Ever since it launched in 2021, peer-to-peer clothing rental company Pickle has been focused on New York. Now, it is expanding to Los Angeles after seeing more customers interested in the app that allows same-day delivery for rented items.
“Anybody in the United States can download the app and use it to rent, lend and borrow items,” said Julia O’Mara, the company’s cofounder and chief operating officer. “We started in New York and really focused on building out that market. Then we started to see a lot of people downloading and using Pickle in Los Angeles before we were even marketing it there.”
Pickle saw its L.A. business start to develop last October. As that interest grew, O’Mara and Brian McMahon, the company’s other cofounder and chief executive, decided last January that it was time to expand more aggressively to the Southern California community.
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Now O’Mara visits once a month to find more people who want to rent out their trendy clothing and customers who want to rent that clothing. “There are some new and exciting people who haven’t heard about us,” O’Mara said, who works with a local community manager and seven interns to grow Pickle’s L.A. business. “It’s a supply and demand matching game.”
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L.A. and New York are in some ways different markets. In L.A., the top rental brands in the last 30 days have been House of CB, Arcina Ori, Rat & Boa, Cult Gaia and Retrofete. During the same time period in New York, the top rental brands have been Cult Gaia, Réalisation Par, Arcina Ori, House of CB and Zimmermann.
Most of the company’s L.A. business has grown organically through word of mouth and social media channels. That has helped Pickle quadruple its L.A. rental business since the beginning of the year. Top performers in the market have been styles from Anna October, which on average earn $600 each item, followed by Rodarte generating $475 per item, and Christopher Esber $366 per item.
Pickle is basically a company that has no inventory. Its operating model allows people to upload their closets to the app and list their clothing for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the original retail price. Renters can sift through the app’s offerings and rent a style directly from the user’s closet.
Pickle offers a same-day courier system, standard shipping or person-to-person delivery when in the same city. There is an extra fee for courier service. “The most popular form of deliveries are door-to-door courier deliveries,” McMahon said. “The whole feeling is it is like DoorDash but for clothes. That’s why we called the company Pickle. If you are in a pickle to get something at the last minute, you can do it in a convenient way.”
The platform has more than 100,000 styles and more than 2,000 brands listed from tens of thousands of closets, the cofounders explained. Pickle’s brand offerings range from labels like Free People, Asos and Princess Polly, to contemporary brands like LoveShackFancy, Alice + Olivia and high-end designers including Chanel, Gucci and Prada.
Pickle was launched after McMahon and O’Mara met each other while working on overlapping projects at Blackstone, a private equity banking company, where they started thinking of potential business ideas. They began their app as a social polling platform where people could vote on other users’ fashion buying decisions. In the poll comments, the cofounders saw users recommending pieces from their own closets, which gave them the idea to offer peer-to-peer rentals.
Since then, they have grown tremendously. Last year, Pickle averaged 55 percent month-over-month revenue growth, which attracted the attention of FirstMark Capital and Craft Ventures. Last October, the two investors provided Pickle with $8 million in seed funding. “Pickle’s marketplace combines a passionate community with a delightful commerce experience for renters and a valuable income stream for owners,” said Jeff Fluhr, general partner at Craft Ventures.
The funding helped Pickle open its first store in New York’s West Village last December, where shoppers can look at various closets filled with rental clothing.
That additional funding will also enable the rental app company to move into other growing markets. Miami is probably next, McMahon said, and it is only a matter of time before a brick-and-mortar location is set up in L.A.