The fashion accessories rental company Vivrelle started as a purely online business before opening its first showroom in New York City. Now, the 7-year-old luxury membership club is branching out with its first retail store, a pop-up in collaboration with Revolve’s FWRD brand in the Hamptons.
Pop-ups and physical retail are just one of the tactics Vivrelle is using as it enters a growth period. Vivrelle is having its best month ever, in terms of revenue, as market conditions are favoring alternative business models like rental and resale.
Vivrelle’s pop-up, which opened on May 23 and will remain open through the summer, is in Bridgehampton. The location was selected because it’s on the main road of Montauk Highway which connects many popular vacation destinations in the Hamptons. In another first for the company, it will let customers buy items outright, in addition to renting them. The pop-up comes on the heels of several other big projects from Vivrelle, including a partnership with Revolve last month and the development of a new AI styling tool called Ella AI, set to debut later this summer.
As other rental services like Nuuly continue to grow, Vivrelle’s founders said there’s one thing rental companies must invest in to stay competitive: inventory. Geffens said having a wide variety of inventory is essential to staying ahead in the rental business where customers want as many options as possible. Both Vivrelle’s existing showroom in New York City and its pop-up in the Hamptons have thousands of styles and products on-hand at any given time.
“As we enter the hyper-growth period of the business, it’s important to have a lot of inventory,” Wayne Geffen said. “Whether that’s emerging brands or classic brands, we always want to have what our customer wants. And what our members see now is us ramping up our inventory.”
While Vivrelle’s inventory skews heavily toward classic brands — the catalogue is chock full of Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta — Blake Geffen said emerging brands are also an important part of the business. Khaite, The Row, Cult Gaia and Staud are some of the newer brands that have been added to Vivrelle’s catalog. Blake Geffen said these newer brands often see just as much demand as classics like Chanel and Prada.
“People know the big brands and they know they want to borrow from them,” Blake Geffen said. “But when we launched some smaller brands as a trial, on the first day, they were all gone. And it was a good amount of inventory. Our members loved it, and they’re really open to testing new things with us.”
Keeping inventory in stock is one of the perennial challenges for rental and resale companies. Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman said on the company’s most recent earnings call in April that “[our] data over the last five years has led us to believe that an investment in inventory is the greatest lever to unlocking customer growth and supporting customer retention.” Nuuly, which has swiftly become a leader in the space with 60% revenue growth this quarter and nearly 400,000 subscribers, carries hundreds of brands at any given time.
Vivrelle raised $35 million in 2022 from investors including Origin Ventures as well as actresses Lily Collins and Nina Dobrev. The Geffens declined to share current membership numbers, but as of 2022, it had tens of thousands of members. The business has been profitable since shortly after its inception.
As for how tariffs may affect the business, Wayne Geffen it’s still too early for Vivrelle to say definitively what the impact will be.
“Ultimately, the tariffs should help the resale market,” he said. “Personally, I think it will help and hurt us. It helps because we have product already within the United States, but also with the volume of inventory we have, we get product from around the world. Japan is actually one of the largest resale markets in the world, and we get a lot of inventory from there. So it’s been a net positive from a consumer standpoint since it’s driving more people to us — but it could hurt, too.”
