Exploring garment rental as a sustainable business model in the fashion industry: Does contamination impact the consumption experience?

Abstract

AbstractFashion has evolved into an unsustainable industry; fast fashion, which has a low‐cost, high‐volume focus is the dominant business strategy, resulting in vast resource use and environmental externalities. The purpose of this research is to support the transition to a more circular industry through exploring the opportunity for short‐term garment rental as a part of a product‐service shift. A number of consumer barriers exist to the adoption of novel business models. Included is the issue of contamination; literature suggests that an item may be considered contaminated when another person or object interacts with it. This poses a fundamental conflict to the garment rental proposition. This study furthers understanding of contamination through a qualitative content analysis of 566 online reviews of two existing fashion rental providers. This enables insight into the actual customer experience, revealing a range of contamination incidences—most commonly visual and odour‐related. The impact of a contamination event on the customer experience was overwhelmingly recorded as negative, at worst resulting in total rejection of the entire rental concept. The analysis suggests that contamination presents a psychological and practical obstacle to successful rental. A range of managerial implications were raised with corresponding recommendations offered to mitigate and reduce contamination across the value chain. The study highlights that trade‐offs exist between product quality and commercial profitability. Findings suggest that rental is likely to be a challenging business model, raising the need for further academic and practitioner research to augment the findings.