服装租赁网站Rent the Runway的梦幻成名路

    今年新年前夜，许多手头拮据的女性不约而同地登陆Rent the Runway，希望租赁（而不是购买）一件时尚别致的礼服。本文摘自《财富》杂志推出的新书《变焦：用令人惊讶的方式改变职业生涯》(Zoom: Surprising Ways to Supercharge Your Career)。珍妮弗•海曼和珍妮弗•弗雷斯和我们分享了她们的创业故事。所有这一切都始于海曼妹妹衣柜中一件价值不菲的礼服。

    2008年，正在哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)读二年级的珍妮弗•海曼回到纽约市过感恩节。她的妹妹贝基趁机炫耀了一番她刚刚购买的玛切萨(Marchesa)礼服，她打算在那个周末穿上这件价值1,600美元的衣服参加一场婚礼。

    这个价码远远超出了贝基的预算。海曼发现贝基的衣柜里还有“数不胜数的其他衣服”，于是就问妹妹，为什么不能穿其中一件呢？贝基给出了三个理由：她不再喜欢其中任何一件；她已经被拍到穿过所有这些衣服了（而这场婚礼的照片无疑将传遍Facebook）；她无法忍受重复着装。

    贝基面临的问题非常简单：一柜子的衣服，但没什么可穿。她的姐姐从中看到了商机。她向自己的朋友珍妮弗•弗雷斯讲述了这个故事，于是两人后来一起创建了一家专门出租女士晚礼服的网站Rent the Runway，这家现在已经大红大紫的网站被人们称为“服装版奈飞公司(Netflix)”。

    两条起初迥然不同的职业路径最终引导海曼和弗雷斯在恰当的时机相聚在了一起。海曼在纽约市外的新罗谢尔长大，在那里上高中时，她的课外活动非常丰富，多得简直有些可笑。每一场校园剧都少不了她的身影，她上声乐课和舞蹈课，还是学校排球队成员，戏剧俱乐部和辩论俱乐部主席，而且经常在周末参加旨在帮助自闭症青少年的志愿者工作。在新罗谢尔高中( New Rochelle High School)的毕业典礼上，她理所当然地成为代表所在班级致告别辞的不二人选。

    在哈佛大学，海曼成为塞内卡俱乐部( The Seneca)的首批会员。就像她和弗莱斯后来创办 Rent the Runway一样，加入这家成立于1999年的女性组织是她热衷于解决问题的早期例证。那么，海曼认为塞内卡俱乐部解决了什么问题呢？答案是，一种男性占主导地位、洋溢着过时的阳刚之气的校园文化。“校园里有各种各样的男性俱乐部，加入这些组织的男生相互联络，成为终身朋友，毕业后在职场上相互提携，”她说。“但女生就没有任何类似的组织。于是，我加入了这个小型女性团体，和其他成员一起在哈佛大学掀起了一场社会运动，现在校园内有几十家女性俱乐部。”她认识的许多事业有成的女企业家都曾经是塞内卡俱乐部的会员。

    This New Year's Eve, women on a budget will head online to Rent the Runway in order to borrow, not buy, a chic ensemble. In this excerpt from Fortune's new book Zoom: Surprising Ways to Supercharge Your Career, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss share the story of how they created the company. It all started with an overpriced dress hanging in a little sister's closet.

    In 2008, Jennifer Hyman was in New York City on Thanksgiving break from her second year at Harvard Business School when her younger sister Becky showed off a $1,600 Marchesa dress she had just purchased for a wedding that weekend.

    The price tag was far out of Becky's budget, and Hyman, after seeing the "kazillion other dresses" in Becky's closet, asked her sister why she couldn't just wear one of those. The three-pronged answer: She didn't like any of them anymore; she had already been photographed in all of them (and pictures from the wedding would go all over Facebook); and she couldn't stand to repeat an outfit.

    In Becky's straightforward problem -- a closetful of dresses, but nothing to wear -- her older sister saw a business opportunity. She brought the story back to her friend Jennifer Fleiss, and together they created Rent the Runway, a now-popular website for renting women's evening-wear that has been called a "Netflix for dresses."

    Two different early career paths ultimately led Hyman and Fleiss to each other at just the right time. Hyman grew up outside New York City in New Rochelle, where her high school extracurricular-activity list was almost comically long. She was in every school play. She took voice lessons and dance classes. She was on the volleyball team. She was president of the theater club and the debate club. She did volunteer work with autistic teens on weekends. And, inevitably, she ended up valedictorian of her class at New Rochelle High School.

    At Harvard, Hyman was a member of the first class of The Seneca, a women's organization created in 1999. The group was an early example of her being involved in something that solved a problem, as she and Fleiss would later do with Rent the Runway. The problem that Hyman believes The Seneca addressed? An on-campus culture that was male-dominated and masculine in its outdated traditions. "There were all these male clubs where men would network with each other, become lifelong friends, and help each other get jobs afterward," she says. "There was nothing like that for women. So I was part of this small group of women who created what became kind of a social movement at Harvard, and now there are dozens of female clubs on campus." Many of the most entrepreneurial and successful women she knows from Harvard were in The Seneca.