Eighteen years ago, Jenn Hyman cofounded Rent the Runway. She had just turned 27 and was fresh out of Harvard Business School. Her idea to rent out high-end clothing and accessories created a category and made wearing secondhand clothing more popular. Since then, there’s been an IPO, a pandemic that nearly killed the company, and a complete reset of the business. Now, Fortune is the first to report, Hyman is stepping down as CEO.
It’s a clean break—Hyman will advise the company during the transition, but she isn’t planning to stay on Rent the Runway’s board of directors.
The choice to step aside is “one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” Hyman says. Of her class of late 2000s and early 2010s female founders, Hyman is one of the last to still be running the company she founded. (Some, like Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd, have boomeranged back.) Her Rent the Runway cofounder, Jenny Fleiss, left in 2017. In 2024, Hyman told Fortune that she would stay on as CEO as long as she still believed in the business and as long as she was still having fun.
Hyman clearly still believes in Rent the Runway; she argues that she’s leaving the company in the strongest position it’s ever been in. Its stock price doesn’t necessarily reflect that; Rent the Runway was trading around $4.44 on Tuesday, down just over 3% in the past year and 98% since its 2021 IPO.
But Hyman counts other signs of success: $4.6 billion of gross merchandise value moved through Rent the Runway over the past 12 months, a measure of its impact on the fashion industry; a record number of active subscribers in Q4 of last year; and an overhauled inventory model that means 70% of inventory is through revenue-share agreements, rather than the capital-intensive model that dominated the startup’s earlier years. The business took in almost $330 million in revenue last year.
Rent the Runway’s creation of a category means that it now has a number of competitors, like the rental service Nuuly. The future of Rent the Runway could involve new services—like peer-to-peer rental, as the platform Pickle has introduced. As for its immediate future, Teri Bariquit, a board member and former Nordstrom exec, will serve as interim CEO while the board conducts a search.
Hyman, now 45, has been able to reflect on some of Rent the Runway’s most significant moments. “There’s a lot that has been written critically about our IPO,” she acknowledges, “but we were the first IPO in history where a female CEO, COO, and CFO were leading their business. I was the 30th woman ever to take a company public that she founded.” For Hyman, those stats are “alarming.”
She advises other founders deciding when to step aside to leave while they’re on top. Hyman says she never could have left Rent the Runway while it was struggling; the business took on debt to make it through the pandemic, for example, and she wouldn’t leave until its debt was restructured, avoiding bankruptcy. In late 2025, the company recapitalized its debt, leaving a private equity group with majority control; those investors from Story3 and Nexus now make up much of its board.
“It’s always best to leave at your happiest point, at the strongest point for your business, and leave when you know that what you’ve built will continue to thrive and build its next chapter without you,” she says.
Hyman is planning a next act; she intends to launch an as-yet-unspecified project that will “help women feel and do all of the things that they want to accomplish.”
With all her excitement about a new chapter, she still tears up talking about leaving this one behind. “I’ve spent more time building Rent the Runway over the last 18 years than I’ve spent with my family, than I’ve spent with my husband, than I’ve spent with my kids,” she says. “It’s been, honestly, the most important part of my life. It’s my contribution to the world.”
Ultimately, she says, “I’ve left it all on the field.”
