Jennifer Hyman and the closet that wouldn’t stand still

Jennifer Hyman’s sister had a closet full of clothes and a reason to buy another dress. There was a wedding coming up. There were photographs of the old outfits on Facebook. There was, in other words, an audience. Home for Thanksgiving in 2008, Hyman saw an expensive purchase that made little financial sense. Her sister Becky saw the perfectly reasonable cost of appearing as someone new.

That disagreement became Rent the Runway. It also offers a useful introduction to Hyman, whose career has involved taking desires that can sound frivolous and examining them with considerable seriousness. A dress worn once contains an economic problem. A wardrobe contains an emotional one. Getting dressed, apparently, requires rather more infrastructure than a hanger.

In September 2026, she became chief executive of Babylist, after stepping down from the company she co-founded with Jennifer Fleiss. The merchandise has changed. The recurring interest is recognizable: what happens when a person enters a new chapter, wants different things, and discovers that shopping for them is unnecessarily difficult?

The dress was already in the photograph

Hyman grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and graduated from Harvard in 2002. She returned for an MBA, completed in 2009. Between those degrees came jobs at Starwood Hotels, WeddingChannel.com and IMG. Her education in customers happened across hotel stays, wedding purchases and the business of fashion, before she had a company of her own.

At Starwood, she pursued a honeymoon registry: friends and relatives could contribute to a couple’s trip rather than another household object. The appeal depended on recognizing that an experience could matter more than the thing traditionally purchased to celebrate it. Years before the rented wardrobe, she was already interested in giving people another way to spend.

At Harvard Business School, she met Fleiss. The two began exploring the rental idea while still students. Their early tests put dresses in front of potential customers rather than leaving the proposal in a presentation. Would women rent? Would they trust the process? Would trying on a dress produce enough enthusiasm to overcome the unfamiliarity of borrowing it?

The social context mattered. A photograph had acquired a longer life than the evening it recorded. An outfit could become old news while hanging in excellent condition. Hyman’s insight took that feeling seriously without requiring the customer to become a different sort of person. Keep the pleasure of dressing up. Change the terms of access.

An appointment before a business

Diane von Furstenberg received an email from Hyman in November 2008. She agreed to meet. The designer later recalled that the idea was only three days old when Hyman arrived to pitch it. Most people would still have been choosing a name for the slide deck.

The meeting introduced a second customer problem. Designers had their own concerns about how rental might affect their businesses. Hyman needed their participation, so persuading women to borrow clothes was only part of the work. She also had to persuade brands that the transaction could help them reach people who might otherwise never try their products.

Her approach to meetings was practical: ask for introductions. An appointment with one person should lead to conversations with others. That habit makes her early boldness easier to understand. A prominent contact was a beginning, with further work attached. The door opened onto more doors.

“If you’re an entrepreneur, effectively you are a salesperson.”

Jennifer Hyman, Stanford, 2023

That is an unusually plain description of a job often dressed in grander language. It covers the designer, the investor, the colleague and the customer. All need a reason to believe. Hyman’s particular talent has been making a proposed change in behavior sound close enough to everyday life that someone will give it a try.

The cloud had a cleaning bill

Rent the Runway launched in 2009. The attractive part was easy to explain: designer clothing, available temporarily, for less than the cost of buying it. The work behind that proposition was elaborate. Every returned item needed attention before another person could wear it. Fashion’s endless appetite for novelty had met a business dependent on repetition.

By 2012, Hyman was visiting a New Jersey warehouse with 25,000 dresses, 4,000 accessories, a dry cleaner and a jewelry repair shop. Her working week could move from customer data to designer meetings to discussions about tailoring and shipping. The company’s promise came with sequins, software and a very real need to get parcels out the door.

She described listening carefully to designers who worried about brand dilution and lost retail sales. Rental could introduce an unfamiliar label to a customer at a lower commitment. The argument depended on actual use: somebody wearing the clothes, discovering the fit, and deciding what she liked. The inventory was also a means of introduction.

In 2018, she put the operational reality succinctly: “Our whole business is logistics.” A conventional sale can finish when the parcel arrives. Rental creates another obligation when it comes back. Restoring a garment, tracking it and making it available again are part of what the customer has paid for, even if she would prefer never to think about them.

Tuesday joined the wedding party

The next question was frequency. A wedding guest needs a dress for a particular date. Someone going to work needs clothes again tomorrow. In March 2016, Rent the Runway introduced Unlimited, a monthly subscription priced at $139 at launch, bringing everyday clothing into a business associated with special occasions.

The shift asked customers to make a larger adjustment. Renting for one party could be an occasional exception. Subscribing made rotation a habit. It also changed the operating problem: the wardrobe had to keep moving, across ordinary weeks as well as conspicuous evenings.

Hyman used the phrase “closet in the cloud” to describe access without keeping everything at home. There was a certain comic efficiency to putting a very physical business under so airy a name. Every blouse still had to exist somewhere. But the phrase explained why someone might care: more possibilities, with fewer permanent additions to the bedroom.

Her own use could be playful. In a 2023 conversation, she recalled dressing as Harry Styles alongside her daughter, in a silver sequined striped jumpsuit, and singing with a band at the child’s birthday party. Asked about her childhood dream job, she chose pop star. The subscription had found a use case the office dress code was unlikely to anticipate.

A bigger closet, a harder promise

In 2019, Rent the Runway reached a $1 billion valuation. Hyman appeared on the TIME 100 list, with a tribute written by von Furstenberg. The student who had requested the meeting was now being recognized by the designer who had taken it. The connection had lasted well beyond the first pitch.

Growth also exposed how easily the operating promise could break. During a systems transition that September, customers experienced delayed and canceled orders. Hyman responded publicly to complaints, and the company explained the disruption in customer communications. A rental reservation can be tied to a date that refuses to move. The inconvenience has a place on the calendar.

In 2021, she took Rent the Runway public. The milestone added a different audience to the people she had spent years persuading. Public investors could examine revenue, losses and the cost of maintaining that moving wardrobe. A persuasive account of how people wanted to dress now faced recurring financial reports.

The later record requires care. Rent the Runway completed a recapitalization in October 2025, converting substantial debt into equity and receiving new investment. For fiscal 2025, it reported revenue of $329.8 million and net income of $22.6 million. That profit included a $96.3 million gain from debt restructuring. The distinction matters when judging the business she was about to leave.

On May 15, 2026, Hyman stepped down as CEO, president and a director. She agreed to remain an adviser through January 2027. After years spent selling the idea and running the operation, she was handing responsibility for its future to others.

The next shopping list

Babylist announced her appointment in July, with a September 9 start. Founder Natalie Gordon moved to executive chair. Hyman had already joined the board, giving her time to learn the business before taking charge. She would work from New York, bringing experience from a company she had built to one someone else had founded.

Her explanation centered on the unusual concentration of decisions that comes with becoming a parent. People reconsider purchases, saving, where they live and the communities around them. A registry sits close to those decisions. Hyman wants Babylist to serve families across a longer portion of their lives, beyond assembling the first shopping list.

There is a practical expression of that ambition in SoHo. Babylist opened a 20,000-square-foot showroom in September 2026, its second showroom and its largest to date. Customers could compare products in person and receive guidance. For a business built online, the opportunity to touch the merchandise still had a purpose.

The continuity with Hyman’s earlier work is suggestive. At Starwood, she reconsidered what a wedding gift could buy. At Rent the Runway, she reconsidered what access to a dress could cost. At Babylist, she has taken charge of a business helping families decide what belongs on a new list. Different purchases, familiar attention to the person making them.

Her sister’s crowded closet supplied the first question. Seventeen years after Rent the Runway’s launch, Hyman is working on another version of it: when life changes, how should the things around you change too? There are plenty of items to sell. Her career has been spent asking why someone wants them in the first place.