Designer wear burning a hole in your pocket? Rent it out

With more and more women shifting towards renting expensive designer wear instead of buying, three IITians have come up with a novel and innovative concept of letting users rent premium apparel via a mobile app – 'Flyrobe'.

The app is the brainchild of three Indian Institute of Technology alumni from the mechanical engineering stream – Shreya Mishra, Pranay Surana and Tushar Saxena. All three left their high-profile jobs to capitalise on the booming mobile app market.

Flyrobe was born out of a simple logic that a person should not be paying full price for something they won't utilise completely. The more expensive an outfit is, the less it is worn, with exorbitant designer wear being used barely 1-2 times. Flyrobe offers branded designer wear on rent for all occasions, including weddings, parties and weekend outings. And what's more, they send across your outfit with a matching accessory. Once the order is placed, the dress comes within three hours. In case of ethnic wear, one needs to book a few days in advance, to get the size right.

Co-founder Shreya says, "Flyrobe is currently serving only in Mumbai but we plan to launch it in five other cities within the next year. The application started from September, and within the first seven days, we had over 7,000 installs."

Flyrobe is partnering with noted ethnic wear designers, including Samant Chauhan, Sonali Gupta, Yogesh Chaudhary, Outhouse, Aharin, among others. The founders launched their website in October.

Co-founder Pranay says, "There are 19 people in our management and 37 in total, including fit experts, delivery boys, customer relation executive and order management executive. We get 70-100 orders every week. An apparel is rented for three days, but the security deposit is taken only on ethnic wear, which is more expensive, and not on the western wear. We take 20 per cent of the security deposit on ethnic wear. While this application is only for women, we are getting a lot of requests from men to start a similar company for them."