The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - $150k Renting Out Dresses: How to Start a Dress Rental Business.

I put up two dresses and then one day I was just sitting in my car at my daughter's chair practice and one of them rented and I got a notification that it rented and I was like oh my god I just rented a dress but like now what do I do? I do 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. You can work on a consumer model so you can go to all your friends and family and say who's got dresses they want me to rent you could get started that way. It's really interesting to think about it as like an asset class in general because Pific that I'm crazy because I did put a hundred grand into dresses like in that first year a people were like what are you doing?

And I said well it's an asset that I can resell afterwards for the same price I paid for if not more and it's giving me cash flow in between for pretty low amount of work. A hundred fifty thousand dollars renting out dresses what's up what's up Nick Loper here welcome to the side hustle show because you're nine to five they make you a living but your five tonight makes you alive and here's a side hustle that earned just a hundred and sixty bucks in its first month I came from just two customers but it was enough it was enough traction to know that she was on to something since then I guess it has scaled to over two hundred different garments bringing in a hundred fifty thousand dollars in rental income last year she is at the profit collective on Instagram summer Fisher 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 want to 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 put together a list of twenty five other unconventional things that you can make money renting out that is yours free to download out the show notes for this episode just follow the link in the episode description and it'll get you right over there now summer 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 and flip it by low sell high like simple yeah so what what inspired the shift to the rental business well I'm actually still race selling and it is actually probably still a bigger part of my business um I saw an opportunity yeah so I saw an opportunity for the renting so what happened is um I've had a model agency for 15 years that started as another side hustle which is a story for another day um 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 well what's that what 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 you know rent them online and I thought okay and I just thought they were going to rent them on I know 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 all already kind of um flipping dresses on the side um and had built a whole business around that as well and so I decided I just put up all the dresses I had um no like actually first I put up two dresses um and that was in October of 2022 um and I put up two dresses 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 had rented and I was like oh my god I just rented a dress but like now what do I do um I didn't really understand it and I just kind of went all in um 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 um it kind of grew from there and then I started buying dresses specifically two rents so yeah okay okay I love this you know side hustles on side hustles right what are you doing how could I you know 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 yeah 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 it's like a double dip profit strategy is what I call it so basically yeah you're getting 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 yeah to wait for it to get back well I went at rents I do take it off from being available for sale yeah got it so those first couple you get that notification hey this is somebody uh somebody wanted to rent this thing there was a marketplace that had some existing demand of of renters versus you trying to build an audience build a following build a two-sided marketplace so whereas like hey rent from me it's like no no no there's already some existing validation and demand for it yes definitely yeah there's online sites where you can rent addresses 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 in the UK is buy rotation so there's several of these type of websites and they're kind of peer-to-peer lending so basically you're putting up 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 barrow or steal is that one or was that just like for buying handbags I don't know if it was a rental service too not sure I'm trying to make a link to rent 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 what's a sweet spot for you cost of acquisition like brand style and there's a lot of different factors that might must go into the purchase site of it to decide well what 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 addressed 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 yeah it'll be 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 yeah 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 like girls in the early 20s 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 still try and assource this stuff second hand or are you now comfortable say I could buy it off the rack I could buy it new to rent and then you kind of like a car rental is like I'm gonna rent it out for a year then I'm gonna resell it yeah I would say that mostly I buy it 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 like 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 US yeah you're gonna be throwing out brand names that go way over like all right I'll take your word for but if you're in that space like if you know what is what is hot what is in style and yeah you can absolutely play around with that and so for the rental side is I can imagine it's gotta be local like you're not gonna ship something halfway around the world for a rental no no yeah so the majority of my reselling is actually like I sell a lot to the US and the UK and probably more than Australia but with 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 out 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 pick it up they were 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 like now this is this is the one you ordered here yeah yeah okay so inspired to do it a model at the modeling agency it 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 is 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 dressers you want to 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 buy a size that size for yourself. Got it so it's okay to have the same style that other people have but yeah maybe try and fill in the gaps on some sizes that you don't find readily available yeah or you want to be first to market like you want to be the first one to have it and get it listed and then 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 it 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 it does do those little pop-ups it 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 sold 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 got to learn the ins and outs like any like any business once you once you're in it you can't see it any other way but for the outside okay I like this little trick of like oh okay you know it's booked up the next three weekends it must be in demand yeah yeah our friend friend of ours used to do this for wedding and like you said like mid late 20s like peak wedding attendance season yeah we're yeah sickleware in the same thing over and over again so she'd try something new and yeah I forget how much does it cost to rent address these days um like the absolute lace estimate out would be $80 but um like I have I have like four dresses that are about two and a half grand retail each and I rent those for three fifty per rental I like you have to pull my jaw off the floor like 2500 for like I've heard of wedding dresses yes costing that much but just like a regular regular yeah it shows you how much I know about it's really beautiful Nick it's really beautiful I'm sure this summer the last article of clothing that I rented was a tuxedo for senior prop like and it was I don't remember how much it was it's probably 80 bucks but yeah okay so obviously the higher retail price the more you can command on the on the rental side absolutely definitely and that's helpful to have a range of 80 to three hundred fifty dollars per rental is there a rule like you know a percentage of the retail price or something like that did you go by yeah I think like generally you want to get your money back within three to four rentals um but yeah if you had a paid if if I had a paid full price for like that dress that's worth two and a half thousand dollars obviously I wouldn't have made that back in four rentals but um yeah usually if you there's a way to find usually ten twenty percent off at least on full retail when you're buying something so once you've done that and um 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've buying it pre-loved um you know my set pop up on eBay or D-pop and I'll get my money back in one rental yeah actually you have like brand name alerts that that opinion when oh such and such um inventory just 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 I'm sourcing every day so um 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 um 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 class to get dresses in there at jammed warning years and who knows like I don't know I'm no concept of what the brands are but you know maybe it's a timeless style that people would be searching for like is that branded keyword type of search like is that 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 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 um that you know they've seen it come up and in the campaign photos or whatever some celebrities wanted and influencers put it on their Instagram they're like I want to wear that dress and they go looking for a brand so yeah what brands do you like um so for us in Australia and actually a lot of these brands kind of are the same ones as as in the US or UK but like the Australian kind of based brands are like Zimmerman age or ours if you like to be fancy in that way um I rent a lot of um what else there's origin is a big one for me um alama alama is probably the biggest brand that I rent which is um it's only been around a couple of years but it's kind of in that style of Zimmerman as well um so yeah they're the kind of brands I guess all right not like it's all it's all foreign to me but it's yeah it's helpful to know I mean you could go on I imagine any of these marketplaces and see what um you wear the demand seems to be so yeah that that makes sense aside from the marketplace and maybe on the marketplace are there listing best practices are you modeling the the photos you're tapping into the people from the modeling agency to like take these dress photos for you like what 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 reselling so um with reselling 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 um yeah there's no modeling involved okay my modeling day is a long gone I have three kids so yeah I'm not I'm not going to be modeling any mores fair enough fair enough um and you could probably get like customer pictures back at some point I don't know but like that's not important okay no I think if you're using Instagram as a rental platform which a lot a lot of people do um so a lot of people will just rent straight off people's Instagram profiles um then they will use a lot of like customer photos and things like that for sure well so this would be trying to create your own demand like build up an influencer profile and you know hey if you like the style you can actually rent this thing if you're if you happen to be the same size as me uh you can you can you can you can you can you just no they're just rental companies so they just say like you know XYZ rentals um and then they'll go into maybe the Facebook groups online and say I'm 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 Gacha how much what's a typical commission fee I think it's like 16 and a half percent is what we pay on the vault um and I assume it's similar on 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 yeah for you the transaction they're facilitating yeah they actually do the majority of the customer service too um 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 and syndicating the listing like if there are multiple platforms like well I might as well put it on Facebook marketplace and offer up and you know I might we end eBay like I'm going to syndicate it or is it like no no no I want to be uh you know I want to focus all my energy on to this one like vault platform for example yeah I think that I 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 um 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 well there's your next side hustle is the inventory management software for address rental it's like a very niche sucker like to manage the listings oh it got rented out I better take it down off of this other platform yeah I did start I did um create like a notion kind of you know database type thing but all right all right yeah yeah so I do it did I 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 on like fees but you know you still don't have the dress and you need the dress so yeah yeah yeah I promise that to the next customer yeah what and so there's an element of logistical challenges anytime you're moving physical inventory around but what if you found here in terms of sticking it in the mail and making sure it doesn't get damaged in transit and you know 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 the last words of things that could go wrong yeah I guess that yeah there is a lot of things that can go wrong especially I've noticed a lot more than them reselling like there is yeah there's more things that go wrong with the renting I guess I I've been pretty lucky with the post I haven't I think I've maybe had one thing go missing ever so that's been good I a lot of these platforms do offer insurance and you pay you know five ten dollars per 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 have they want you to go to two separate dry cleaners and get stat decks from those two you know 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 you just got to 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 decide to just self-insure you get a lot of people who yeah just don't want to send it back they go oh but I'll buy it from you and I'm gonna let no it's actually not for sale I've got like ten rentals coming up on it so you can't have it so what happens in that case or what do you do like do you I mean eventually you know it's like the late fees at the library where you know I can't afford to return this book because I can't afford to pay the late fee or is that like but 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 they get to keep the dress but like because a lot of these dresses that people want like completely sold out and I think that's one of the biggest drivers is that they they would buy it but they can't so they have to rent it and then I did have one case that went it was crazy I had this go 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 people can just in I put the dress in a garment bag and they can just come pick it up and she came picked it and then four days later it was time to bring it back and I'm the dress didn't come back and like the next day you know sent 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 bringing it back and then all these excuses started and then I got you know 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 you know going to the police she did get charged because she'd done it to so many people like more than 20 people but yeah she kept she said oh I'll meet you at the police station and and give everyone their dresses back and then of course she never showed up it was like a whole thing so yeah wow some crazies out there I can tell you about yeah anytime you deal with the public you open yourself up to just you know random stuff you never probably would have considered a couple years ago it getting started but you're like yeah white you know why can't people just be decent to each other I don't know yeah yeah okay so but for the most part you know send it off in the mail they send it back yeah is customer responsible for cleaning or he's like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna introduce that wild card I'm gonna go clean it myself when it gets back yeah so you so the platforms like to say that you have to dry clean everything but I learned 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 do they have to be ironed afterwards you have a team member who comes over like ironed this stuff it's like my least favorite activity oh really um no I I iron it it's it's not too bad it's yeah like like I said like some of the stuff that's dry cleaned obviously comes um already 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 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 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 like a complex spreadsheet or count like you mentioned the notion template what's what's what's on on the you know trying to figure out in my mind it might be weeks before I even notice that something hasn't gotten returned but like it seems like you gotta be on top of it because like oh shoot I owe this to another customer next week yeah definitely like when I have 350 dresses I did employ someone like I just had it like an assistant and she was ticking off dresses as I come in you 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 um 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 um so yeah I'm not I'm not super like rigid in like taking 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 yeah and I see some of them stored behind you in the video you just you know a closet space spare bedroom space that where there being stored yeah this is a converted double garage um that I converted this was my office for the model agency and now it's my reselling rental room I guess um so I have a wall to take my photos for the reselling and then yeah just keep everything in here on racks you could easily keep it just in a small bedroom floor um probably yeah with the closet would be pretty hard with 200 dresses maybe if you had like 70 or 80 you could keep it in a closet yeah 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 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 um so I have to be on the drop um 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 um if it's yeah a really popular style and then the biggest risk is there's no 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 um because then it's super easy just to offload at anyone will buy something that's sold out for 20 like if 10% off even um or 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 um it's not it's the downside isn't too bad like you would think that you'd be stuck with um 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 okay so they come back damage 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 yeah hinder your rentals because people are just going to be like no I don't want to pay a deposit um so yeah it you can if you want but you won't be renting that many dresses probably okay and so it's just kind of you what happens if you get it back and be like dude there's a huge tear down the side like yeah did you expect me not to notice that what do you yeah or or or people more up front and be like oh I'm so sorry you know I yeah you got it snapped on yeah you get a bit of both so you get um you do get people that are like oh I'm so sorry like I broke the zip um 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 um 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 how'd it the moon like it 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 um yeah sometimes they just come back destroyed um 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 um the platforms will follow up to a degree um 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 and also I'd like to try and get them to pay or I think you could take it to small claims I do see people um you know those girls in their in their 20s they get they get on the Facebook groups and start ranting and saying that they're going to take things to small claims court of things like that I just you know I'm too old for that stuff so I'm just like whatever um and yeah sometimes you can sell stuff with damage you just disclose the damage you say look um the Hems you know 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 like it stores expects some level of shoplifting unfortunately like it's just yeah exactly it's a cost to do in business and you know hopefully you're diversified enough in terms of transaction volume that you know a couple bad things that happen are just kind of part for the course yeah exactly it's exactly like shoplifting that's how I always explain it um you know you've got to expect that some bad things happen but for the most part it's pretty good okay and then after like if you have something that's really hot like oh it's been rented a bunch of times is there a a rule of thumb okay it's getting worn out like I got I got to resell it or like I have just let's ride this cash cow let's see how many more times can we get rented like is there a metric or some sort of yeah rule of thumb there for like when is it time to flip and and get out get out before it gets too cold yeah I think um I think it just comes down to experience so I don't think there's like a spreadsheet or I could say if it's rented 10 times it will depend on the materials so certain materials will hold up better than others um and yeah you've got to say something that silk probably doesn't hold up usually that well as opposed to something that's like a hundred percent linen will usually go quite well um 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 like 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 second hand 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 to hold in it or whatever but like yeah that the expectations aren't too bad I think that I mean you get the odd one who's like oh this should be brand new wise and this brand new but yeah people do expect that it that it's been worn um so yeah that's fair it's like getting in a rental car or even like a vacation rental like you know that other people have been in there okay that's yeah that's fair so yeah I guess as far as so when to flip it I I guess if yeah if it just starts to look really tired and old then I'll probably just flip it um 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 um 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 okay yeah so it could come down to cash flow or um 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 um 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 assets of that I never would have considered but here are these marketplaces that need people like you and like summer to to fill the inventory here so yeah that's 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 in the weddings tomorrow like yeah sorry I can't help you like what happens yeah you don't definitely get that um I guess people always think they're skinnier than they are so it's always usually it's too small um 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 um 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 a for good will 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 do it um like well first of all they'll ask you for a try on service so they'll say oh can you just pay 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 um so they just want to pay for the post they're like oh I won't I won't wear it which is a bit silly um 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 that's code from where it all weekend yeah yeah yeah so many ins and outs in in this um industry that's yeah that's kind of crazy so I'm picturing a day in the life especially during busy season um checking inventory levels like managing the in and out of receiving stuff in taking it to the cleaners dry clean you know dry cleaning it ironing and then sending out kind of the next weekend's batch of inventory like anything else is 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 so much easier than like um 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 a with the rent he gets like that I just kind of chuck up whatever is on the website and it takes like two seconds um so yeah like a day in the life is basically the postman comes and drops off um packages at my door at about eight o'clock in the morning um and then I just bring them inside so no one will steal them and then um I can you know put this up and watch him see you're like yeah this woman gets a lot of mail what's going on yeah yeah they they're like well because I have the stuff reselling coming to so I get a lot of packages yeah honey but yeah the posting and I are on good terms he knows he knows where the side gate is if I if the big gate's closed so um yeah he just comes and drops it off and um 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 um I'll just maybe at about three o'clock I'll start packaging up it takes me maybe an hour to do I don't know seven or eight dresses if I need to do that many and package them up and take them to the post office around the corner I actually could have the post you come and pick it up but we just take it to our post office um and then that's it drop the other stuff off at the dry cleaner yeah it's it's not it's not time intensive it's not a time intensive it's more of a capital intensive business I would say yeah but there are ways to you can start with no money down um which is you know something that I teach to my students so basically um if you want to get started the two ways you can get um 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 who's got dresses they want me to rent um yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you could you could get started that way or the other way is um 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 it 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 um and at least then if you have gotten that piece that rents you've already recouped you know a third of your investments straight off the bat before you've actually had to pay any money out okay that's intro and I imagine a lot of stores have that similar even if it's a 30 day return policy yeah yeah it kind of gives you a little risk way to validate the demand or test the demand yeah or if you just want to try it out yeah that's fair well you've got the rental business you've got the profit collective you've got the reselling business what's yeah what's next for you what are you excited about this year um so yeah I've been I put out courses on on the reselling so I have a course called pre-loved for 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 um because I just it just kind of blew up pretty big so um yeah I'm just gonna keep teaching women how to do what I'm doing basically oh man if they want to learn but I obviously I should I should I never ask like is there a market for like I'm gonna rent out a suit or like men or 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 so that there's not many parts of the country that are like cold enough for coats all the time like there is um elsewhere but I'm sure that you probably could do do things with men's stuff um 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 because there's been you know decades since I've gotten any new clothes but it's it's such an interesting one and it's like oh maybe I don't know 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 whereas yeah there's more people doing it on the on the dress rental side it's more established it's more of a thing but I you know it's really interesting to think about it as like an asset class in general because I think that I'm crazy because I did put a hundred grand into dresses like in that first year a people were like what are you doing like um and I said well but it's an it's an asset that I can resell afterwards for the same price I paid for it if not more um and it's giving me cash flow in between for pretty you know a low amount of work so um 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 um people you know might be able to save say 30 grand for a for a house deposit but that's not enough for a house deposit you need 200 grand here because like the average house prices are 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 a 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 it's you know despite the wear and tear into appreciation like I don't know I think it's really it's really interesting something that we never ever when your your email came across is like what what a random thing I don't know so yeah I could get 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 profit collective dot co slash rookie you can join her free master class on the three biggest mistakes that newbies are making when starting a pre-loved clothing business again the profit collective dot co slash rookie for that summer there's been awesome thank you for joining me I always get a kick out of stuff like this 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 I would love to do what I you do but I live in Italy and it's a really small market here and I 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 smaller you know smaller geographically yeah yeah I'm like so that can't be an excuse so a lot of people think that you 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 obviously long 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 summer's playbook for and a lot of these different assets and products already have these pre-existing marketplaces that you can tap into they've already kind of validated the demand and gotten people used to say well hey this is something that I don't have to buy outright this is something I can rent for just the time period that I need it so make sure to grab that it's 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 as I was getting take up a lot of space if I got 50 or 100 of these things so you don't switch to scroll too far in the archives to find that one again 635 and then another one from the 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 you 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 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 you might be able to rent out and you start to notice these things as you're going to have to date a day and I'm like oh what you know one of those things that are maybe a little more expensive than you'd like to pay you know for something how many how many times I am 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 side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place and 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 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 hustle on