Now if the phrase “the Warby Parker for wearables” makes you want to close your laptop and hurl it into the ocean, I get it. Believe me. In this case, though, the analogy is useful for understanding what is actually going on here. Today, gadget rental company Lumoid.com is launching a new program that will ship you a box of five fitness trackers of your choosing to try out for a week: Fitbit, Jawbone Up, Nike+ products, the swim-friendly Garmin Vivosmart, Samsung’s Gear Fit—you name it.

If you decide to buy, say, a Fitbit One that you can clip onto your belt rather than a bracelet, great! Before your seven days are up, simply send the box back with all five items, pay up, and Lumoid will send you a brand-new Fitbit One, totally unused, as if you ordered one from a store.





If you decide that fitness trackers aren’t quite your thing—and really, who could blame you?—you pay Lumoid a $20 try-on fee. Easy-peasy.

One of the key selling points is that there’s no up-front cost, though you’ll need to leave a credit card number. It’s ideal if you were already planning to purchase a fitness tracker and needed to make a final call between, like, a Jawbone Up24 or a Fitbit Flex, but didn’t want to pay for both and return one of them.

Lumoid is a Y Combinator-backed startup based in San Francisco that was launched last year by Aarthi Ramamurthy. Originally the idea was for customers to rent out DSLRs, lenses, quadcopters, and other expensive electronics before they buy them, but now Lumoid is expanding into the wearables space. (And yes, you can rent a developer’s edition of Google Glass, though why you might want to is another question altogether.)

Ramamurthy sent over a box of assorted fitness trackers for me to try out. Each box is packed with a selection of small plastic ziplocks with a short description of what the device is, who it might be suited for, and what kinds of biometric readings it gathers. It isn’t a fancy setup, but I did not really mind.