the fashion industry to train the team rove
from one prior another.

In November 2009, RTR launched a beta version of its service and invited approximately 5,000
members of the .beta test a week before it was fully released. Making the team aware of the
strong demand for clothing rentals and the importance of establishing waiting lists to control
inventory. The team also found from beta tests that women have a lot of questions about how
RTR works and are in great need of styling guidance. Co-founders compete to increase staff and
train customer service teams.

In November 2009, RTR built the innovative customer insight team to provide customers with
modeling advice and guidance on fit, provide information for product innovation by listening to
customer complaints, suggestions, and questions, and explain how RTR works and how they
handle orders troubleshooting.

In November 2009, RTR got the chance to introduce their website on the front of the business
commercial section in the New York Times when RTR was launched. After that, the demand for
the orders was higher than expected which caused a lot of customers to stay on the waiting list.

In January 2010, the co-founders of RTR felt the need to significantly expand the engineering
staff and they thought about whether they should raise a new round of money in advance. The
operational chaos during the launch trashed RTR’s reputation.

Based on the timeline we learned from the RTR, there are four suggestions that We think the
firm can be improved. First, they can enhance their website design. As female customers who
have rich online shopping experience, they like the Beautiful and accurate web design to help
them find the right place to develop. Second, instead of the phone call consulting for the
customers, RTR can develop an online consulting system to decrease the human resource cost
and increase the efficiency to accept more customers' connections. Third, RTR can spend more
money to invite more influential big curry to use and recommend this site which can increase the
brand's influence and publicity efforts. Last, RTR can change to focus on the man section. Each
person has the right to enjoy their new dresses, not only the female. Broadening the men's market
would be a good opportunity to increase the firm’s all-round development.

Based on these two options, we believe that it is a better idea to tick with their original plan to
pursue operational improvements in 2010 before raising more capital in early 2011. The first
reason is that RTR is growing pretty fast while it is facing some challenges. These challenges
could be distracting to RTR’s growth in the future if they are not solved. One challenge RTR is
now facing is the technical issue. RTR is heavily based on the online platform. As mentioned in
the reading, the fast growth of the company resulted in the urgent desire for software engineers
to fix the platform problems and develop it. So, we believe making more progress on operational
improvements could ensure the future growth of the RTR while making RTR more attractive to
future investors and earn better funds to RTR once the fundraising process starts. Another reason
is that RTR is relatively a very young company. Though it has a satisfying start to the
cofounders, it has not experienced too many issues. Strengthening the operational sectors will
allow the RTR to increase the capability of taking uncertainties in the future, and thus make this
company more stable while experiencing fast growth. For sometimes a high growth speed will
also create many unforeseen problems.
Also, one thing to take into account at this point is that there is not much competition in this
industry. This means that there is no urgent need for RTR to acquire new VC’s funds, and there
is no immediate to expand the company’s scale. Using this period that competition in industry is
scare gives RTR the choice to make the operating sector more mature. RTR could redesign their
website while fixing issues from other operating sectors, like develop warehouse storage and
other sectors.
Yet we believe that RTR could start some research on the fundraising process. Doing some
research on fundraising will not sharpen the concentration on operational improvements. The
reason is that the fundraising process can be time consuming. It is not wise to start the
fundraising process only when the RTR needs more funds. It will be too late for RTR at that
point in time. As RTR is growing pretty fast, it will need more funds in the short coming future.