ught of buying a frock for a single occasion that she was unlikely to wear again. “I knew I wanted a long black gown, and I knew I wouldn’t be reusing it,” she tells Inside Retail Weekly, “so I thought, instead of buying it, why don’t I rent it?”  Roseby jumped onto GlamCorner, Australia’s leading fashion rental site, ordered a dress she liked, wore it to the event and then mailed it back.  “It was so easy and filled a need in a way that was really great to engage with,” Roseby says.  It was her first experience with modern fashion rental, but it wouldn’t be her last. Earlier this year, Roseby bumped into GlamCorner co-founder and CEO Dean Jones at a retail event, and the two quickly got to talking about the possibility of a partnership.  “We spoke about the rental business model and how customers are wanting to experiment with fashion now,” Roseby recalls. “Country Road designs really beautiful quality pieces that people love. It made perfect sense for us to partner with them.” Make it work The first collection of Country Road clothes and accessories became available for rent to subscribers of GlamCorner’s new subscription service, GC Premium, last month, and reportedly was well received by customers.  “We regularly ask our customers about the brands we should stock, and a name that kept coming up was Country Road,” Jones tells IRW. Subscribers can pay either $99 per month for one box of three designer items, or $149 per month for unlimited boxes. Other brands available for rent through GC Premium include Ginger & Smart and Trelise Cooper. Unlike most other brands on GlamCorner, however, Country Road doesn’t have a history of wholesaling to other retailers. It controls distribution of its products through its own bricks-and-mortar stores, concessions and e-commerce site.  “This is an Australian-first for Country Road,” Jones says. “That’s pretty exciting.” According to Roseby, it wasn’t difficult to accommodate the wholesale partnership with GlamCorner, even though Country Road doesn’t have a dedicated team to manage it.  “Because we design in-house at Country Road, it was easy for them to come in and see our collection and say, ‘We’d really like to take a bit of this and that’ and make more informed decisions,” Roseby says.  “We made sure to have the planning team in the room, so they could answer any questions around delivery and supply. The [initial] orders were relatively small, so we were able to pull those quantities from our orders and send them to GlamCorner.”  Even if the order volume increases in the future, Roseby says Country Road simply needs to know the quantity before it books its fabrics.  “It’s all about lead times,” she says.  A growing trend The retailer has good reason to continue working with GlamCorner; the fashion rental market is growing rapidly, driven by increased awareness of the environmental impact of fast fashion and changing consumer attitudes around the sharing economy.  “We know this isn’t a fad, we know it’s a growing trend, we know there is a shift in how customers are engaging with fashion,” Roseby says.  Allied Market Research estimates the rental market is growing at a rate of 10.6 per cent CAGR and will reach $1.9 billion by 2023. Recently, major retailers in the US, such as Bloomingdales, Banana Republic and Urban Outfitters, have launched their own rental services. “The modern retailer sees fashion rental as an important part of their offering,” Jones says. “It’s becoming a third [way] to distribute your brand.” Most of the fashion brands GlamCorner deals with no longer worry about cannibalising their sales by getting into the rental market.  “We haven’t had those questions for years,” Jones says. “Brands realise it’s incremental revenue.”  According to Jones, most GlamCorner customers previously shopped with major global fast fashion retailers, spending $79 to $99 per garment, while most garments on GlamCorner have an RRP of $200 or more. “Our platform increases brands’ access to a segment of the market they weren’t reaching before,” he says.  Guided by data Roseby agrees, noting that Country Road sees rental as an ‘and’ business. “There are people who will always buy, and there are people who will both buy and rent. It isn’t replacing a purchase, it’s about being able to tap into the opportunity of a customer who is going to rent anyway. We know millennials are interested in renting, but it’s not as if everyone is going to be renting their whole wardrobe,” she says.  Roseby imagines some consumers will decide to rent fashion-forward items they may not be able to justify on a cost-per-wear basis, though she believes there will always be customers who fall in love with a garment and need it in their wardrobe.  Ultimately, she says the brand will be guided by the data GlamCorner provides about customer demand: “Are they wanting basics, or the pointy edge of fashion? What does that mean for Spring Racing Carnival or New Year’s Eve?” “It’s very early days,” she says. “Right now, we don’t have any financial expectations, we’re really just excited and interested to see how GlamCorner customers engage with the brand, and we’re proud that we can be part of the circular fashion conversation.”