This New Year's Eve, women on a budget will head online to Rent the Runway in order to borrow, not buy, a chic ensemble. In this excerpt from Fortune's new book Zoom: Surprising Ways to Supercharge Your Career, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss share the story of how they created the company. It all started with an overpriced dress hanging in a little sister's closet.

    In 2008, Jennifer Hyman was in New York City on Thanksgiving break from her second year at Harvard Business School when her younger sister Becky showed off a $1,600 Marchesa dress she had just purchased for a wedding that weekend.

    The price tag was far out of Becky's budget, and Hyman, after seeing the "kazillion other dresses" in Becky's closet, asked her sister why she couldn't just wear one of those. The three-pronged answer: She didn't like any of them anymore; she had already been photographed in all of them (and pictures from the wedding would go all over Facebook); and she couldn't stand to repeat an outfit.

    In Becky's straightforward problem -- a closetful of dresses, but nothing to wear -- her older sister saw a business opportunity. She brought the story back to her friend Jennifer Fleiss, and together they created Rent the Runway, a now-popular website for renting women's evening-wear that has been called a "Netflix for dresses."

    Two different early career paths ultimately led Hyman and Fleiss to each other at just the right time. Hyman grew up outside New York City in New Rochelle, where her high school extracurricular-activity list was almost comically long. She was in every school play. She took voice lessons and dance classes. She was on the volleyball team. She was president of the theater club and the debate club. She did volunteer work with autistic teens on weekends. And, inevitably, she ended up valedictorian of her class at New Rochelle High School.

    At Harvard, Hyman was a member of the first class of The Seneca, a women's organization created in 1999. The group was an early example of her being involved in something that solved a problem, as she and Fleiss would later do with Rent the Runway. The problem that Hyman believes The Seneca addressed? An on-campus culture that was male-dominated and masculine in its outdated traditions. "There were all these male clubs where men would network with each other, become lifelong friends, and help each other get jobs afterward," she says. "There was nothing like that for women. So I was part of this small group of women who created what became kind of a social movement at Harvard, and now there are dozens of female clubs on campus." Many of the most entrepreneurial and successful women she knows from Harvard were in The Seneca.

    今年新年前夜，许多手头拮据的女性不约而同地登陆Rent the Runway，希望租赁（而不是购买）一件时尚别致的礼服。本文摘自《财富》杂志推出的新书《变焦：用令人惊讶的方式改变职业生涯》(Zoom: Surprising Ways to Supercharge Your Career)。珍妮弗•海曼和珍妮弗•弗雷斯和我们分享了她们的创业故事。所有这一切都始于海曼妹妹衣柜中一件价值不菲的礼服。

    2008年，正在哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)读二年级的珍妮弗•海曼回到纽约市过感恩节。她的妹妹贝基趁机炫耀了一番她刚刚购买的玛切萨(Marchesa)礼服，她打算在那个周末穿上这件价值1,600美元的衣服参加一场婚礼。

    这个价码远远超出了贝基的预算。海曼发现贝基的衣柜里还有“数不胜数的其他衣服”，于是就问妹妹，为什么不能穿其中一件呢？贝基给出了三个理由：她不再喜欢其中任何一件；她已经被拍到穿过所有这些衣服了（而这场婚礼的照片无疑将传遍Facebook）；她无法忍受重复着装。

    贝基面临的问题非常简单：一柜子的衣服，但没什么可穿。她的姐姐从中看到了商机。她向自己的朋友珍妮弗•弗雷斯讲述了这个故事，于是两人后来一起创建了一家专门出租女士晚礼服的网站Rent the Runway，这家现在已经大红大紫的网站被人们称为“服装版奈飞公司(Netflix)”。

    两条起初迥然不同的职业路径最终引导海曼和弗雷斯在恰当的时机相聚在了一起。海曼在纽约市外的新罗谢尔长大，在那里上高中时，她的课外活动非常丰富，多得简直有些可笑。每一场校园剧都少不了她的身影，她上声乐课和舞蹈课，还是学校排球队成员，戏剧俱乐部和辩论俱乐部主席，而且经常在周末参加旨在帮助自闭症青少年的志愿者工作。在新罗谢尔高中( New Rochelle High School)的毕业典礼上，她理所当然地成为代表所在班级致告别辞的不二人选。

    在哈佛大学，海曼成为塞内卡俱乐部( The Seneca)的首批会员。就像她和弗莱斯后来创办 Rent the Runway一样，加入这家成立于1999年的女性组织是她热衷于解决问题的早期例证。那么，海曼认为塞内卡俱乐部解决了什么问题呢？答案是，一种男性占主导地位、洋溢着过时的阳刚之气的校园文化。“校园里有各种各样的男性俱乐部，加入这些组织的男生相互联络，成为终身朋友，毕业后在职场上相互提携，”她说。“但女生就没有任何类似的组织。于是，我加入了这个小型女性团体，和其他成员一起在哈佛大学掀起了一场社会运动，现在校园内有几十家女性俱乐部。”她认识的许多事业有成的女企业家都曾经是塞内卡俱乐部的会员。

    On registration day of her senior year, the World Trade Center was attacked. Hyman says it had a real impact on her career trajectory. A social studies major, she completely scrapped her planned thesis and instead did one on how network-news outlets covered 9/11—she interviewed broadcasters like Ted Koppel and John Stossel. But instead of deciding she wanted to go into media herself, she began thinking about business. "What Sept. 11 had done is wreak havoc on many different industries in the country, and I always think that in chaos there's innovation," she says. "So I wanted to find the most chaotic industry out there, because I felt I would learn a huge amount. There would be a lot of change and transformation."

    Hyman was searching for a problem to solve. She looked toward the travel industry because 9/11 was having such an obvious impact on it, and landed in corporate strategy at Starwood Hotels. There she hit it off with then-CEO Barry Sternlicht, who had also started W Hotels. "The spirit of the company at the time was very entrepreneurial because of him," she says. "So even though it was a huge company, there was an expectation that people at all levels of the company would have ideas and bring those ideas to fruition."

    One idea Hyman had, after a year of rotating through various groups in marketing and partnerships, was for Starwood to create a wedding division. She felt the company's Preferred Guest rewards program should aim for recently engaged couples and their wedding-related events, from the bachelor and bachelorette parties to the wedding to the honeymoon. Hyman approached the president of her division and asked for $2 million to start a mini-business within Starwood. She was 22 years old and had been at the company for barely a year. It was an audacious move. But Hyman says she was thinking, " Someone thinks I'm being too aggressive? The worst thing that could happen is he says no. And then I'll figure out how to make it into a yes." She did get a yes, and the division she came up with -- a honeymoon registry combined with luxury services for newly engaged guests -- thrived, generating $13 million in its first year. It is still in place at Starwood (HOT) today.

    While at Starwood, Hyman had what she now describes as a pivotal moment in her career. After an important meeting with some senior people -- during which Hyman, as she often would, spoke up and contributed ideas -- a woman who had been with the company longer than Hyman took her aside. She told her that when Hyman speaks out in meetings too much, "it comes off as being too aggressive and too pushy. And just be aware of that." The woman was trying to be helpful. But she was also, Hyman says, "trying to tell me that if you're perceived as being this hard-charging 22-year-old girl, that's going to be very off-putting to a lot of people in this company, especially people above you who are men. I kind of ignored her."

    After Hyman worked briefly for the startup WeddingChannel.com and the sports and fashion agency IMG, she entered Harvard Business School in 2007. Hyman's sister Becky knew Fleiss as a friend of a friend, and thought the two would hit it off. Hyman admits her first reaction was icy: "I already have more friends than I need right now. If I meet her, I meet her. But I'm not going to specifically look out for her," she told Becky. Yet on the first day the two of them happened to land in the same section and they became instant friends.

    Fleiss had grown up in Kentucky and New York, where she went to the Horace Mann School, then college at Yale, where she focused on political science and English. After graduation, she went into banking. "I have a pretty competitive personality in general, and I'm always trying to go after what is the best and the hardest thing to get and to do," she says. "And coming out of Yale, everyone wanted to work in investment banking, like at Goldman Sachs." The summer before her senior year, she got a Goldman internship, and the next spring, after graduating, she went to work at Morgan Stanley (MS) in the strategic-planning group doing internal M&A and consulting. After a year she moved on to a similar role at Lehman Brothers in 2006.

    大四注册那天，纽约世贸中心遭到袭击。海曼说，这起恐怖袭击事件对她的职业轨迹产生了切切实实的影响。这位社会学专业学生毅然放弃了起初的论文计划，转而撰写了一篇以新闻网络如何报道911事件为主题的学术论文——她先后采访了新闻主播特德•科佩尔和约翰•斯托塞尔。然而，她并没有产生投身于媒体的念头，而是开始思考一些商业问题。“911事件给这个国家的许多产业带来了灭顶之灾，我一向认为，动荡中必然蕴含着创新机遇，”她说。“所以我想寻找最动荡的行业，因为我觉得我将从中学到很多东西。这个行业必将发生大变革，大转型。”

    于是，海曼开始四处寻找有待解决的问题，最终把目光投向了旅游业，因为911事件对这个行业造成的负面影响再明显不过了。没过多久，海曼就在喜达屋酒店集团(Starwood Hotels)谋得了一份参与制定公司战略的差事。在那里，她与时任CEO、曾参与创办W酒店管理公司(W Hotels)的巴里•斯特恩利希特形成了非常默契的工作关系。“由于他的缘故，这家公司当时极富创业激情，”她说。“所以，即使它是一家大公司，但各级员工都被视为创新源泉，有机会将自身的创意付诸实现。”

    海曼在营销和合作项目的不同组别轮值了一年之后产生了一个想法：为喜达屋酒店集团创建一个婚礼事业部。她认为，喜达屋优先顾客奖励计划( Preferred Guest)应该针对最近订婚的伉俪，以及与婚礼相关的活动，包括单身派对、婚庆、蜜月，不一而足。海曼主动联系所在部门总裁，希望获得200万美元拨款，同时授权她在喜达屋酒店集团内部启动这样一个小型企业。她当时22岁，来这家公司还不到一年。这番举动确属大胆。但海曼说，她当时想：“也许有人觉得我这样做过于激进，但最糟糕的事情莫过于老板否决这项提议。要是那样的话，我一定要想法子说服他。”她的提议最终获得肯定。这个事业部面向新订婚夫妇的奢华蜜月服务大受欢迎，第一个财年就斩获1,300万美元收入。时至今日，它依然是喜达屋酒店集团的重要一员。

    按照海曼如今的描述，在喜达屋工作期间，她经历过一个对其职业生涯产生重大影响的时刻。有一回，在一场有资深员工参加的重要会议上，海曼一如往常，毫无保留地表达了自己的想法。会后，一位任职时间更长的女士把海曼拉到一边，说她开会时讲得太多，“让人觉得锋芒毕露，爱出风头，希望你意识到这一点。”这番话当然是出于好意，但海曼表示，这位女士也“想告诉我，如果大家觉得你一个22岁的小女生竟然如此咄咄逼人，一定会招致许多员工的不满，尤其是那些男上司。我基本上没听她的。”

    离开喜达屋酒店后，海曼还曾先后在初创公司婚礼频道网(WeddingChannel.com)和运动与时尚经纪公司国际管理集团( IMG)短暂工作过一段时间。2007年，她进入哈佛商学院。海曼的妹妹贝基认识弗雷斯（一位朋友的朋友），觉得她们两人肯定很合拍。海曼承认，她最初的反应非常冷淡：“我现在的朋友够多了，都应付不过来了。有机会碰到的话，认识一下也行。但我不会专门去结交她，”她对贝基说。然而，开学的第一天，她们两人碰巧坐在同一个分区，很快就成了好朋友。

    弗莱斯出生于肯塔基州，从纽约霍勒斯曼学校(Horace Mann School)毕业后被耶鲁大学(Yale University)录取，专修政治学和英语。大学毕业后，她进入银行业。“我生来好强，总喜欢追逐最好的东西，做最难办的事情，”她说。“从耶鲁出来后，大家都想去高盛(Goldman Sachs)这样的投行工作。”大四前那个暑期，她获得了一个在高盛实习的机会。第二年春天毕业后，她进入摩根士丹利公司(Morgan Stanley)战略规划部，开始从事内部并购和咨询业务。一年后，也就是2006年，她跳槽至雷曼兄弟公司(Lehman Brothers)从事类似的工作。

    Yet Fleiss was never passionate about what she was doing -- she was coasting. "I didn't know that you necessarily would be or could be passionate about a job," she says. "And I guess the breaking point was once it became so much of my life, where it was like so many hours a day. It was suddenly the only thing I was doing. And that became a little much." A further sign of her restlessness: On weekends she was running a successful side business, Carter Admissions, that edited papers and prepared high school students to apply to colleges -- and enjoying it more than her real job. (During her first year at HBS, she expanded the concept and took it online.)

    She had applied to and gotten into Columbia Law School, but it occurred to her that she hadn't considered whether it was what she actually wanted. "I literally had this kind of last-minute, like, 'I don't really want to be a lawyer. What am I going to law school for? Is it too late to apply for business school?" Within a month and a half, she had taken the GMAT, applied to HBS, and gotten in during its third round.

    After meeting on that first day, Hyman and Fleiss stayed close throughout their first year of business school and into their second. Then, during Thanksgiving break in their second year, Hyman had her "eureka moment" in front of her little sister's closet. After Becky explained how she had felt forced to overpay for a new dress, Hyman asked, "Why did you buy a Marchesa dress, as opposed to a cheaper one?" (Becky at the time was a buyer for Bloomingdale's; she now works for Rent the Runway.) Becky answered, "I want to feel beautiful." Hyman noted the association between self-confidence and luxury, and has carried that idea through to Rent the Runway, a business that trades on the desire of young women to look and feel fancy even if their wallets aren't equipped to own the very highest-end designer gowns.

    There was a problem Becky had unwittingly identified, and Hyman thought she had an inkling of a way to solve it. "Why don't we take all these dresses that you're never wearing again," she proposed, "and rent them out to other people, and create an income stream for yourself?" They weren't about to actually do that using Becky's dresses, but it got Hyman thinking about the concept of renting dresses, as well as the more abstract question of why women felt pressure to dress up.

    On the first day back at Harvard after vacation, a Monday, Hyman related the closet story to Fleiss over lunch. "I didn't go into it with the intention or the thinking that we would actually start something," she says. "Every time I would go home, I would be talking about it with Becky and with my family. But in my head I didn't really think it would be a company. I just thought it was something fun that we were working on."

    Still, they did work on it. They laid out a map for how they could solve the problem that Becky and so many other young women like her were having. There were two trends in the market that Hyman and Fleiss had noticed and were contemplating. One was the "sharing economy" and movement from ownership to renting. It was happening in music (with streaming services like Pandora), television and film (Netflix), and even automobiles, with car-sharing services like Zipcar. (Soon there would also be Airbnb, for renting out people's apartments.) The second, less measurable phenomenon they perceived was an increased saturation of celebrity worship -- social platforms like Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) were making people more aware than ever before of socialites and pop-culture stars like Kim Kardashian, and what luxury brands they were wearing. Women increasingly wanted to develop their own personal brands via social media to show off their luxury. "Our culture is educating an entire population of people to aspire to this lifestyle that 99% of us can't afford," Hyman says.

    但对自己正在从事的工作，弗雷斯根本就没有兴趣——她只是随波逐流。“我不知道一个人是否一定会喜欢上某项工作，”她说。“我觉得临界点可能出现在它占据了我太多生活空间的时候。我每天都工作很长时间，这份工作突然成为我生活的全部，我有点受不了了。”弗雷斯对现状不满的另一个迹象是：她利用周末经营一家名叫卡特招生服务(Carter Admissions)的公司，结果这个帮助高中生编辑大学申请文档的副业大获成功，带给她的满足感远胜过日常工作。（在哈佛商学院的第一年，她扩大了业务范围，同时开始提供网络服务。）

    她此前曾申请过哥伦比亚大学法学院(Columbia Law School)，获得了录取。但弗雷斯突然意识到，她并没有认真考虑过这是不是自己真正想要的东西。“我的确是在最后那一刻决定放弃的。我当时想，‘我并不是真的想当一名律师。如果是这样，我为什么要去上法学院啊？这时候申请商学院是不是太晚了？’”此后一个半月内，她参加了GMAT考试，向哈佛商学院递交了申请书，在第三轮面试中达成了心愿。

    开学第一天相识后，海曼和弗雷斯亲密无间地度过了商学院的第一学年。然后，在第二年的感恩节，海曼在妹妹的小衣柜前，经历了“灵光一现”的一刻。贝基解释了她被迫掏大价钱购买新衣服的苦衷之后，海曼问：“你为什么要买一件玛切萨礼服，而不是便宜一点的衣服呢？”【贝基当时是布卢明代尔百货公司(Bloomingdale's)的一名采购员；她现在为Rent the Runway工作】贝基回答说：“穿好衣服漂亮呗。”海曼发现一个人的自信程度与奢华着装存在联系，Rent the Runway就是她贯彻这一理念的成果。这门生意所利用的正是年轻女性对时尚形象和感觉的强烈渴望，即使她们并不具备购买高端服饰的财力。

    贝基不知不觉地发现了一个问题，而海曼认为她已经构想了一个模糊的解决方案。“我们为什么不把所有这些你再也不打算穿的衣服收集在一起，然后租给其他人，为你自己创造一个收入流呢？”她建议道。她们并没有真的打算把贝基的衣服租出去，但这件事不仅促使海曼开始思考为什么女性被迫盛装打扮这 抽象问题，还让她萌生了出租礼服的念头。

    假期后返回哈佛的第一天，海曼就利用午餐间隙给弗雷斯讲述了妹妹的衣柜故事。“我当时并没有产生借此机会创业的意图或想法，”她说。“每次回家时，我总是跟贝基和家人讨论这件事。但在我的脑子里，我真的不认为它可以成为一门生意。我只是觉得这样做肯定挺好玩。”

    尽管如此，海曼和弗雷斯还是决定尝试一下。为解决贝基和其他许多年轻女性面临的这个难题，她们制定了一张路线图。海曼和弗雷斯已经注意到、并开始思考两种市场趋势。其一是“共享经济”——对于许多商品，人们不再购买，转而采用了租赁方式。租赁的对象现在不仅仅是歌曲（比如Pandora公司提供的流媒体服务），影视作品（奈飞公司），甚至还包括汽车（比如Zipcar公司的轿车共享服务）。另一个动向是，Airbnb公司即将搭建一个公寓租赁平台。其次就是她们觉得不易衡量，愈演愈烈的名人崇拜现象。在Twitter和Facebook等社交平台的推动下，人们现在比以前更加关注金•卡戴珊这样的名媛和流行文化明星，以及她们身穿的奢侈品牌。越来越多的女性希望在社交媒体上炫耀自己的奢华服饰，打造自己的个人品牌。海曼说：“我们的文化正在潜移默化地促使所有人渴望这种99%的人都无力负担的生活方式。”    

    Rent the Runway married the two trends. It harnesses the shareable economy and takes advantage of the aspirations to luxury that many young women harbor today. Hyman and Fleiss soon approached people at fashion labels, but many were initially hesitant to let Rent the Runway buy and rent out their products. Their talks with some of the labels were the most memorably difficult hurdles they faced. "Designers basically told us that over their dead body would they ever let us buy inventory from them," says Hyman, "so that was pretty discouraging." To persuade designers to partner with them, the duo had to understand what the labels wanted (which in most cases was brand protection and the certainty that they weren't going to lose real purchases by making their products available for rent) and show them that Rent the Runway could be a major channel for them to get new customers and reach new demographics.

    Even as they were pitching their concept to designers and VC firms, neither woman was ready to fully commit. Both had lined up other jobs for when they graduated. But less than two weeks before Fleiss's wedding, they got an initial round of $1.75 million from Bain Capital Ventures. In 2010, Rent the Runway received another $15 million in funding from Highland Partners, and in 2011 $15 million from Kleiner Perkins. By March 2013 it had raised another $24.4 million. The site has more than 3 million members and the business is growing at nearly 100% year over year in users and revenues (it won't disclose the latter).

    While the moniker "Netflix for dresses" is meant admiringly, Hyman doesn't particularly like that analogy. "Netflix is a very rational business, and everything that we are doing is about delivering an emotional experience," she says.

    Indeed, both co-founders, when they appear on television or do interviews, like to say that Rent the Runway gives women a "Cinderella experience." But it's less romantic than that. It's a company that solves a problem. It'll certainly solve one for women seeking a New Year's Eve party outfit at low cost. (And indeed, their biggest business comes at New Year's Eve and prom season.) That's not to say women are never going to buy dresses anymore. But now they don't necessarily have to. That's clever entrepreneurship.

    Rent the Runway把这两种趋势结合在了一起。它不仅顺应共享经济的大潮，而且充分利用了许多年轻女性对奢侈服饰的渴慕之情。没过多久，海曼和弗雷斯就开始接洽时装界人士，但许多人起初并不认同这种先购买再外租的方式。与一些时装品牌的洽谈是她们最难跨越的障碍。海曼说：“许多设计师直接拒绝了我们的购买请求，看到那副宁死不屈的架势，我们当时非常沮丧。”为了说服设计师与她们合作，这对搭档必须理解时装品牌想要的东西（在大多数情况下，时装公司希望自身品牌受到保护，同时确保自己的服饰不会因这项租赁业务而丧失真实的销售机会），还要向他们展示，Rent the Runway有望成为各大时装品牌获得新客户、触及新受众群体的主要渠道。

    甚至在海曼和弗雷斯向设计师和风投公司兜售经营理念的时候，她们两人也没有做好全身心投入这项事业的准备。两人其实已经联系好了其他工作机会。但就在距离弗雷斯大婚之日不到两周的时候，她们获得了贝恩资本(Bain Capital Ventures)175万美元的首轮投资。2010年，Rent the Runway收到了高原资本(Highland Partners)提供的150万美元投资，2011年,凯鹏华盈(Kleiner Perkins)投入了150万美元。至2013年3月份，它又筹集了2,440万美元资金。这家服装租赁网站现在拥有超过300万会员，用户数量和收入的年均增幅均接近100%（它不愿透露具体的营收额）。

    尽管“服装版奈飞公司”这一绰号包含赞美之意，但海曼并不是特别喜欢这个类比。她说：“奈飞公司经营的业务非常理性，而我们所做的一切，其实是在提供一种情感体验。”

    每当出席电视节目或接受采访时，这两位创始人总是喜欢说，Rent the Runway希望为女性提供一种“灰姑娘般的体验”。但它其实并没有这么浪漫。这是一家旨在解决问题的公司。它无疑将帮助许多女性解决一个大问题：不用花大价钱就可以盛装出席新年前夜派对（新年前夜和舞会高峰期，其实也是这家公司生意最兴隆的时刻）。这并不是说女性永远也不会购买奢华礼服了。但现在，她们没必要非得这样做。这，就是高明的企业家精神。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒