Luxury handbag rentals with StillChic

By Heri Sep 13th 2007 in Design

still chic StillChic has opened, and it allows women rent luxury handbags for a night. Members reserve a handbag on the website or by calling a toll-free number, and they will get then the item in 24 hours with Canada Post. When they are finished with the item, they send it back free of charge. The business model is very similar to Netflix’s, and is aimed at consumers who want to try and use, but not own items.

StillChic is to be taken very seriously. First, they have been launching the service in France for the past year with sacdunjour, and it prooved to be wildly successful and viral. It was an untapped market and the website became profitable within the first two months.

Second, I know and met the StudioCodency guys who did it. StudioCodency is the “operational&armed” division of Codency, which invests in Internet Ventures. In their website, they state they have the best programmers, designers, and marketing specialists in Montréal. This is quite arrogant, but it might not be far from reality. They are very fast-paced, productive and obsessed on results and skills, which reminded me a lot of the atmosphere I found in interactive agencies in Paris (well, it turns out they come from France)

Even if most readers of this blog wouldn’t be interested in becoming member of stillchic, it’s still worth a visit. When adapting the concept to North America, StudioCodency also integrated the mechanism found on vente-privee.com, which is one of the most popular ecommerce website in France, as it highly encourages compulsive buying.

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Comments

What luxury handbags have to do with green living — Some French Guy September 13, 2007

[...] Montreal Tech Watch has a surprising article about a new luxury handbag rental service. [...]

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mehdi September 13, 2007

Well, this is quite interesting. I’ve read an article in business 2.0 magazine several months ago and it had an interview with the CEO of http://www.bagborroworsteal.com/. I think these people are pioneers in this niche, plus they have a better designed website.

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Heri September 13, 2007

mehdi, i didnt know about bagborroworsteal. what i know from studiocodency is that the idea was new when they started it.

bagborrow might have had more press because they are in the US, with a bigger market. bagborrow seems to be a better design too, but we cant really judge, you will have to get the opinion of a girl.

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David September 13, 2007

Bag Borrow or Steal has raised a total of almost $27M starting back in March of 2005, with $15M of the $27M coming just this past May. If StillChic was around at those times, they got passed over. Definitely playing catchup.

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Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino September 13, 2007

I’m a girl :P and I’d heard of bagborrowsteal months ago and personally prefer their service model as you pay a monthly fee to get access to certain “types of bags”. It’s also not really a problem with ownership, but just about keeping up with fashion which sad to say can be different every week. Stillchic’s model is a /bag charge, far less appealing.

But that’s just me :)

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lionel September 20, 2007

I’m sure that if you’re pioneer or not it doesn’t matter. The most important is design a good website with enough options that you can have what you want.
I’m really not worry about stillchic, this market have few competitors. let’s see. ;)

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[...] of the founding members. The business model has certainly been masterfully fine-tuned and applied. Other Montreal startups tried the vente privee model, but BeyondTheRack leaves all of them in the [...]

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