Understanding Fashion Rental Service Subscriber
Introduction
Rental fashion is emerging these year as a part of shared economy. This data visualization focus on comparing the user groups of two major player in US market: Renttherunway and Letote. The former brand provides rental of high-end dresses for special occasions, when the latter focus on daily casual dress. So far the visualization
About the Dataset
The data is scraped from Instagram since official API doesn't support location information of where the photo post is taken. When instagram user post each photo, they can add many tags to make the post more searchable, so I scrape the basic information (user name, location is any, post time, etc) of all the photo which has been attached with a "Letote" tag and "Renttherunway" tag. As the screenshot shown below, the user "thejessie_grace" has tagged "Letote" in her post at Chicago Riverwalk.
Visualization
Findings
Question: Is all the user cases inside US?
It's interesting to find that there are quite a large proportion of users actully use this service outsides US or wear those clothes to travel. We are not able to conclude whether they're overseas service subscriber or domestic users who wear the clothes during their travel. We didn't notice this part of people untill the graphic showed us. Therefore, it helped a lot to modify our wishlist of research plan and focus.
Question: Does renttherunway dominate across US?
North, East Area and New York City
California and Downtown San Francisco
Renttherunway was launched in 2009 with 505 employee currently. On contrast, Letote is established in 2012 with a group of employee arounf 150. Letote is still under Series C funding, so there is gap between the volumn of two companies. The plots above clearly shows the dominance of RentTheRunway in east costal area. However, in the bay area where Letote was launched, ladies are open to both brands and many of them are subscribing both services (shown in orange dots).
Renttherunway user tends to disclose/show off their location
Not all user post the location of their photo, and here is an overview of data I obtained:
- Renttherunway: 16,597 posts with location out of 41,352 (40%) posts (last update 4/7/2018)
- Letote: 3,556 posts with location out of 14,080 (25%) posts (last update 4/7 2018)
This is understandable because the clothes from Renttherunway are mainly high-end and worn in special situation when the clothes of Letote is mainly worn as daily casual.
Conclusion
Several patterns about fashion rental service subscribers are lised below. However, I still find the information extracted so far are limited, further works are definetly needed.
- RentTheRunway is popular in both metropolitian area and small scale cities when Letote's business is still constricted in big cities.
- Regional culture differences amy contribute of the popularity of brands in different area. For instance, people wears casual in California but formal in NYC, so Letote gains higher popularity in western costal areas.
- Fashion rental services continually gaining attention in fashion-driven social media platforms.
There will be more findings as my digital ethnography continues and the data analysis will definetly give insights and help our qualitative research works. Other social media platforms and forums like Facebook, Reddit and Yelp could be data resources for next steps of analysis.