Rent the Runway

How it happened

Rent the Runway is a fashion-rental subscription service that reached a roughly $1B+ private valuation and went public in 2021 at about $1.7B. Pandemic disruption, subscriber churn, and heavy losses sent shares down sharply after listing, cutting its market cap to around $0.13B (~-92% from peak). Glassdoor reviews across the post-IPO years describe a repeated hire-then-layoff cycle — several rounds in roughly three years, some delivered over company-wide video calls — with survivors absorbing extra work and pay frozen for two years or more. The large remote customer-service staff separately described an intensifying per-hour productivity-quota regime and days spent talking members out of canceling as subscribers churned.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.