Why Rent a Dress ? : A Study on Renting Intention for Fashion Clothing Products

Abstract

Access-based consumption provided an opportunity to consumers to experience new and variety of products without actually buying. Fashion renting, a form of collaborative consumption (CC), is still in its nascent stage in India. Collaborative consumption (CC) has created new opportunities in fashion such as sharing, gifting, swapping, lending, leasing, renting, and second-hand buying. Globally, companies such as Rent the Runway, Lending Luxury, and Girl Meets Dress are found successful in the fashion renting space. In India, FlyRobe, Date the Ramp, Swishlist, Wrapd, and Liberent are some of the companies that are involved in renting fashion clothing. The present study examined how personal factors like fashion innovativeness, frugality, perceived obsolescence, along with past sustainable behaviour affected the fashion renting intention of Indian female consumers. An online survey was conducted with 369 participants across India. Multiple regression analysis was employed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results confirmed the positive influence of perceived obsolescence, past sustainable behaviour, subjective norms, attitude, perceived behavioural control, and negative influence of frugality on intention to rent clothes.