AI transcript
$150,000 renting out dresses.
What’s up, what’s up, Nikola for here.
Welcome to The Side Hustle Show
because your nine to five may make you a living
if your five to nine makes you alive.
And here’s a side hustle
that earned just 160 bucks in its first month.
I came from just two customers, but it was enough.
It was enough traction to know that she was onto something.
Since then, my guest has scaled to
over 200 different garments, bringing in $150,000
in rental income last year.
She is @theprofitcollective on Instagram, summerfisher.
Welcome to The Side Hustle Show.
– Thank you, thanks for having me.
– You bet, stick around in this one.
We’re gonna learn how this business
and the math behind it works.
The delivery and logistics piece
behind moving clothing all around the place
and some of the marketing best practices
that you can follow along
if you wanna start something similar.
Now, you know, I love a fun rental business,
but dresses certainly aren’t the only thing
that you can rent out for a profit,
which is why I’ve put together a list
of 25 other unconventional things
that you can make money renting out
that is yours free to download at the show notes
for this episode.
Just follow the link in the episode description
and it’ll get you right over there.
Now, some of my understanding is you started
as a more traditional reseller, like go to the thrift shop,
find the brand name designer type of stuff
that you think is undervalued and flip it by low sell high.
Simple.
So what inspired the shift to the rental business?
– Well, I’m actually still reselling
and it is actually probably still a bigger part
of my business.
– Oh, okay.
– Yeah, so I saw an opportunity for the renting.
So what happened is I’ve had a model agency for 15 years.
That started as another side hustle,
which is a story for another day.
And I was in my agency one day
and a girl came in, one of the models came in
and said she was starting a dress rental business.
And I was like, what’s that?
I didn’t understand.
I was like, what are you talking about?
She’s like, oh yeah, we just put some dresses together.
My friend and I and we’re going to rent them online.
And I thought, okay.
And I just thought they were going to rent them
on Facebook marketplace or D-pop or something like that.
And I looked into it and I realized there’s this whole
industry around dress rentals.
And I thought, oh, I want to try this.
And I was already kind of flipping dresses on the side
and had built a whole business around that as well.
And so I decided I just put up all the dresses I had.
Actually, first I put up two dresses
and that was in October of 2022.
And then one day I was just sitting in my car
at my daughter’s cheer practice and one of them rented
and I got a notification that it had rented.
And I was like, oh my God, I just rented a dress.
But like now what do I do?
I didn’t really understand it.
And I just kind of went all in.
So I kind of worked it out as I went along.
And then I ended up putting all the dresses up then
that I had been flipping.
And it kind of grew from there.
And then I started buying dresses specifically to rent.
So yeah.
– Okay.
I love this, side hustles on side hustles, right?
What am I already doing?
How could I add a new revenue stream to this?
And this is really interesting.
It’s like, well, I’ll have it listed up for sale.
And in the meantime, until it sells,
hey, maybe I can make some revenue.
I can recoup some of that cost on the rental side.
I think that’s really interesting.
– Yeah, exactly.
It’s like a double-dip profit strategy is what I call it.
So basically, you’re making the money from flipping the item.
But in between, you’re also making the money from renting it.
– What happens when somebody wants to buy it
and you’re like, well, I can’t ship it out just yet.
I need to wait for it to get back.
– When it rents, I do take it off
from being available for sale, yeah.
– Oh, okay.
So those first couple, you get that notification.
Hey, this is somebody wanted to rent this thing.
There was a marketplace that had some existing demand
of renters versus you trying to build an audience,
build a following, build a two-sided marketplace.
So where it’s like, hey, it rent from me.
It’s like, no, no, no.
There’s already some existing validation and demand for it.
– Yes, definitely.
And yeah, there’s online sites
where you can rent dresses basically.
So they’re different in every country.
So for us in Australia, there’s a site called The Vault.
A big one in the US and the UK is Byrotation.
So there’s several of these types of websites
and they’re kind of peer-to-peer lending.
So basically you can put up your own wardrobe
or like I do, run it as a business
and rent to other people.
– There was one like bag borrower steal.
Is that one?
Or was that just like for buying handbags?
I don’t know if it was a rental service too.
I’m trying to think of like the left.
– You can rent bags on these sites as well.
– Okay, do you play around in that space or strictly dresses?
– No, I don’t really because their bags
are really expensive to buy.
And I just, because I self-insure all my items,
I just don’t want to play with that.
– Right, right, right.
What’s a sweet spot for cost of acquisition,
like brand style, and there’s a lot of different factors
that might must go into the purchase side of it
to decide, well, what might there be demand for?
– It’s quite nuanced.
So it will depend on, it’s like the intersection
of brand, style, size, all these things
that kind of come together to get a dress that’s in demand.
I would say that as opposed to when I’m reselling,
when I’m renting, it does need to be a fairly recent style,
like within the last 18 months, but definitely,
but usually even within the last six months
is that will be like the most popular styles.
Whereas when I’m reselling, that’s not as relevant.
– Okay.
– And then a lot of it will be like,
did a celebrity wear it?
Is it the color of that season?
You know, is it winter or summer?
I rent a lot to wedding guests.
So a lot of people who are going to weddings
and just are going to wear that item once.
So there’s a lot of that with the sizing.
You do have to look at the market.
So a lot of girls in their early twenties
will get into dress rentals
and they will tend to rent those smaller sizes.
And I’ve found pretty good success with renting
like slightly like mid sizes, I guess it would be called.
So yeah, just slightly larger, not the teeny tiny sizes.
So yeah, but it does depend on the brand too,
because some of those brands do do better
in the really small sizes.
– And you’re still trying to source this stuff secondhand
or are you now comfortable?
So I could buy it off the rack.
I could buy it new to rent.
And then you’re kind of like a car rental business,
like I’m going to rent it out for a year
and then I’m going to resell it.
– Yeah, I would say that mostly I buy at retail now,
but I do use all the strategies to try and get
like a percentage off when I buy it.
So that when I, at the end of the rental,
when I go to flip it, I’m actually making money both ways.
So I’m getting 20% off retail.
I’m renting it, you know, five, 10 times.
And then I’m actually selling it still
for more than I paid for it, even though it’s pre-loved
because it’s such a new and hot and in demand item.
And I’m also using things like the currency arbitrage
and the geographical arbitrage of being in Australia
where I can get, you know, something like a Zimmerman dress
a lot cheaper and sell it to someone in the U.S.
– Yeah, you’re going to be throwing out brand names
that go where?
(laughing)
Like, all right, I’ll take your word for it.
But if you’re in that space, like,
if you know what is hot, what is in style,
then yeah, you can absolutely play around with that.
And so for the rental side is,
and you imagine it’s got to be local,
like you’re not going to ship something halfway
around the world for a rental, are you?
– So the majority of my reselling is actually like,
I sell a lot to the U.S. and the UK
and probably more than Australia.
But with the renting it is, yeah, only in Australia.
So I do it pretty much, all of it is by post.
So I do allow pickups sometimes.
I don’t love people coming to my house
and picking up the items,
but sometimes if it’s a bit slow,
I’ll let people come and pick it up.
But you get the problem that if they will pick it up,
they will be like, oh, what else have you got?
You know, can I try it on and all this type of thing?
And yeah, I don’t like that.
– I’m like, no, no, no, this is the one you ordered.
Here you go.
So inspired to do it.
A model at the modeling agency was like,
hey, I’m getting into this.
You’re like, well, you know,
there might be something else here.
There was some existing, you know, proof of concept, right?
These marketplaces already existed.
And you had the confidence to say,
well, I can add my own listings to this.
Was there a point of, you know, market saturation
if, you know, 10 providers all have the same thing
and like on that busy summer,
I guess it’s so fluid,
like the busy summers, you know, wedding season,
where, you know, different people want different styles
and different sizes at the time.
It’s hard to imagine it being like so overstocked,
overcrowded.
– Yeah, I think that it’s like,
even if 20 people have the same dress,
there could be easily 20 people that want to rent that dress,
especially like if it’s very in demand.
And you just got to do your research
when you’re choosing what dresses you want to rent
because you don’t want to pick a size
that like everyone else is renting that size.
Usually you can pick, find a size that, you know,
only one or two people have
and then just go by a size, that size for yourself.
– Got it.
So it’s okay to have the same style that other people have,
but maybe try and fill in the gaps on some sizes
that you don’t find readily available.
– Or you want to be first to market.
Like you want to be the first one to have it,
get it listed, then you’ll get all the bookings
and you’ll get bookings months in advance.
So it’ll be booked out
before anyone can get their item up.
– Are there any demand tools, like, you know,
number of customer reviews
or do these platforms show you like,
oh, this was, you know, rented out eight times
in the last two months, like something like that to say,
well, okay, clearly I should go buy one of those.
– Yeah, there is, in Australia, there is a site
which I don’t rent on for other reasons,
but it does do those little pop-ups that says,
oh, this dress was just rented.
So you can definitely use that to see what’s being rented,
but it’s not like reselling where on eBay,
you can like look at recent solds
or you can use a product research tool to look up
what’s selling, there’s nothing like that.
Yeah, there’s no, you’ve really, it’s quite like laborious.
You’ve got to go through other people’s calendars
and see what bookings they’ve got
to see how in demand it is.
So yeah, at first you’ve got to do quite a bit of research.
– Got it, and then you can learn the into now.
It’s like any business, once you’re in it,
you can’t see it any other way.
– Definitely.
– But from the outside, okay, I like this little trick
of like, oh, okay, it’s booked up the next three weekends.
It must be in demand.
A friend of ours used to do this for a wedding,
and like you said, like mid-late 20s,
like peak wedding attendance season,
we’re sick of wearing the same thing over and over again,
so she’d try something new.
And like, how much does it cost to rent a dress these days?
– The absolute least amount would be $80,
but I have like four dresses
that are about two and a half grand retail each,
and I rent those for 350 per rental.
And like, you have to pull my jaw off the floor,
like 2,500 for like, I’ve heard of wedding dresses,
yes, costing that much, but just like a regular dress.
This shows you how much I know about fashion.
– It’s really beautiful, Nick.
It’s really beautiful dress.
– I’m sure it is.
The last article of clothing that I rented
was a tuxedo for senior prom.
Like, and it was, I don’t even remember how much it was.
It was probably 80 bucks, but yeah, okay.
So obviously the higher retail price,
the more you can command on the rental side, absolutely.
– And that’s helpful to have a range of $80 to $350 per rental.
Is there a rule, like a percentage of the retail price
or something like that that you go by?
– Yeah, I think like generally you want to get your money back
within three to four rentals,
but if I had have paid full price for like that dress,
it’s worth two and a half thousand dollars.
Obviously I wouldn’t have made that back in four rentals,
but there’s a way to find usually 10, 20% off at least
on full retail when you’re buying something.
So once you’ve done that or you buy it secondhand,
then usually you can get your money back.
Sometimes I’ll get my money back with one rental.
If I’m buying it pre-love,
you know, I might see it pop up on eBay or Depop
and I’ll get my money back in one rental.
– Gotcha.
Do you have like brand name alerts that pin you when,
oh, such and such inventory just got listed.
I need to go and check it out.
– Well, because I’m already reselling as well
and that’s quite a big income stream for me.
I’m sourcing every day, so.
– Constantly on the lookout.
– I’m there like when it comes up, I’m ready.
So yeah, for sure.
But like I do have like saved searches that I look through.
Yeah.
– And I suppose you could just start with,
if you have some existing dress inventory,
I’m thinking of like my wife’s classic addresses in there.
She hadn’t worn in years.
– Yeah.
– And who knows, like, I don’t know.
I have no concept of what the brands are,
but maybe it’s a timeless style
that people would be searching for.
Like is that branded keyword type of search,
like how important is that in your listing
on the marketplaces?
Like are people looking specifically for that brand
or could you describe it more as like a, you know,
a green A line, something, something strapless.
I don’t know, it’s just a keyword, keyword, keyword.
– Yeah, it’s heavily brand dependent.
People go on, they know what they want.
They know what dress they want.
Probably 80% of the time, maybe 90% of the time.
– Okay.
– You know, they’ve seen it come up
in the campaign photos or whatever.
Some celebrities worn it and influencers
put it on their Instagram.
They’re like, I want to wear that dress
and they go looking for it.
So, yeah.
– What brands do you like?
– For us in Australia, and actually a lot of these brands
kind of are the same ones as in the US or UK,
but like the Australian kind of based brands
are like Zimmerman, Age or Arge,
if you like to be fancy in that way.
Orishan is a big one for me.
Alame, Alame is probably the biggest brand that I rent.
It’s only been around a couple of years,
but it’s kind of in that style of Zimmerman as well.
So yeah, they’re the kind of brands, I guess.
– All right.
It’s all foreign to me, but it’s helpful to know.
I mean, you could go on,
I imagine any of these marketplaces
and see where the demand seems to be.
So that makes sense.
– More with Summer in just a moment,
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plus some of the logistical considerations
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Aside from the marketplace and maybe on the marketplace,
other listing best practices,
are you modeling the photos?
You’re tapping into people from the modeling agency
to like take these dress photos for you.
Like what goes into a good listing?
How am I going to stand out against everybody else
who’s already been on there?
Yeah, well, it’s really different to race-selling.
So with race-selling, you know,
I am trying to position an item to show its value
by using campaign photos where I can and stock photos
and then using certain photos
to like show that perceived value, I guess.
And with renting, it’s really no one uses their own photos.
They just use stock photos.
So it’s literally just screenshotting three stock photos
from the company’s website and putting it up.
There’s no modeling involved.
My modeling days are long gone at three kids.
So yeah, I’m not going to be modeling any of them close.
Fair enough.
You could probably get like customer pictures back
at some point, I don’t know, but like, that’s not important.
If you’re using Instagram as a rental platform,
which a lot, a lot of people do.
So a lot of people will just rent straight
off people’s Instagram profiles.
Then they will use a lot of like customer photos
and things like that for sure.
So this would be trying to create your own demand,
like build up an influencer profile.
And you know, hey, if you like my style,
you can actually rent this thing.
If you happen to be the same size as me, you can rent it.
No, they’re just rental companies.
So they just say like, you know, XYZ rentals.
And then they’ll go into maybe the Facebook groups online
and say, I’m renting these dresses
if anyone wants to come to my Instagram
and then the customers will just message them.
And then they just facilitate the transaction that way.
And so they’re not paying the rental platforms a commission.
What’s a typical commission fee?
I think it’s like 16.5% is what we pay on the vault.
I assume it’s similar on the other ones internationally.
Yeah, it’s not much for the level of demand
that they had to create the marketing
that they’re doing for you, the transaction,
they’re facilitating.
Yeah, they actually do the majority
of the customer service too.
So yeah, they have customer service people,
everything goes through customer service.
So it does take the burden off a little bit that way.
Is there a strategy in syndicating the listing?
Like if there are multiple platforms,
like, well, I might as well put it on Facebook marketplace
and offer up and we had eBay, like I’m gonna syndicate it.
Or is it like, no, no, no, I wanna focus all my energy
onto this one vault platform, for example.
Yeah, I was using a second platform a lot
when I first started and I did get to like 350 dresses
and I had them on two platforms and things.
I was trying to like not have crossover,
but there definitely was crossover.
And then so people were getting unhappy
because the dress wasn’t coming back in time
from one platform and it was just like getting really messy.
So I decided to ultimately just rent on one platform.
But if, I think if you had a small inventory,
you know, 50 dresses or something,
you could definitely probably manage that a lot more easily.
It was just, I had too many dresses to kind of,
yeah, keep track of everything.
– Yeah, well, there’s your next side hustle
is the inventory management software
for a grass rental.
– Oh my gosh. – Like a very niche software.
Like to manage the listings, like, oh, it got rented out.
I better take it down off of this other platform.
– Yeah, I did create like a notion, you know,
database type thing.
I didn’t have that going,
but I think there’s so much like human element involved.
It’s really hard.
Like if someone’s just like,
“Oh, I just forgot to post the dress back.”
And then you’re just like,
there’s like nothing you can really do about it.
You could charge them late fees,
but you know, you still don’t have the dress
and you need the dress.
– Yeah, yeah, I had that.
I promise that to the next customer.
– Yeah.
– And so there’s an element of logistical challenges.
Anytime you’re moving physical inventory around,
but what have you found here
in terms of sticking it in the mail
and making sure it doesn’t get damaged in transit
and you said self-insured.
So like if it shows up, somebody makes a claim,
like, oh, it was torn or it smelled bad or it didn’t fit.
Like there’s all sorts of things that could go wrong.
– Yeah, there is a lot of things that can go wrong,
especially I’ve noticed a lot more than reselling.
Like there is, yeah,
there’s more things that go wrong with the renting.
I’ve been pretty lucky with the post.
I think I’ve maybe had one thing go missing ever.
So that’s been good.
A lot of these platforms do offer insurance
and you pay $5, $10 per order to have that insurance.
And I did do that early on,
but I found that self-insuring was the way to go
because they make you jump through so many hoops
to claim on that insurance.
They want you to go to two separate dry cleaners
and get stat decks from those two separate dry cleaners.
And then they want you to go to a seamstress
and say, get the stat deck from them
to say that it can’t be fixed.
And then it’s like providing all this evidence
and it just is very time consuming
and it just wasn’t worth it in the end for me.
So I decided to just self-insure.
You get a lot of people who just don’t want to send it back.
They go, oh, but I’ll buy it from you.
And I’ll be like, no, it’s actually not for sale.
I’ve got like 10 rentals coming up on it.
So you can’t have it.
So you get a little bit of that.
– So what happens in that case?
Or what do you do?
I mean, eventually it’s like the late fees at the library,
where I can’t afford to return this book
’cause I can’t afford to pay the late fee or something.
But at a certain point you just need it back.
– Yeah, well, I guess a lot of girls,
if they really, really want the dress,
they’ll just take the late fees up to the maximum amount
and then they get to keep the dress for like,
because a lot of these dresses
that people want are like completely sold out.
And I think that’s one of the biggest drivers
is that they would buy it, but they can’t.
So they have to rent it.
I did have one case, it was crazy.
I had this girl, it was,
and this was like in the first couple of months
when I started, she rented a dress from me
and she came and picked it up from my house.
And I just like have a hook on my front door.
So I put the dress in a garment bag
and they can just come pick it up.
And she came, picked it up and then four days later,
it was time to bring it back
and the dress didn’t come back.
And like the next day, you know, send her a message,
can you bring it back?
And she goes to me a bit and then I text her
and I’m like, can you bring the dress back?
And she’s said, oh, you know, oh yeah, I’m bring it back.
And then all these excuses started.
And then I got my dad’s terminally ill
and my car broke down
and like all these excuses day after day.
And then I was on a Facebook group one day
for one of the brands
and someone was saying, does anyone know this girl?
And it turns out it was like this whole scam
that she was doing to lots of renters.
And we all got together and tried to take it to the police.
And eventually this took like six months
of going to the police.
She did get charged
because she’d done it to so many people,
like more than 20 people.
– Wow. – But yeah, she said,
I’ll meet you at the police station
and give everyone their dresses back.
And then of course she never showed up.
It was like a whole thing.
So yeah. – Wow.
– There’s some crazies out there, I can tell you that.
– Yeah, anytime you’re dealing with the public,
you open yourself up to just, you know, random stuff.
You never probably would have considered
a couple of years ago, getting started.
But you’re like, oh, I can’t people just be decent
to each other.
I don’t know, bothers me.
But for the most part, send it off in the mail.
They send it back.
Is customer responsible for cleaning
or I’m not gonna introduce that wild card.
I’m gonna go clean it myself when it gets back.
– So the platforms like to say
that you have to dry clean everything,
but I learnt pretty fast
that that was gonna eat a lot into my profit margin.
So I probably dry clean about 20% of the clothes
because they can only be dry cleaned.
And that’s not by what’s on the tag
because most clothes will say
that they can only be dry cleaned.
But really there’s probably not that many
that actually have to be dry cleaned.
But that has come into my sourcing more and more now
is that I try to source items
that can just be put in the washing machine
and hung out to dry.
I don’t like to get things that need, you know,
very specific dry cleaning anymore.
No matter how much, you know, I could make,
it’s just not worth the effort.
– Yeah, ’cause they have to be ironed afterwards.
You have a team member who comes over and like irons this stuff.
That’s like my least favorite activity.
– I iron it, it’s not too bad.
It’s like I said, like some of the stuff
that’s dry cleaned obviously comes all ready to go.
And then yeah, it’s more just like the linen pieces.
And I’ll just give them a quick iron.
But what I don’t, I’m not like pedantic about it
because ultimately you’re putting it in the post
and it’s gonna get crushed on the way anyway.
– Sure, sure.
– So you’re just giving it a quick, you know,
just so it looks nice.
But the customer’s gonna iron or steam it
when it gets to them anyway.
So yeah.
– Sure, okay.
Now with a couple hundred of these garments coming in
and going out at any given time,
and I imagine there’s some seasonality to it,
but like any tools or tech or inventory management system,
complex spreadsheet or account like you mentioned
the notion template, what’s what’s going on
on the trying to figure out, in my mind,
it might be weeks before I even noticed
that something hasn’t gotten returned.
But like it seems like you gotta be on top of it.
‘Cause like, oh shoot,
I owe this to another customer next week.
– Yeah, definitely.
Like when I had 350 dresses, I did employ someone.
Like I just had like an assistant
and she was ticking off dresses as they come in.
We tried Notion, we tried spreadsheets.
It’s really, it’s really, really hard
when the inventory gets big.
It’s really hard to keep track of.
But now that I have around 200 dresses,
it’s actually not too difficult to keep track of.
I think you just, it’s like,
I guess if you’re a teacher and you know your students,
it’s like, I know my dresses, I know what’s missing.
I’m like, hey, that dress is missing.
Where is that dress?
– I’m not super like rigid in like ticking things off
and that I probably should be.
But usually you find out you don’t have it
if it needs to go back out again too.
And you’re like, oh, where is that dress?
– And I see some of them stored behind you
in the video closet space, spare bedroom space
that where they’re being stored.
– Yeah, this is a converted double garage that I converted.
This was my office for the model agency.
And now it’s my reselling rental room, I guess.
So I have a wall to take my photos for the reselling
and then, yeah, just keep everything in here on rack.
So you could easily keep it just in a small bedroom, though.
Probably, yeah, with a closet would be pretty hard
with 200 dresses.
Maybe if you had like 70 or 80, you could keep it in a closet.
– Do you find yourself buying multiple sizes
of the same style or is it like, I’m gonna buy one.
I’m gonna see what the demand is like.
And if it hits and I’m going really wide,
like I want the full catalog of this particular style.
I want to be able to serve all different sizes.
– Yeah, I definitely will buy all the sizes
because generally the thing is that they will sell out.
Like I’ve had dresses that sell out within 20 minutes.
So I have to be on the drop.
And then it’s a matter of if I didn’t get everything,
then I have to try and pick it up in the resell market.
If it’s, yeah, a really popular style.
– And then the biggest risk is
the demand doesn’t materialize.
Like it doesn’t end up renting out
as often as you thought it would
or for as much as you thought it would.
And now you’re kind of like, well, I’m sitting on this
and I’ve got to go and try and unload it,
try and resell it to recoup the initial investment.
– Yeah, but that’s why it’s really important
to try and get it, get those coupons
to like find things for 20% off.
Because then it’s super easy just to offload it.
Anyone will buy something that’s sold out
for like if 10% off even.
Like I said, then usually I can take,
if that item hasn’t rented, I can list it on eBay.
And then I’ll probably sell it to someone in the US or UK
and probably make $200 profit on it.
So the downside isn’t too bad.
Like you would think that you’d be stuck with stuff,
but the biggest downside is probably the damage
to the dresses.
And then obviously it becomes quite hard to sell them
once they’re very damaged.
– Oh, okay.
So they come back damaged.
Like is there a damage deposit?
Like if I’m renting out a place on Airbnb,
like, okay, I got to put down the security deposit
or you know, something like that.
– You could definitely request security deposits
and the platforms like allow you to request them,
but you’re going to severely hinder your rentals
because people are just going to be like,
no, I don’t want to pay a deposit.
You can if you want,
but you won’t be renting that many dresses probably.
– Okay.
And so it’s just kind of, you know, what happens
if you get it back and be like,
dude, there’s a huge tear down the side.
Did you expect me not to notice that?
– Yeah.
– What do you want?
Or are people more upfront and be like,
oh, I’m so sorry.
You know, I got it snagged on.
– You get a bit of both.
So you get, you do get people that are like,
oh, I’m so sorry.
Like I broke the zip, I’ll send you money.
I’ve even had people put cash in with the dress.
So I’m so sorry.
Like here’s the money to fix the zip or whatever.
So you do get some really good people,
but then obviously you get some special people
who send it back and it looks like, you know,
they’ve rolled around in the mud, jumped in the fire,
howled at the moon.
Like it looks really bad.
Like it’s just totally wrecked.
And you’re like, what, like you try to,
I did have a game on Instagram for a while
with my followers, like guess what happened in this dress?
Because like I’d show the stains and like it was really funny.
But yeah, sometimes they just come back destroyed.
And so, I mean, if they’re completely destroyed
and the person is just ghosting me,
then that’s where I’m basically self-insured.
So I just have to cop it on the chin.
The platforms will follow up to a degree.
They’ll say, you know, can you pay?
But ultimately they don’t have to pay.
Like I would have to, you know, file a police report
or something to try and get them to pay.
Or I think you could take it to small claims.
I do see people, you know, those girls in their 20s,
they get on the Facebook groups and start ranting
and saying that they’re going to take things
to small claims court or things like that.
I just too old for that stuff.
So I’m just like, whatever.
And yeah, sometimes you can sell stuff with damage.
You just disclose the damage.
You say, look, the hems torn,
but you can easily, you know, get a seamstress to redo it.
I did have a seamstress kind of on tap for a while
that I was taking stuff to.
But I think, again, it’s just like a time thing.
It’s just not really worth it for me.
– Okay. Yeah, it’s kind of at a certain point,
it just becomes, you know, a loss, you know, a percent loss.
– Yeah. – Like stores expect
some level of shoplifting, unfortunately.
– Yeah, exactly. – Like it’s just,
it’s a cost to do in business.
And, you know, hopefully you’re diversified enough
in terms of transaction volume
that a couple of bad things that happen
are just kind of par for the course.
– Yeah, exactly.
It’s exactly like shoplifting.
That’s how I always explain it.
You know, you’ve got to expect that some bad things happen,
but for the most part, it’s pretty good.
– More with summer in just a moment,
including when to exit out of a dress to sell it
rather than keep renting it.
And two ways to get started
without a big upfront investment right after this.
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– Okay, like if you have something that’s really hot,
like, oh, it’s been rented a bunch of times.
Is there a rule of thumb?
Okay, it’s getting worn out.
Like I gotta resell it or like I have to,
let’s ride this cash cow.
Let’s see how many more times we can rent it.
Like is there a metric or some sort of rule of thumb there
for like, when is it time to flip
and get out before it gets too cold?
– I think it just comes down to experience.
I don’t think there’s like a spreadsheet
or I could say if it’s rented 10 times.
It will depend on the material.
So certain materials will hold up better than others.
So something that silk probably doesn’t hold up usually
that well as opposed to something that’s like 100% linen
will usually go quite well.
You know, it will depend on how much it’s fading and stuff.
I think that a lot of the time, like when I first started,
I was really concerned about it looking pristine.
And I think what I’ve come to realize
is that people expect it to be secondhand.
They know it’s a secondhand dress.
They know other people have worn it.
So it doesn’t really matter if like, it’s clearly been worn.
Like obviously they don’t want a hole in it or whatever.
But like, yeah, the expectations aren’t too bad, I think.
I mean, you get the odd one who’s like,
this should be brand new, why isn’t this brand new?
But yeah, people do expect that it’s been worn.
Yeah, that’s fair.
It’s like getting in a rental car or even vacation rental,
like you know that other people have been in there.
Okay, that’s fair.
– So when to flip it, I guess if, yeah,
if it just starts to look really tired and old,
then I’ll probably just flip it.
It might come down to like just getting
to the end of the season.
So for us, it’s quite busy from kind of September
till April.
And so maybe, you know, I would start getting rid of stuff
towards April, May, June and getting that cash in
ready to buy new stuff for the next season.
– In the next years, okay.
– So it could come down to cash flow or yeah, just demand.
Like I can see that, yeah, people just,
it’s just not in demand and just becomes a math equation.
Then like, obviously when you’re buying a dress,
you’re buying cash flow basically.
So the dress, just like a house, the dress is the asset
and I’m buying the cash flow from the rentals.
And so I’ve got to kind of make a mathematical decision
is, you know, the money best sitting in the dress
or is it best moving it on and buying something
that’s kind of yielding a better rental?
– Yeah, I mean, what an interesting cash flowing asset.
Something I never would have considered, but yeah,
here are these marketplaces that need people like you
and like Summer to fill the inventory here.
So that’s super interesting.
Do you ever get people, you know, if you send it out,
they rented this certain size and they’re like,
oh shoot, it doesn’t fit and the wedding’s tomorrow.
Like, sorry, I can’t help you.
Like what happens?
– Yeah, you definitely get that.
People always think they’re skinnier than they are.
So it’s always, usually it’s too small.
And yeah, sometimes people will hit you up
and say, well, can I get a refund?
And I’ll be like, no,
because you essentially did the whole rental,
like I posted it to you.
Sometimes I will give them back the cleaning fee
if they haven’t worn it, I will say like,
if you return it on one, I can refund you the cleaning fee,
just, you know, as for goodwill, I guess.
But ultimately they have taken it out of the rental pool
for that amount of time.
So I do need to be compensated for that.
A lot of people will try and be tricky.
And like, well, first of all,
they’ll ask you for a try on service.
So they’ll say, oh, I’ll pay to just post it to me
so I can try it on.
And then I’ll, you know, I’ll send it back.
So they just want to pay for the post.
They’re like, oh, I won’t wear it, which is a bit silly.
And then sometimes people try and trick you into that.
So they’ll book a rental
and then they’ll try and do the, oh, it doesn’t fit me.
And I guess some newbies might be like, oh, that’s okay.
Just post it back and we’ll give you full refund.
And I guess with time you learn
that you’ve been taken advantage of a little bit.
– That’s code for I’m gonna wear it all weekend
and then tell you it didn’t fit.
– Exactly.
– Yeah, yeah, so many ins and outs in this industry.
– Yeah.
– It’s kind of crazy.
So I’m picturing a day in the life,
especially during busy season, checking inventory levels,
like managing the in and out of receiving stuff in,
taking it to the cleaners, dry cleaning it, ironing,
and then sending out kind of the next weekend’s batch
of inventory, like anything else that’s going into it
on a day-to-day basis.
It sounds like on the marketing side,
it’s primarily just putting your buy button up for sale
on these existing marketplaces,
like, you know, tapping into their traffic.
– Yeah, the listings are like so easy,
it’s so much easier than like eBay,
like an eBay listing for reselling is,
there’s a lot of thought.
I’ve even created a chat GPT bot
to like do my eBay listings really well.
Like there’s a lot that goes into it with the rentee.
It’s not like that.
I just kind of chuck up whatever is on the website
and it takes like two seconds.
So yeah, like a day in the life is basically
the postman comes and drops off packages at my door
at about eight o’clock in the morning.
And then I just bring them inside
so no one else steal them.
And then I can, you know, put the stuff
in the washing machine.
– How funny, do you think they’re like, yeah,
this woman gets a lot of mail.
What’s going on here?
– Yeah, they’re like, whoa,
because I have the stuff for reselling coming too.
So I get a lot of packages.
But yeah, the postie and I are on good terms.
He knows where the side gate is if the big gate’s closed.
So yeah, he just comes and drops it off
and I just will open up the packages
and then put whatever needs to be put in the washing machine
and then, you know, section out what needs to go
the dry cleaner.
And that’s pretty much it in the mornings.
And then I’ll just maybe at about three o’clock
I’ll start packaging up.
It takes me maybe an hour to do seven or eight dresses
if I need to do that many
and take them to the post office around the corner.
I actually could have the postie come and pick it up
but we just take it to our post office.
And then that’s it.
Drop the other stuff off at the dry cleaner.
Yeah, it’s not time intensive.
It’s not a time intensive.
It’s more of a capital intensive business, I would say.
But there are ways to, you can start with no money down
which is, you know, something that I teach to my students.
So basically, if you wanna get started,
the two ways you can get started
without putting a lot of money into inventory
is you can work on a consignment model.
So you can go to all your friends and family
and say, who’s got dresses?
They want me to rent.
– Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it.
– Yeah, you could get started that way
or the other way is, and this might be a bit controversial
but you can buy things on, say if you’re in the US,
you could buy things on somewhere like Revolve
that have, you know, change of mind return policies.
And you could see, put it up for rent, see if it rents.
If it doesn’t rent, you send it back
and before you have to pay your credit card.
And then you can get a feel for what rents
and at least then if you have gotten that piece
that rents you’ve already recouped, you know,
a third of your investment straight off the bat
before you’ve actually had to pay any money out.
– Okay, and imagine a lot of stores have that similar,
even if it’s a 30 day return policy,
it’s gonna give you a low risk way
to validate the demand or test the demand, I don’t know.
– Yeah, or if you just wanna try it out, yeah.
– That’s fair.
Well, we’ve got the rental business,
you’ve got the profit collective,
you’ve got the reselling business.
What’s next for you?
What are you excited about this year?
– So I put out courses on the reselling.
So I have a course called Pre-Lover Profit
and then I have the course on the rentals
called Rental Riches.
And that’s kind of like blowing up
to the point where I actually closed my model agency
after 15 years at the end of June
because it just kind of blew up pretty big.
So yeah, I’m just gonna keep teaching women
how to do what I’m doing basically,
or men if they wanna learn.
– I never asked like, is there a market
for like I’m gonna rent out a suit
or like men will be the equivalent on the men’s side?
– I think there would be.
Like you can definitely, even with the women’s,
you can rent out jackets or coats and things like that.
It’s not a massive market in Australia
because it’s just too hot here basically.
– Okay, okay.
– There’s not many parts of the country
that are like cold enough for coats all the time.
Like there is elsewhere,
but I’m sure that you probably could do things
with men’s stuff.
I don’t know, are you gonna do it, Nick?
Are you gonna put your clothes up?
– I love this like idea of getting paid over and over again
from something that you do once.
I could not start in my closet
’cause it’s been decades since I got any new clothes,
but it’s such an interesting one.
And it’s like, if you’re gonna go after the men’s market,
maybe you’re gonna be a big player
if there’s no existing supply base there
or there’s more people doing it on the dress rental side.
It’s more established, it’s more of a thing.
– It’s really interesting to think about it
as like an asset class in general
because people might think that I’m crazy
because I did put a hundred grand into dresses.
Like in that first year, people were like,
what are you doing?
Like, and I said, well,
but it’s an asset that I can resell afterwards
for the same price I paid for it, if not more.
And it’s giving me cash flow in between
for pretty, you know, a low amount of work.
So I think it’s really interesting to think about
and something I’ve been talking about on Instagram
a lot this week with my followers was like,
how you could, you know, in Australia,
it’s all about, oh, no one can afford to buy a house.
You know, houses are so expensive here
and people, you know, might be able to save say 30 grand
for a house deposit,
but that’s not enough for a house deposit.
You need 200 grand here
’cause like the average house price is a million dollars now.
And I was like, well, what if you, you know,
took that 30 grand invested it into some dresses,
took that rental income
and then the reselling income over the course of two years
and you could turn it into 200 grand quite easily.
So it’s something to think about.
– Yeah, dresses as an asset class, like you said,
it is capital intensive,
but you’ve kind of protected your downside.
Like, oh, I’m hopefully gonna cash flow in the near term.
And if I bought well enough upfront,
I can recoup sometimes even better
than my acquisition cost on the back end,
you know, despite the wear and tear and depreciation.
Like, it’s really interesting,
something that we’d never have when you,
your email came across as like, what a random,
so yeah, I get a kick out of businesses like this for sure.
So follow along, summer is at the Profit Collective.
You can find her on Instagram over there.
And if you hit up the profitcollective.co/rookie,
you can join her free masterclass
on the three biggest mistakes that newbies are making
when starting a pre-loved clothing business.
Again, the profitcollective.co/rookie for that.
Summer, this has been awesome.
Thank you for joining me.
I always get a kick out of stuff like this.
– No problem.
– Let’s wrap this thing up
with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
– If you think you can or you think you can’t,
you’re right.
So I get a lot of people say that they,
all the reasons they can’t start their side hustles.
So they can’t start their side hustle
because of where they live or, you know,
how much money they have or something like that.
And whether they think they can or they can’t,
they’re right because I had a girl
who messaged me just yesterday, actually,
and she said, “Oh, I would love to do what you do,
but I live in Italy and it’s a really small market here.”
And so I looked up the population of Australia in Italy
and I said, “Actually, you have doubled
the population of Australia.”
So that’s not an excuse.
So I think a lot of–
– Smaller geographically, yeah.
– Yeah, I’m like, so that can’t be an excuse.
So a lot of people think that, you know,
that I’m special because I live in Australia
or because I had a model agency
and I have a background in fashion and all these things.
But I think that all these things can be learned.
And yeah, you just have to have the right attitude
that you can make it work for you.
– Yeah, what an interesting business.
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t,
you are right, a little Henry Ford wisdom from that,
which was my one and only corporate job working for Ford.
– Oh, there you go.
– Obviously long after Henry passed,
but whether you think you can or think you can’t,
you are right.
Make sure to grab your free listener only bonus
for this week.
We’ve been talking about dresses,
but it’s just one of a lot of different things
that you can rent out for a profit.
So the listener bonus is 25 other unconventional rental
ideas that you might be able to borrow
some of Summers Playbook for.
And a lot of these different assets and products
already have these preexisting marketplaces
that you can tap into.
They’ve already kind of validated the demand
and gotten people used to saying,
well, hey, this is something that I don’t have to buy out,
this is something that I can rent
for just the time period that I need it.
So make sure to grab that.
It’s a free PDF download at the show notes for this episode.
You can follow the link in the episode description
and I’ll get you right over there.
Now, another recent rental episode
that we did, another example of this
was Gary Graywell’s moving box rental service
like renting out plastic bins.
Definitely an interesting one, episode 635.
He ended up partnering with a local moving company
to handle the storage and the delivery logistics
and was like, let’s take up a lot of space
if I got 50 or 100 of these things.
So you don’t have to scroll too far in the archives
to find that one and get 635.
And then another one from a year, year and a half ago
is 564 with Lenny Tim on his mobility scooter rental business.
He’s doing this in LA and yeah,
I think he had a fleet of six or seven of these
and he would deliver them to nearby hotels.
Like mostly for, you know, people, travelers, tourists,
people coming into LA from out of town,
like it doesn’t make sense to bring my own mobility scooter.
So I got a rent one while I’m in town
and he was making a few grand a month doing that on the side.
So lots of different things that you might be able to rent out
and you just start to notice these things
as you go to back to day to day.
And like, oh, what are those things
that are maybe a little more expensive
than you’d like to pay for something?
How many times are we really going to use that thing?
And dresses can check that box for those weddings
or those one-off events.
But Summer, thanks so much for sharing your insight.
Big thanks to our sponsors
for helping make this content free for everyone.
You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
Thank you for supporting the advertisers
that support the show.
That is it for me.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you find a value in the show,
the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
So fire off a text message to that fashionable friend of yours
and say, “Hey, have you ever thought about this?
Check this one out.”
Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen
and I’ll catch you in the next edition of The Side Hustle Show.
What’s up, what’s up, Nikola for here.
Welcome to The Side Hustle Show
because your nine to five may make you a living
if your five to nine makes you alive.
And here’s a side hustle
that earned just 160 bucks in its first month.
I came from just two customers, but it was enough.
It was enough traction to know that she was onto something.
Since then, my guest has scaled to
over 200 different garments, bringing in $150,000
in rental income last year.
She is @theprofitcollective on Instagram, summerfisher.
Welcome to The Side Hustle Show.
– Thank you, thanks for having me.
– You bet, stick around in this one.
We’re gonna learn how this business
and the math behind it works.
The delivery and logistics piece
behind moving clothing all around the place
and some of the marketing best practices
that you can follow along
if you wanna start something similar.
Now, you know, I love a fun rental business,
but dresses certainly aren’t the only thing
that you can rent out for a profit,
which is why I’ve put together a list
of 25 other unconventional things
that you can make money renting out
that is yours free to download at the show notes
for this episode.
Just follow the link in the episode description
and it’ll get you right over there.
Now, some of my understanding is you started
as a more traditional reseller, like go to the thrift shop,
find the brand name designer type of stuff
that you think is undervalued and flip it by low sell high.
Simple.
So what inspired the shift to the rental business?
– Well, I’m actually still reselling
and it is actually probably still a bigger part
of my business.
– Oh, okay.
– Yeah, so I saw an opportunity for the renting.
So what happened is I’ve had a model agency for 15 years.
That started as another side hustle,
which is a story for another day.
And I was in my agency one day
and a girl came in, one of the models came in
and said she was starting a dress rental business.
And I was like, what’s that?
I didn’t understand.
I was like, what are you talking about?
She’s like, oh yeah, we just put some dresses together.
My friend and I and we’re going to rent them online.
And I thought, okay.
And I just thought they were going to rent them
on Facebook marketplace or D-pop or something like that.
And I looked into it and I realized there’s this whole
industry around dress rentals.
And I thought, oh, I want to try this.
And I was already kind of flipping dresses on the side
and had built a whole business around that as well.
And so I decided I just put up all the dresses I had.
Actually, first I put up two dresses
and that was in October of 2022.
And then one day I was just sitting in my car
at my daughter’s cheer practice and one of them rented
and I got a notification that it had rented.
And I was like, oh my God, I just rented a dress.
But like now what do I do?
I didn’t really understand it.
And I just kind of went all in.
So I kind of worked it out as I went along.
And then I ended up putting all the dresses up then
that I had been flipping.
And it kind of grew from there.
And then I started buying dresses specifically to rent.
So yeah.
– Okay.
I love this, side hustles on side hustles, right?
What am I already doing?
How could I add a new revenue stream to this?
And this is really interesting.
It’s like, well, I’ll have it listed up for sale.
And in the meantime, until it sells,
hey, maybe I can make some revenue.
I can recoup some of that cost on the rental side.
I think that’s really interesting.
– Yeah, exactly.
It’s like a double-dip profit strategy is what I call it.
So basically, you’re making the money from flipping the item.
But in between, you’re also making the money from renting it.
– What happens when somebody wants to buy it
and you’re like, well, I can’t ship it out just yet.
I need to wait for it to get back.
– When it rents, I do take it off
from being available for sale, yeah.
– Oh, okay.
So those first couple, you get that notification.
Hey, this is somebody wanted to rent this thing.
There was a marketplace that had some existing demand
of renters versus you trying to build an audience,
build a following, build a two-sided marketplace.
So where it’s like, hey, it rent from me.
It’s like, no, no, no.
There’s already some existing validation and demand for it.
– Yes, definitely.
And yeah, there’s online sites
where you can rent dresses basically.
So they’re different in every country.
So for us in Australia, there’s a site called The Vault.
A big one in the US and the UK is Byrotation.
So there’s several of these types of websites
and they’re kind of peer-to-peer lending.
So basically you can put up your own wardrobe
or like I do, run it as a business
and rent to other people.
– There was one like bag borrower steal.
Is that one?
Or was that just like for buying handbags?
I don’t know if it was a rental service too.
I’m trying to think of like the left.
– You can rent bags on these sites as well.
– Okay, do you play around in that space or strictly dresses?
– No, I don’t really because their bags
are really expensive to buy.
And I just, because I self-insure all my items,
I just don’t want to play with that.
– Right, right, right.
What’s a sweet spot for cost of acquisition,
like brand style, and there’s a lot of different factors
that might must go into the purchase side of it
to decide, well, what might there be demand for?
– It’s quite nuanced.
So it will depend on, it’s like the intersection
of brand, style, size, all these things
that kind of come together to get a dress that’s in demand.
I would say that as opposed to when I’m reselling,
when I’m renting, it does need to be a fairly recent style,
like within the last 18 months, but definitely,
but usually even within the last six months
is that will be like the most popular styles.
Whereas when I’m reselling, that’s not as relevant.
– Okay.
– And then a lot of it will be like,
did a celebrity wear it?
Is it the color of that season?
You know, is it winter or summer?
I rent a lot to wedding guests.
So a lot of people who are going to weddings
and just are going to wear that item once.
So there’s a lot of that with the sizing.
You do have to look at the market.
So a lot of girls in their early twenties
will get into dress rentals
and they will tend to rent those smaller sizes.
And I’ve found pretty good success with renting
like slightly like mid sizes, I guess it would be called.
So yeah, just slightly larger, not the teeny tiny sizes.
So yeah, but it does depend on the brand too,
because some of those brands do do better
in the really small sizes.
– And you’re still trying to source this stuff secondhand
or are you now comfortable?
So I could buy it off the rack.
I could buy it new to rent.
And then you’re kind of like a car rental business,
like I’m going to rent it out for a year
and then I’m going to resell it.
– Yeah, I would say that mostly I buy at retail now,
but I do use all the strategies to try and get
like a percentage off when I buy it.
So that when I, at the end of the rental,
when I go to flip it, I’m actually making money both ways.
So I’m getting 20% off retail.
I’m renting it, you know, five, 10 times.
And then I’m actually selling it still
for more than I paid for it, even though it’s pre-loved
because it’s such a new and hot and in demand item.
And I’m also using things like the currency arbitrage
and the geographical arbitrage of being in Australia
where I can get, you know, something like a Zimmerman dress
a lot cheaper and sell it to someone in the U.S.
– Yeah, you’re going to be throwing out brand names
that go where?
(laughing)
Like, all right, I’ll take your word for it.
But if you’re in that space, like,
if you know what is hot, what is in style,
then yeah, you can absolutely play around with that.
And so for the rental side is,
and you imagine it’s got to be local,
like you’re not going to ship something halfway
around the world for a rental, are you?
– So the majority of my reselling is actually like,
I sell a lot to the U.S. and the UK
and probably more than Australia.
But with the renting it is, yeah, only in Australia.
So I do it pretty much, all of it is by post.
So I do allow pickups sometimes.
I don’t love people coming to my house
and picking up the items,
but sometimes if it’s a bit slow,
I’ll let people come and pick it up.
But you get the problem that if they will pick it up,
they will be like, oh, what else have you got?
You know, can I try it on and all this type of thing?
And yeah, I don’t like that.
– I’m like, no, no, no, this is the one you ordered.
Here you go.
So inspired to do it.
A model at the modeling agency was like,
hey, I’m getting into this.
You’re like, well, you know,
there might be something else here.
There was some existing, you know, proof of concept, right?
These marketplaces already existed.
And you had the confidence to say,
well, I can add my own listings to this.
Was there a point of, you know, market saturation
if, you know, 10 providers all have the same thing
and like on that busy summer,
I guess it’s so fluid,
like the busy summers, you know, wedding season,
where, you know, different people want different styles
and different sizes at the time.
It’s hard to imagine it being like so overstocked,
overcrowded.
– Yeah, I think that it’s like,
even if 20 people have the same dress,
there could be easily 20 people that want to rent that dress,
especially like if it’s very in demand.
And you just got to do your research
when you’re choosing what dresses you want to rent
because you don’t want to pick a size
that like everyone else is renting that size.
Usually you can pick, find a size that, you know,
only one or two people have
and then just go by a size, that size for yourself.
– Got it.
So it’s okay to have the same style that other people have,
but maybe try and fill in the gaps on some sizes
that you don’t find readily available.
– Or you want to be first to market.
Like you want to be the first one to have it,
get it listed, then you’ll get all the bookings
and you’ll get bookings months in advance.
So it’ll be booked out
before anyone can get their item up.
– Are there any demand tools, like, you know,
number of customer reviews
or do these platforms show you like,
oh, this was, you know, rented out eight times
in the last two months, like something like that to say,
well, okay, clearly I should go buy one of those.
– Yeah, there is, in Australia, there is a site
which I don’t rent on for other reasons,
but it does do those little pop-ups that says,
oh, this dress was just rented.
So you can definitely use that to see what’s being rented,
but it’s not like reselling where on eBay,
you can like look at recent solds
or you can use a product research tool to look up
what’s selling, there’s nothing like that.
Yeah, there’s no, you’ve really, it’s quite like laborious.
You’ve got to go through other people’s calendars
and see what bookings they’ve got
to see how in demand it is.
So yeah, at first you’ve got to do quite a bit of research.
– Got it, and then you can learn the into now.
It’s like any business, once you’re in it,
you can’t see it any other way.
– Definitely.
– But from the outside, okay, I like this little trick
of like, oh, okay, it’s booked up the next three weekends.
It must be in demand.
A friend of ours used to do this for a wedding,
and like you said, like mid-late 20s,
like peak wedding attendance season,
we’re sick of wearing the same thing over and over again,
so she’d try something new.
And like, how much does it cost to rent a dress these days?
– The absolute least amount would be $80,
but I have like four dresses
that are about two and a half grand retail each,
and I rent those for 350 per rental.
And like, you have to pull my jaw off the floor,
like 2,500 for like, I’ve heard of wedding dresses,
yes, costing that much, but just like a regular dress.
This shows you how much I know about fashion.
– It’s really beautiful, Nick.
It’s really beautiful dress.
– I’m sure it is.
The last article of clothing that I rented
was a tuxedo for senior prom.
Like, and it was, I don’t even remember how much it was.
It was probably 80 bucks, but yeah, okay.
So obviously the higher retail price,
the more you can command on the rental side, absolutely.
– And that’s helpful to have a range of $80 to $350 per rental.
Is there a rule, like a percentage of the retail price
or something like that that you go by?
– Yeah, I think like generally you want to get your money back
within three to four rentals,
but if I had have paid full price for like that dress,
it’s worth two and a half thousand dollars.
Obviously I wouldn’t have made that back in four rentals,
but there’s a way to find usually 10, 20% off at least
on full retail when you’re buying something.
So once you’ve done that or you buy it secondhand,
then usually you can get your money back.
Sometimes I’ll get my money back with one rental.
If I’m buying it pre-love,
you know, I might see it pop up on eBay or Depop
and I’ll get my money back in one rental.
– Gotcha.
Do you have like brand name alerts that pin you when,
oh, such and such inventory just got listed.
I need to go and check it out.
– Well, because I’m already reselling as well
and that’s quite a big income stream for me.
I’m sourcing every day, so.
– Constantly on the lookout.
– I’m there like when it comes up, I’m ready.
So yeah, for sure.
But like I do have like saved searches that I look through.
Yeah.
– And I suppose you could just start with,
if you have some existing dress inventory,
I’m thinking of like my wife’s classic addresses in there.
She hadn’t worn in years.
– Yeah.
– And who knows, like, I don’t know.
I have no concept of what the brands are,
but maybe it’s a timeless style
that people would be searching for.
Like is that branded keyword type of search,
like how important is that in your listing
on the marketplaces?
Like are people looking specifically for that brand
or could you describe it more as like a, you know,
a green A line, something, something strapless.
I don’t know, it’s just a keyword, keyword, keyword.
– Yeah, it’s heavily brand dependent.
People go on, they know what they want.
They know what dress they want.
Probably 80% of the time, maybe 90% of the time.
– Okay.
– You know, they’ve seen it come up
in the campaign photos or whatever.
Some celebrities worn it and influencers
put it on their Instagram.
They’re like, I want to wear that dress
and they go looking for it.
So, yeah.
– What brands do you like?
– For us in Australia, and actually a lot of these brands
kind of are the same ones as in the US or UK,
but like the Australian kind of based brands
are like Zimmerman, Age or Arge,
if you like to be fancy in that way.
Orishan is a big one for me.
Alame, Alame is probably the biggest brand that I rent.
It’s only been around a couple of years,
but it’s kind of in that style of Zimmerman as well.
So yeah, they’re the kind of brands, I guess.
– All right.
It’s all foreign to me, but it’s helpful to know.
I mean, you could go on,
I imagine any of these marketplaces
and see where the demand seems to be.
So that makes sense.
– More with Summer in just a moment,
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Aside from the marketplace and maybe on the marketplace,
other listing best practices,
are you modeling the photos?
You’re tapping into people from the modeling agency
to like take these dress photos for you.
Like what goes into a good listing?
How am I going to stand out against everybody else
who’s already been on there?
Yeah, well, it’s really different to race-selling.
So with race-selling, you know,
I am trying to position an item to show its value
by using campaign photos where I can and stock photos
and then using certain photos
to like show that perceived value, I guess.
And with renting, it’s really no one uses their own photos.
They just use stock photos.
So it’s literally just screenshotting three stock photos
from the company’s website and putting it up.
There’s no modeling involved.
My modeling days are long gone at three kids.
So yeah, I’m not going to be modeling any of them close.
Fair enough.
You could probably get like customer pictures back
at some point, I don’t know, but like, that’s not important.
If you’re using Instagram as a rental platform,
which a lot, a lot of people do.
So a lot of people will just rent straight
off people’s Instagram profiles.
Then they will use a lot of like customer photos
and things like that for sure.
So this would be trying to create your own demand,
like build up an influencer profile.
And you know, hey, if you like my style,
you can actually rent this thing.
If you happen to be the same size as me, you can rent it.
No, they’re just rental companies.
So they just say like, you know, XYZ rentals.
And then they’ll go into maybe the Facebook groups online
and say, I’m renting these dresses
if anyone wants to come to my Instagram
and then the customers will just message them.
And then they just facilitate the transaction that way.
And so they’re not paying the rental platforms a commission.
What’s a typical commission fee?
I think it’s like 16.5% is what we pay on the vault.
I assume it’s similar on the other ones internationally.
Yeah, it’s not much for the level of demand
that they had to create the marketing
that they’re doing for you, the transaction,
they’re facilitating.
Yeah, they actually do the majority
of the customer service too.
So yeah, they have customer service people,
everything goes through customer service.
So it does take the burden off a little bit that way.
Is there a strategy in syndicating the listing?
Like if there are multiple platforms,
like, well, I might as well put it on Facebook marketplace
and offer up and we had eBay, like I’m gonna syndicate it.
Or is it like, no, no, no, I wanna focus all my energy
onto this one vault platform, for example.
Yeah, I was using a second platform a lot
when I first started and I did get to like 350 dresses
and I had them on two platforms and things.
I was trying to like not have crossover,
but there definitely was crossover.
And then so people were getting unhappy
because the dress wasn’t coming back in time
from one platform and it was just like getting really messy.
So I decided to ultimately just rent on one platform.
But if, I think if you had a small inventory,
you know, 50 dresses or something,
you could definitely probably manage that a lot more easily.
It was just, I had too many dresses to kind of,
yeah, keep track of everything.
– Yeah, well, there’s your next side hustle
is the inventory management software
for a grass rental.
– Oh my gosh. – Like a very niche software.
Like to manage the listings, like, oh, it got rented out.
I better take it down off of this other platform.
– Yeah, I did create like a notion, you know,
database type thing.
I didn’t have that going,
but I think there’s so much like human element involved.
It’s really hard.
Like if someone’s just like,
“Oh, I just forgot to post the dress back.”
And then you’re just like,
there’s like nothing you can really do about it.
You could charge them late fees,
but you know, you still don’t have the dress
and you need the dress.
– Yeah, yeah, I had that.
I promise that to the next customer.
– Yeah.
– And so there’s an element of logistical challenges.
Anytime you’re moving physical inventory around,
but what have you found here
in terms of sticking it in the mail
and making sure it doesn’t get damaged in transit
and you said self-insured.
So like if it shows up, somebody makes a claim,
like, oh, it was torn or it smelled bad or it didn’t fit.
Like there’s all sorts of things that could go wrong.
– Yeah, there is a lot of things that can go wrong,
especially I’ve noticed a lot more than reselling.
Like there is, yeah,
there’s more things that go wrong with the renting.
I’ve been pretty lucky with the post.
I think I’ve maybe had one thing go missing ever.
So that’s been good.
A lot of these platforms do offer insurance
and you pay $5, $10 per order to have that insurance.
And I did do that early on,
but I found that self-insuring was the way to go
because they make you jump through so many hoops
to claim on that insurance.
They want you to go to two separate dry cleaners
and get stat decks from those two separate dry cleaners.
And then they want you to go to a seamstress
and say, get the stat deck from them
to say that it can’t be fixed.
And then it’s like providing all this evidence
and it just is very time consuming
and it just wasn’t worth it in the end for me.
So I decided to just self-insure.
You get a lot of people who just don’t want to send it back.
They go, oh, but I’ll buy it from you.
And I’ll be like, no, it’s actually not for sale.
I’ve got like 10 rentals coming up on it.
So you can’t have it.
So you get a little bit of that.
– So what happens in that case?
Or what do you do?
I mean, eventually it’s like the late fees at the library,
where I can’t afford to return this book
’cause I can’t afford to pay the late fee or something.
But at a certain point you just need it back.
– Yeah, well, I guess a lot of girls,
if they really, really want the dress,
they’ll just take the late fees up to the maximum amount
and then they get to keep the dress for like,
because a lot of these dresses
that people want are like completely sold out.
And I think that’s one of the biggest drivers
is that they would buy it, but they can’t.
So they have to rent it.
I did have one case, it was crazy.
I had this girl, it was,
and this was like in the first couple of months
when I started, she rented a dress from me
and she came and picked it up from my house.
And I just like have a hook on my front door.
So I put the dress in a garment bag
and they can just come pick it up.
And she came, picked it up and then four days later,
it was time to bring it back
and the dress didn’t come back.
And like the next day, you know, send her a message,
can you bring it back?
And she goes to me a bit and then I text her
and I’m like, can you bring the dress back?
And she’s said, oh, you know, oh yeah, I’m bring it back.
And then all these excuses started.
And then I got my dad’s terminally ill
and my car broke down
and like all these excuses day after day.
And then I was on a Facebook group one day
for one of the brands
and someone was saying, does anyone know this girl?
And it turns out it was like this whole scam
that she was doing to lots of renters.
And we all got together and tried to take it to the police.
And eventually this took like six months
of going to the police.
She did get charged
because she’d done it to so many people,
like more than 20 people.
– Wow. – But yeah, she said,
I’ll meet you at the police station
and give everyone their dresses back.
And then of course she never showed up.
It was like a whole thing.
So yeah. – Wow.
– There’s some crazies out there, I can tell you that.
– Yeah, anytime you’re dealing with the public,
you open yourself up to just, you know, random stuff.
You never probably would have considered
a couple of years ago, getting started.
But you’re like, oh, I can’t people just be decent
to each other.
I don’t know, bothers me.
But for the most part, send it off in the mail.
They send it back.
Is customer responsible for cleaning
or I’m not gonna introduce that wild card.
I’m gonna go clean it myself when it gets back.
– So the platforms like to say
that you have to dry clean everything,
but I learnt pretty fast
that that was gonna eat a lot into my profit margin.
So I probably dry clean about 20% of the clothes
because they can only be dry cleaned.
And that’s not by what’s on the tag
because most clothes will say
that they can only be dry cleaned.
But really there’s probably not that many
that actually have to be dry cleaned.
But that has come into my sourcing more and more now
is that I try to source items
that can just be put in the washing machine
and hung out to dry.
I don’t like to get things that need, you know,
very specific dry cleaning anymore.
No matter how much, you know, I could make,
it’s just not worth the effort.
– Yeah, ’cause they have to be ironed afterwards.
You have a team member who comes over and like irons this stuff.
That’s like my least favorite activity.
– I iron it, it’s not too bad.
It’s like I said, like some of the stuff
that’s dry cleaned obviously comes all ready to go.
And then yeah, it’s more just like the linen pieces.
And I’ll just give them a quick iron.
But what I don’t, I’m not like pedantic about it
because ultimately you’re putting it in the post
and it’s gonna get crushed on the way anyway.
– Sure, sure.
– So you’re just giving it a quick, you know,
just so it looks nice.
But the customer’s gonna iron or steam it
when it gets to them anyway.
So yeah.
– Sure, okay.
Now with a couple hundred of these garments coming in
and going out at any given time,
and I imagine there’s some seasonality to it,
but like any tools or tech or inventory management system,
complex spreadsheet or account like you mentioned
the notion template, what’s what’s going on
on the trying to figure out, in my mind,
it might be weeks before I even noticed
that something hasn’t gotten returned.
But like it seems like you gotta be on top of it.
‘Cause like, oh shoot,
I owe this to another customer next week.
– Yeah, definitely.
Like when I had 350 dresses, I did employ someone.
Like I just had like an assistant
and she was ticking off dresses as they come in.
We tried Notion, we tried spreadsheets.
It’s really, it’s really, really hard
when the inventory gets big.
It’s really hard to keep track of.
But now that I have around 200 dresses,
it’s actually not too difficult to keep track of.
I think you just, it’s like,
I guess if you’re a teacher and you know your students,
it’s like, I know my dresses, I know what’s missing.
I’m like, hey, that dress is missing.
Where is that dress?
– I’m not super like rigid in like ticking things off
and that I probably should be.
But usually you find out you don’t have it
if it needs to go back out again too.
And you’re like, oh, where is that dress?
– And I see some of them stored behind you
in the video closet space, spare bedroom space
that where they’re being stored.
– Yeah, this is a converted double garage that I converted.
This was my office for the model agency.
And now it’s my reselling rental room, I guess.
So I have a wall to take my photos for the reselling
and then, yeah, just keep everything in here on rack.
So you could easily keep it just in a small bedroom, though.
Probably, yeah, with a closet would be pretty hard
with 200 dresses.
Maybe if you had like 70 or 80, you could keep it in a closet.
– Do you find yourself buying multiple sizes
of the same style or is it like, I’m gonna buy one.
I’m gonna see what the demand is like.
And if it hits and I’m going really wide,
like I want the full catalog of this particular style.
I want to be able to serve all different sizes.
– Yeah, I definitely will buy all the sizes
because generally the thing is that they will sell out.
Like I’ve had dresses that sell out within 20 minutes.
So I have to be on the drop.
And then it’s a matter of if I didn’t get everything,
then I have to try and pick it up in the resell market.
If it’s, yeah, a really popular style.
– And then the biggest risk is
the demand doesn’t materialize.
Like it doesn’t end up renting out
as often as you thought it would
or for as much as you thought it would.
And now you’re kind of like, well, I’m sitting on this
and I’ve got to go and try and unload it,
try and resell it to recoup the initial investment.
– Yeah, but that’s why it’s really important
to try and get it, get those coupons
to like find things for 20% off.
Because then it’s super easy just to offload it.
Anyone will buy something that’s sold out
for like if 10% off even.
Like I said, then usually I can take,
if that item hasn’t rented, I can list it on eBay.
And then I’ll probably sell it to someone in the US or UK
and probably make $200 profit on it.
So the downside isn’t too bad.
Like you would think that you’d be stuck with stuff,
but the biggest downside is probably the damage
to the dresses.
And then obviously it becomes quite hard to sell them
once they’re very damaged.
– Oh, okay.
So they come back damaged.
Like is there a damage deposit?
Like if I’m renting out a place on Airbnb,
like, okay, I got to put down the security deposit
or you know, something like that.
– You could definitely request security deposits
and the platforms like allow you to request them,
but you’re going to severely hinder your rentals
because people are just going to be like,
no, I don’t want to pay a deposit.
You can if you want,
but you won’t be renting that many dresses probably.
– Okay.
And so it’s just kind of, you know, what happens
if you get it back and be like,
dude, there’s a huge tear down the side.
Did you expect me not to notice that?
– Yeah.
– What do you want?
Or are people more upfront and be like,
oh, I’m so sorry.
You know, I got it snagged on.
– You get a bit of both.
So you get, you do get people that are like,
oh, I’m so sorry.
Like I broke the zip, I’ll send you money.
I’ve even had people put cash in with the dress.
So I’m so sorry.
Like here’s the money to fix the zip or whatever.
So you do get some really good people,
but then obviously you get some special people
who send it back and it looks like, you know,
they’ve rolled around in the mud, jumped in the fire,
howled at the moon.
Like it looks really bad.
Like it’s just totally wrecked.
And you’re like, what, like you try to,
I did have a game on Instagram for a while
with my followers, like guess what happened in this dress?
Because like I’d show the stains and like it was really funny.
But yeah, sometimes they just come back destroyed.
And so, I mean, if they’re completely destroyed
and the person is just ghosting me,
then that’s where I’m basically self-insured.
So I just have to cop it on the chin.
The platforms will follow up to a degree.
They’ll say, you know, can you pay?
But ultimately they don’t have to pay.
Like I would have to, you know, file a police report
or something to try and get them to pay.
Or I think you could take it to small claims.
I do see people, you know, those girls in their 20s,
they get on the Facebook groups and start ranting
and saying that they’re going to take things
to small claims court or things like that.
I just too old for that stuff.
So I’m just like, whatever.
And yeah, sometimes you can sell stuff with damage.
You just disclose the damage.
You say, look, the hems torn,
but you can easily, you know, get a seamstress to redo it.
I did have a seamstress kind of on tap for a while
that I was taking stuff to.
But I think, again, it’s just like a time thing.
It’s just not really worth it for me.
– Okay. Yeah, it’s kind of at a certain point,
it just becomes, you know, a loss, you know, a percent loss.
– Yeah. – Like stores expect
some level of shoplifting, unfortunately.
– Yeah, exactly. – Like it’s just,
it’s a cost to do in business.
And, you know, hopefully you’re diversified enough
in terms of transaction volume
that a couple of bad things that happen
are just kind of par for the course.
– Yeah, exactly.
It’s exactly like shoplifting.
That’s how I always explain it.
You know, you’ve got to expect that some bad things happen,
but for the most part, it’s pretty good.
– More with summer in just a moment,
including when to exit out of a dress to sell it
rather than keep renting it.
And two ways to get started
without a big upfront investment right after this.
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– Okay, like if you have something that’s really hot,
like, oh, it’s been rented a bunch of times.
Is there a rule of thumb?
Okay, it’s getting worn out.
Like I gotta resell it or like I have to,
let’s ride this cash cow.
Let’s see how many more times we can rent it.
Like is there a metric or some sort of rule of thumb there
for like, when is it time to flip
and get out before it gets too cold?
– I think it just comes down to experience.
I don’t think there’s like a spreadsheet
or I could say if it’s rented 10 times.
It will depend on the material.
So certain materials will hold up better than others.
So something that silk probably doesn’t hold up usually
that well as opposed to something that’s like 100% linen
will usually go quite well.
You know, it will depend on how much it’s fading and stuff.
I think that a lot of the time, like when I first started,
I was really concerned about it looking pristine.
And I think what I’ve come to realize
is that people expect it to be secondhand.
They know it’s a secondhand dress.
They know other people have worn it.
So it doesn’t really matter if like, it’s clearly been worn.
Like obviously they don’t want a hole in it or whatever.
But like, yeah, the expectations aren’t too bad, I think.
I mean, you get the odd one who’s like,
this should be brand new, why isn’t this brand new?
But yeah, people do expect that it’s been worn.
Yeah, that’s fair.
It’s like getting in a rental car or even vacation rental,
like you know that other people have been in there.
Okay, that’s fair.
– So when to flip it, I guess if, yeah,
if it just starts to look really tired and old,
then I’ll probably just flip it.
It might come down to like just getting
to the end of the season.
So for us, it’s quite busy from kind of September
till April.
And so maybe, you know, I would start getting rid of stuff
towards April, May, June and getting that cash in
ready to buy new stuff for the next season.
– In the next years, okay.
– So it could come down to cash flow or yeah, just demand.
Like I can see that, yeah, people just,
it’s just not in demand and just becomes a math equation.
Then like, obviously when you’re buying a dress,
you’re buying cash flow basically.
So the dress, just like a house, the dress is the asset
and I’m buying the cash flow from the rentals.
And so I’ve got to kind of make a mathematical decision
is, you know, the money best sitting in the dress
or is it best moving it on and buying something
that’s kind of yielding a better rental?
– Yeah, I mean, what an interesting cash flowing asset.
Something I never would have considered, but yeah,
here are these marketplaces that need people like you
and like Summer to fill the inventory here.
So that’s super interesting.
Do you ever get people, you know, if you send it out,
they rented this certain size and they’re like,
oh shoot, it doesn’t fit and the wedding’s tomorrow.
Like, sorry, I can’t help you.
Like what happens?
– Yeah, you definitely get that.
People always think they’re skinnier than they are.
So it’s always, usually it’s too small.
And yeah, sometimes people will hit you up
and say, well, can I get a refund?
And I’ll be like, no,
because you essentially did the whole rental,
like I posted it to you.
Sometimes I will give them back the cleaning fee
if they haven’t worn it, I will say like,
if you return it on one, I can refund you the cleaning fee,
just, you know, as for goodwill, I guess.
But ultimately they have taken it out of the rental pool
for that amount of time.
So I do need to be compensated for that.
A lot of people will try and be tricky.
And like, well, first of all,
they’ll ask you for a try on service.
So they’ll say, oh, I’ll pay to just post it to me
so I can try it on.
And then I’ll, you know, I’ll send it back.
So they just want to pay for the post.
They’re like, oh, I won’t wear it, which is a bit silly.
And then sometimes people try and trick you into that.
So they’ll book a rental
and then they’ll try and do the, oh, it doesn’t fit me.
And I guess some newbies might be like, oh, that’s okay.
Just post it back and we’ll give you full refund.
And I guess with time you learn
that you’ve been taken advantage of a little bit.
– That’s code for I’m gonna wear it all weekend
and then tell you it didn’t fit.
– Exactly.
– Yeah, yeah, so many ins and outs in this industry.
– Yeah.
– It’s kind of crazy.
So I’m picturing a day in the life,
especially during busy season, checking inventory levels,
like managing the in and out of receiving stuff in,
taking it to the cleaners, dry cleaning it, ironing,
and then sending out kind of the next weekend’s batch
of inventory, like anything else that’s going into it
on a day-to-day basis.
It sounds like on the marketing side,
it’s primarily just putting your buy button up for sale
on these existing marketplaces,
like, you know, tapping into their traffic.
– Yeah, the listings are like so easy,
it’s so much easier than like eBay,
like an eBay listing for reselling is,
there’s a lot of thought.
I’ve even created a chat GPT bot
to like do my eBay listings really well.
Like there’s a lot that goes into it with the rentee.
It’s not like that.
I just kind of chuck up whatever is on the website
and it takes like two seconds.
So yeah, like a day in the life is basically
the postman comes and drops off packages at my door
at about eight o’clock in the morning.
And then I just bring them inside
so no one else steal them.
And then I can, you know, put the stuff
in the washing machine.
– How funny, do you think they’re like, yeah,
this woman gets a lot of mail.
What’s going on here?
– Yeah, they’re like, whoa,
because I have the stuff for reselling coming too.
So I get a lot of packages.
But yeah, the postie and I are on good terms.
He knows where the side gate is if the big gate’s closed.
So yeah, he just comes and drops it off
and I just will open up the packages
and then put whatever needs to be put in the washing machine
and then, you know, section out what needs to go
the dry cleaner.
And that’s pretty much it in the mornings.
And then I’ll just maybe at about three o’clock
I’ll start packaging up.
It takes me maybe an hour to do seven or eight dresses
if I need to do that many
and take them to the post office around the corner.
I actually could have the postie come and pick it up
but we just take it to our post office.
And then that’s it.
Drop the other stuff off at the dry cleaner.
Yeah, it’s not time intensive.
It’s not a time intensive.
It’s more of a capital intensive business, I would say.
But there are ways to, you can start with no money down
which is, you know, something that I teach to my students.
So basically, if you wanna get started,
the two ways you can get started
without putting a lot of money into inventory
is you can work on a consignment model.
So you can go to all your friends and family
and say, who’s got dresses?
They want me to rent.
– Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it.
– Yeah, you could get started that way
or the other way is, and this might be a bit controversial
but you can buy things on, say if you’re in the US,
you could buy things on somewhere like Revolve
that have, you know, change of mind return policies.
And you could see, put it up for rent, see if it rents.
If it doesn’t rent, you send it back
and before you have to pay your credit card.
And then you can get a feel for what rents
and at least then if you have gotten that piece
that rents you’ve already recouped, you know,
a third of your investment straight off the bat
before you’ve actually had to pay any money out.
– Okay, and imagine a lot of stores have that similar,
even if it’s a 30 day return policy,
it’s gonna give you a low risk way
to validate the demand or test the demand, I don’t know.
– Yeah, or if you just wanna try it out, yeah.
– That’s fair.
Well, we’ve got the rental business,
you’ve got the profit collective,
you’ve got the reselling business.
What’s next for you?
What are you excited about this year?
– So I put out courses on the reselling.
So I have a course called Pre-Lover Profit
and then I have the course on the rentals
called Rental Riches.
And that’s kind of like blowing up
to the point where I actually closed my model agency
after 15 years at the end of June
because it just kind of blew up pretty big.
So yeah, I’m just gonna keep teaching women
how to do what I’m doing basically,
or men if they wanna learn.
– I never asked like, is there a market
for like I’m gonna rent out a suit
or like men will be the equivalent on the men’s side?
– I think there would be.
Like you can definitely, even with the women’s,
you can rent out jackets or coats and things like that.
It’s not a massive market in Australia
because it’s just too hot here basically.
– Okay, okay.
– There’s not many parts of the country
that are like cold enough for coats all the time.
Like there is elsewhere,
but I’m sure that you probably could do things
with men’s stuff.
I don’t know, are you gonna do it, Nick?
Are you gonna put your clothes up?
– I love this like idea of getting paid over and over again
from something that you do once.
I could not start in my closet
’cause it’s been decades since I got any new clothes,
but it’s such an interesting one.
And it’s like, if you’re gonna go after the men’s market,
maybe you’re gonna be a big player
if there’s no existing supply base there
or there’s more people doing it on the dress rental side.
It’s more established, it’s more of a thing.
– It’s really interesting to think about it
as like an asset class in general
because people might think that I’m crazy
because I did put a hundred grand into dresses.
Like in that first year, people were like,
what are you doing?
Like, and I said, well,
but it’s an asset that I can resell afterwards
for the same price I paid for it, if not more.
And it’s giving me cash flow in between
for pretty, you know, a low amount of work.
So I think it’s really interesting to think about
and something I’ve been talking about on Instagram
a lot this week with my followers was like,
how you could, you know, in Australia,
it’s all about, oh, no one can afford to buy a house.
You know, houses are so expensive here
and people, you know, might be able to save say 30 grand
for a house deposit,
but that’s not enough for a house deposit.
You need 200 grand here
’cause like the average house price is a million dollars now.
And I was like, well, what if you, you know,
took that 30 grand invested it into some dresses,
took that rental income
and then the reselling income over the course of two years
and you could turn it into 200 grand quite easily.
So it’s something to think about.
– Yeah, dresses as an asset class, like you said,
it is capital intensive,
but you’ve kind of protected your downside.
Like, oh, I’m hopefully gonna cash flow in the near term.
And if I bought well enough upfront,
I can recoup sometimes even better
than my acquisition cost on the back end,
you know, despite the wear and tear and depreciation.
Like, it’s really interesting,
something that we’d never have when you,
your email came across as like, what a random,
so yeah, I get a kick out of businesses like this for sure.
So follow along, summer is at the Profit Collective.
You can find her on Instagram over there.
And if you hit up the profitcollective.co/rookie,
you can join her free masterclass
on the three biggest mistakes that newbies are making
when starting a pre-loved clothing business.
Again, the profitcollective.co/rookie for that.
Summer, this has been awesome.
Thank you for joining me.
I always get a kick out of stuff like this.
– No problem.
– Let’s wrap this thing up
with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
– If you think you can or you think you can’t,
you’re right.
So I get a lot of people say that they,
all the reasons they can’t start their side hustles.
So they can’t start their side hustle
because of where they live or, you know,
how much money they have or something like that.
And whether they think they can or they can’t,
they’re right because I had a girl
who messaged me just yesterday, actually,
and she said, “Oh, I would love to do what you do,
but I live in Italy and it’s a really small market here.”
And so I looked up the population of Australia in Italy
and I said, “Actually, you have doubled
the population of Australia.”
So that’s not an excuse.
So I think a lot of–
– Smaller geographically, yeah.
– Yeah, I’m like, so that can’t be an excuse.
So a lot of people think that, you know,
that I’m special because I live in Australia
or because I had a model agency
and I have a background in fashion and all these things.
But I think that all these things can be learned.
And yeah, you just have to have the right attitude
that you can make it work for you.
– Yeah, what an interesting business.
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t,
you are right, a little Henry Ford wisdom from that,
which was my one and only corporate job working for Ford.
– Oh, there you go.
– Obviously long after Henry passed,
but whether you think you can or think you can’t,
you are right.
Make sure to grab your free listener only bonus
for this week.
We’ve been talking about dresses,
but it’s just one of a lot of different things
that you can rent out for a profit.
So the listener bonus is 25 other unconventional rental
ideas that you might be able to borrow
some of Summers Playbook for.
And a lot of these different assets and products
already have these preexisting marketplaces
that you can tap into.
They’ve already kind of validated the demand
and gotten people used to saying,
well, hey, this is something that I don’t have to buy out,
this is something that I can rent
for just the time period that I need it.
So make sure to grab that.
It’s a free PDF download at the show notes for this episode.
You can follow the link in the episode description
and I’ll get you right over there.
Now, another recent rental episode
that we did, another example of this
was Gary Graywell’s moving box rental service
like renting out plastic bins.
Definitely an interesting one, episode 635.
He ended up partnering with a local moving company
to handle the storage and the delivery logistics
and was like, let’s take up a lot of space
if I got 50 or 100 of these things.
So you don’t have to scroll too far in the archives
to find that one and get 635.
And then another one from a year, year and a half ago
is 564 with Lenny Tim on his mobility scooter rental business.
He’s doing this in LA and yeah,
I think he had a fleet of six or seven of these
and he would deliver them to nearby hotels.
Like mostly for, you know, people, travelers, tourists,
people coming into LA from out of town,
like it doesn’t make sense to bring my own mobility scooter.
So I got a rent one while I’m in town
and he was making a few grand a month doing that on the side.
So lots of different things that you might be able to rent out
and you just start to notice these things
as you go to back to day to day.
And like, oh, what are those things
that are maybe a little more expensive
than you’d like to pay for something?
How many times are we really going to use that thing?
And dresses can check that box for those weddings
or those one-off events.
But Summer, thanks so much for sharing your insight.
Big thanks to our sponsors
for helping make this content free for everyone.
You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
Thank you for supporting the advertisers
that support the show.
That is it for me.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you find a value in the show,
the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
So fire off a text message to that fashionable friend of yours
and say, “Hey, have you ever thought about this?
Check this one out.”
Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen
and I’ll catch you in the next edition of The Side Hustle Show.
In 2022, Summer Fisher discovered the world of renting out dresses.
“Oh, well, I have all these dresses. Let me just put one up,” she told Yahoo Finance.
Now with a streamlined inventory of around 200 pieces, she made $150,000 last year using what she calls a “double-dip profit strategy” — renting dresses multiple times before selling them for more than she paid.
(Check out her free masterclass at theprofitcollective.co/RookieResellerMistakes.)
Tune in to episode 652 of The Side Hustle Show to learn:
- Summer’s favorite brands to rent out.
- Her pricing and profit margin math on her inventory.
- The logistics of shipping and selling dresses.
- and more.
Full Show Notes: $150k Renting Out Dresses as a Side Hustle
New to the Show? Get your personalized money-making playlist here!
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