Middle-class India loves Gossip Girl, but can’t afford high fashion. Here’s how she’s changing that.

Remember Gossip Girl? That teen drama that gave a glimpse into the lives of New York’s super rich and famous, told from the point of view of an outsider looking in? Well, if you’re a fashion lover, it’s likely you followed Blair and Serena’s lives as much for their clothes, as for the drama it offered.

Like youngsters across the world and in India, Sahyujyah Shrinivas was taken in by the glitz and glamor of the show. Unlike most of them, the entrepreneur in her saw a business opportunity too.

“There was this one character in the show who didn’t have money to dress up, so she would buy clothes from stores, keep the tags on, and then return them after wearing,” Sahyujyah says, explaining how the idea for LibeRent came to her.

Unlike in the United States, stores in India do not refund shoppers money on returning items. They issue store credit. This effectively kills the point of buying stuff and returning them the next day (even with tags on), because the money is tied up.

The idea is to dress up middle class Indian women in fashion they are comfortable with.

On the other hand, most women don’t like repeating clothes, especially for important gatherings. Contrary to common perception, the pressures of “looking nice” are no less acute in smaller towns and cities, where neighbors freely critique each other’s appearance. Anecdotes of brides and their families going broke trying to afford an expensive trousseau for weddings abound across the country.

It is this gap between aspirations and affordability that Sahyujyah has decided to fill with her clothes rental startup, but is taking it beyond just weddings. The idea is to dress up the middle-class Indian woman in fashion that she is comfortable with. LibeRent (from ‘liberation’ and ‘renting’) started off in August 2014 as a Facebook page, and got its own website in June 2016. It rents everything from sarees to cocktail dresses, and allows trial options at home. Clients can also choose a “backup dress” in case of emergencies.

In February 2016, Abhishek More joined as a co-founder.

The company services 11 cities, and has filled in 10,000 rentals as of date. About 90 percent of those customers come back, Sahyujyah says.

“The target customer for LibeRent is a woman aged between 18-35, who works and maybe is just married, earns between US$7,500-US$22,000 a year. We aren’t targeting the rich, we are targeting the middle class,” Sahyujyah says.

Learning curve

When Sahyujya, a metallurgical engineer by training, decided to go it alone, she started off with tie-ups with established fashion designers and high-brow brands. Understandable, since her inspiration was Gossip Girl’s cutting-edge wardrobe.

She soon realized that, while middle-class India may lust after top designer brands, her customers didn’t necessarily want to spend her hard-earned money on buying one gown that she’ll likely wear only once. “It was getting very hard to make margins, and we were getting complaints about how the rental prices were too steep,” Sahyujyah says.

Rental future