服装租赁网站Rent the Runway的梦幻成名路

    但对自己正在从事的工作，弗雷斯根本就没有兴趣——她只是随波逐流。“我不知道一个人是否一定会喜欢上某项工作，”她说。“我觉得临界点可能出现在它占据了我太多生活空间的时候。我每天都工作很长时间，这份工作突然成为我生活的全部，我有点受不了了。”弗雷斯对现状不满的另一个迹象是：她利用周末经营一家名叫卡特招生服务(Carter Admissions)的公司，结果这个帮助高中生编辑大学申请文档的副业大获成功，带给她的满足感远胜过日常工作。（在哈佛商学院的第一年，她扩大了业务范围，同时开始提供网络服务。）

    她此前曾申请过哥伦比亚大学法学院(Columbia Law School)，获得了录取。但弗雷斯突然意识到，她并没有认真考虑过这是不是自己真正想要的东西。“我的确是在最后那一刻决定放弃的。我当时想，‘我并不是真的想当一名律师。如果是这样，我为什么要去上法学院啊？这时候申请商学院是不是太晚了？’”此后一个半月内，她参加了GMAT考试，向哈佛商学院递交了申请书，在第三轮面试中达成了心愿。

    开学第一天相识后，海曼和弗雷斯亲密无间地度过了商学院的第一学年。然后，在第二年的感恩节，海曼在妹妹的小衣柜前，经历了“灵光一现”的一刻。贝基解释了她被迫掏大价钱购买新衣服的苦衷之后，海曼问：“你为什么要买一件玛切萨礼服，而不是便宜一点的衣服呢？”【贝基当时是布卢明代尔百货公司(Bloomingdale's)的一名采购员；她现在为Rent the Runway工作】贝基回答说：“穿好衣服漂亮呗。”海曼发现一个人的自信程度与奢华着装存在联系，Rent the Runway就是她贯彻这一理念的成果。这门生意所利用的正是年轻女性对时尚形象和感觉的强烈渴望，即使她们并不具备购买高端服饰的财力。

    贝基不知不觉地发现了一个问题，而海曼认为她已经构想了一个模糊的解决方案。“我们为什么不把所有这些你再也不打算穿的衣服收集在一起，然后租给其他人，为你自己创造一个收入流呢？”她建议道。她们并没有真的打算把贝基的衣服租出去，但这件事不仅促使海曼开始思考为什么女性被迫盛装打扮这 抽象问题，还让她萌生了出租礼服的念头。

    假期后返回哈佛的第一天，海曼就利用午餐间隙给弗雷斯讲述了妹妹的衣柜故事。“我当时并没有产生借此机会创业的意图或想法，”她说。“每次回家时，我总是跟贝基和家人讨论这件事。但在我的脑子里，我真的不认为它可以成为一门生意。我只是觉得这样做肯定挺好玩。”

    尽管如此，海曼和弗雷斯还是决定尝试一下。为解决贝基和其他许多年轻女性面临的这个难题，她们制定了一张路线图。海曼和弗雷斯已经注意到、并开始思考两种市场趋势。其一是“共享经济”——对于许多商品，人们不再购买，转而采用了租赁方式。租赁的对象现在不仅仅是歌曲（比如Pandora公司提供的流媒体服务），影视作品（奈飞公司），甚至还包括汽车（比如Zipcar公司的轿车共享服务）。另一个动向是，Airbnb公司即将搭建一个公寓租赁平台。其次就是她们觉得不易衡量，愈演愈烈的名人崇拜现象。在Twitter和Facebook等社交平台的推动下，人们现在比以前更加关注金•卡戴珊这样的名媛和流行文化明星，以及她们身穿的奢侈品牌。越来越多的女性希望在社交媒体上炫耀自己的奢华服饰，打造自己的个人品牌。海曼说：“我们的文化正在潜移默化地促使所有人渴望这种99%的人都无力负担的生活方式。”    

    Yet Fleiss was never passionate about what she was doing -- she was coasting. "I didn't know that you necessarily would be or could be passionate about a job," she says. "And I guess the breaking point was once it became so much of my life, where it was like so many hours a day. It was suddenly the only thing I was doing. And that became a little much." A further sign of her restlessness: On weekends she was running a successful side business, Carter Admissions, that edited papers and prepared high school students to apply to colleges -- and enjoying it more than her real job. (During her first year at HBS, she expanded the concept and took it online.)

    She had applied to and gotten into Columbia Law School, but it occurred to her that she hadn't considered whether it was what she actually wanted. "I literally had this kind of last-minute, like, 'I don't really want to be a lawyer. What am I going to law school for? Is it too late to apply for business school?" Within a month and a half, she had taken the GMAT, applied to HBS, and gotten in during its third round.

    After meeting on that first day, Hyman and Fleiss stayed close throughout their first year of business school and into their second. Then, during Thanksgiving break in their second year, Hyman had her "eureka moment" in front of her little sister's closet. After Becky explained how she had felt forced to overpay for a new dress, Hyman asked, "Why did you buy a Marchesa dress, as opposed to a cheaper one?" (Becky at the time was a buyer for Bloomingdale's; she now works for Rent the Runway.) Becky answered, "I want to feel beautiful." Hyman noted the association between self-confidence and luxury, and has carried that idea through to Rent the Runway, a business that trades on the desire of young women to look and feel fancy even if their wallets aren't equipped to own the very highest-end designer gowns.

    There was a problem Becky had unwittingly identified, and Hyman thought she had an inkling of a way to solve it. "Why don't we take all these dresses that you're never wearing again," she proposed, "and rent them out to other people, and create an income stream for yourself?" They weren't about to actually do that using Becky's dresses, but it got Hyman thinking about the concept of renting dresses, as well as the more abstract question of why women felt pressure to dress up.

    On the first day back at Harvard after vacation, a Monday, Hyman related the closet story to Fleiss over lunch. "I didn't go into it with the intention or the thinking that we would actually start something," she says. "Every time I would go home, I would be talking about it with Becky and with my family. But in my head I didn't really think it would be a company. I just thought it was something fun that we were working on."

    Still, they did work on it. They laid out a map for how they could solve the problem that Becky and so many other young women like her were having. There were two trends in the market that Hyman and Fleiss had noticed and were contemplating. One was the "sharing economy" and movement from ownership to renting. It was happening in music (with streaming services like Pandora), television and film (Netflix), and even automobiles, with car-sharing services like Zipcar. (Soon there would also be Airbnb, for renting out people's apartments.) The second, less measurable phenomenon they perceived was an increased saturation of celebrity worship -- social platforms like Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) were making people more aware than ever before of socialites and pop-culture stars like Kim Kardashian, and what luxury brands they were wearing. Women increasingly wanted to develop their own personal brands via social media to show off their luxury. "Our culture is educating an entire population of people to aspire to this lifestyle that 99% of us can't afford," Hyman says.