The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 8 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Subramanian: Sizing is only 30% of the online apparel fit problem
“Sizing, I think, is one part of the problem. I actually think it's only 30% of the problem. The bigger problem is, does this dress work for me? Does it actually fit me? Does it flatter me? And I think they're missing the mark by focusing too much on sizing.”
Subramanian: Designer fashion brands do not deeply care about data
“A lot of the brands don't care as much about data that deeply. I mean, they have their own sort of philosophy of how they want to design stuff. They do it six months in advance.”
Rent the Runway built custom reverse logistics after finding no software options
“We actually tried to, by the way, buy this, you know, off the shelf. We tried, went out, we looked. No one is doing reverse logistics in this kind of scale, so we had to build everything from scratch.”
Subramanian in 2014: Big data requires C-level data executives to succeed
“And honestly, to me, this whole hype will all be real and make sense if, in five, 10 years from now, There is, like, C-level execs, more like me, who are, who actually own the data function, own the science function, and if that actually happens, then this who…”
Rent the Runway does not make money on a dress's first rental
“As a rental business, we don't make money on the first rental, right? So, I mean, the dresses have to go through many life cycles of rentals for us to make money.”
Shortening garment turnaround cycles directly reduces required inventory capital in rental models
“The shorter that is, the less inventory I have to buy to support demand, basically.”
Rent the Runway's 2014 open source stack: MySQL, Mongo, Redis, and R
“Our entire transactional stuff is, is, is on MySQL. We use Mongo for a product catalog. We use Redis to serve recommendations. We use R to do the matrix factorization. Should I touch everything? I think I did. We use tons of Python scripts for parsing the revi…”
Subramanian: Photo reviews are heavily used by Rent the Runway shoppers
“You actually upload a picture review, and this actually is a very commonly used feature for us. People coming to the website organically, posting pictures, talking about the event, writing reviews, which is really consumed a lot by users when they actually bro…”