Building followership and inspiration around female leadership is quite difficult to do.
— Jennifer Hyman
I think that life is difficult. People have challenges. Family members get sick, people get older, you don't always get the job or the promotion that you want. You have conflicts in your life. And really, life is about your resilience and your ability to go through your life and all of the ups and downs with a positive attitude.
Like any startup in hyper-growth mode, growth often brings change, and with it, evolution in the executive team.
I actually think that self-expression comes, sometimes, from what you wear, and having the freedom to be able to wear whatever you want for whatever mood you want to wear it, but to not feel frivolous that all of those things that help you self-express have to be things that you're committing to forever.
At Rent the Runway, we rent designer clothes. We have a belief set that half of the closet over time is going to move into the cloud, and a portion of what we wear every single day will be comprised of things that we don't own forever.
Even though she's my younger sister, Becky's definitely a role model in my life. She's the most genuinely positive person I've ever met.
Around the year 2000, businesses around the country went 'business casual.'
Be brave and take accountability for your thoughts and beliefs.
I dream of democratizing the fashion industry by giving everyone access to feeling their most beautiful and powerful every day and, at the same time, using technology to modernize how we get dressed.
I was sexually harassed while building Rent the Runway - propositioned, sent sexual text messages, harassed and threatened in person.
I'm an auditory learner, and if you put something into a song, I'll remember it forever.
My contribution to Rent the Runway as the CEO is higher than the contribution of someone on my warehouse team, but my pregnancy is not any more important than the pregnancy of any single person who works at my company.
It's amazing how much misinformation there is about pregnancy and how many myths are still ingrained into our culture.
As a little kid, I would watch Oprah almost every day.
I'm totally obsessed with Italian food and Mexican food.
I had this thesis that we had entered the experience economy. People were getting married later and starting to value experiences like travel over owning things.
The most important thing to Ben and me was starting a family, so as soon as we got engaged, we booked Gurney's in Montauk - which is just a few miles down the beach from our summer home - as our wedding venue a full year and a half out, and then we immediately started trying to get pregnant.
I want to put H&M and Zara out of business.
The first core value we have is that everyone deserves a Cinderella experience. And I have experienced a Cinderella experience. And I really believe that most people who've come to Rent the Runway have had a Cinderella experience.
Every single person around the world has this storage facility in their bedroom, and we call it a closet, and 80 percent of the stuff in that storage facility is worn three times or less in its lifetime.
I have no desire to sell Rent the Runway. I have a 50-year vision for Rent the Runway, at least, to change consumer behavior and actually put the closet in the cloud.
Our goal is to teach young women who were brought up on H&M and Forever 21 that designer clothes are expensive for a reason. They're works of art.
I can grow as a leader only if I'm willing to accept feedback.
We're in the '100 percent return' business. This is driving millions of new customers into brands; most of our customers are wearing brands they've never tried before.
I sleep around 8 hours, but I tend to wake up several times a night with constant dreams, thoughts, and ideas related to Rent the Runway.
In many cases, women are being harassed by people who are on their board or who are associated with one of their venture capitalists.
I think about people like Jeff Bezos or Reed Hastings, and I really marvel at the stamina they've had to keep on trucking no matter what happens.
I want to have an 'Eat, Pray, Love' experience where I drop off the face of the planet and move to Greece.
If your work isn't mission-driven or emotionally resonant to you, it will be very hard to maintain passion and focus over a long period of time, which is critical in entrepreneurship.
In the morning at home, I'm not functioning as an entrepreneur - I completely limit technology and any work-think - I'm functioning as a mom and a wife.
I think a lot of people might've and probably did have the idea of renting clothes before me. I was the only one who was crazy enough to attempt it.
I think, so often, female cofounders are positioned in this competitive, catty way. It's just awful. It's not reality.
When choosing vendors for my wedding, I intentionally searched for women who were at the beginning of their own founder journeys.
I've always loved artists - creative, spontaneous, laid-back people - but I wasn't meeting these types in real life. So I figured that, given I run a technology company, I should also trust technology to help me find the love of my life.
The more time goes by, the more things will happen to you in your life. And the ability to be positive throughout and look for the good in people, look for the good in situations - it's so important.
People feel extremely comfortable with me personally.
People should think about their closets like they think about a stock portfolio. There are things you want to invest in; you make those investments, and those are your blue chips. So you should invest in a great pair of jeans, in a great cashmere sweater.
All that Rent the Runway has really done is we've opened up the technology and logistics to make it possible to have the customer decide how long she needs an article of clothing for.
I try to work with people the way they prefer.
What's interesting about the transportation market is that you're often dabbling in multiple categories. The same person who might own a car is still using Uber, is still using a taxi, still might go to Avis on a business trip and rent a car.
When you buy something for $9.99, and you know that it'll fall apart after you wear it once... you're going into the shopping experience knowing that you're renting. So all I'm doing is making the rental process more efficient.
Fashion should be a daily convenience, not a daily chore.
There are a lot of subtle things that are harder to stamp out of a culture in terms of male entrepreneurs being mentored more than female entrepreneurs... male entrepreneurs getting several strikes against them before they're kind of let go, whereas female entrepreneurs, it's kind of one strike and you're out.
I've found that entrepreneurship only gets harder every year, and as your team gets bigger, the stakes get higher.
Our company wouldn't exist and wouldn't be around without our warehouse employees and our call center employees. And these employees - not just at Rent the Runway but at tens of thousands of other companies throughout the country - are treated unequally.
Founders are often great storytellers because they're in the business of constantly selling a dream against all odds.
I'm bad at hiding my emotions.
When I feel like the day is great? Pasta. When I feel like I want the day to be great? Pasta. It's just awesome.
When you don't have to buy something, it allows you to try new things.
As a female founder and CEO, it is important to me to support other women as they build their businesses.
