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.
