Photo by Inspirationfeed on Unsplash

I’m going back to my younger years, back to 16 year old me, when high School was filled with socials and dances that needed dresses — not just any dresses either, fancy dresses to be precise.. Think of prom, winter formal, spring formal, and any other ‘formal’. There were about 3–4 a school year, all of which I needed to buy a new dress for, because who wants to reuse a dress you wore when you were 15 at age 17? I sure didn’t. Buying new dresses seemed to be the thing to do, but when it came down to it, buying them so frequently and only wearing them once and never again, got quite expensive. I used to beg and beg for the cutest and newest style, but my parents had other thoughts about how that money could be spent.

To give you perspective, one dress could cost anything from $75 to — $400 USD, depending on the style and if it was on sale or not. To me, that seemed pretty normal, and I thought nothing of spending that much on a dress I would only be using for one occasion, because if I am honest, that is what everyone else was doing too.

One year, after failing to find a suitable dress within my price range and preferred style, one of my moms friends, suggested a company called ‘Rent The Runway’ that had an incredible selection of dresses in different styles, colours and sizes for people to rent and then return! They even offered shoes and bags to complete each outfit.

After hours of browsing through their catalogue, I found the dress! As soon as I came across it, I loved it, and my parents were pretty happy too as the price was so much more reasonable than buying brand new. I wore the dress with such pride to my third year prom, took photos, received a handful of compliments on how lovely my dress was — and then simply returned the dress back to ‘Rent the Runway’ with such ease.

It turns out ‘Rent the Runway’ was just the starting point to my sharing economy journey; and since then I have gone on to rent furniture, decorations and an event space for a party I organised, garden equipment when I decided to improve my outdoor space; and most recently a high spec SLR camera for a photography course I went on.

With the fast urbanization of our culture and a consumerist mindset that is drilled into us at an early age, we tend to forget that we don’t need to own absolutely everything to feel like we have ‘made it’. By renting items we are able to make use of items for a short period of time which would otherwise be outside of our budget to own.

Today there are more and more rental companies popping up in cities around the world, as it becomes a more popular and accepted activity. ShareRing is passionate about sharing, and is developing a platform that will centralize the currently highly fragmented economy; and will allow small rental businesses the opportunity to gain greater exposure to potential customers.

The reason behind the ShareRing platform is their mission to reduce the current global waste footprint. To find out more about the ShareRing platform, and the journey they have taken so far, click here.