Dive Brief:
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Rent the Runway on Wednesday announced that Natalie McGrath has been appointed chief marketing officer, effective March 4.
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She will oversee all aspects of the customer journey, including brand and growth marketing, creative services, public relations and customer service, and report to Co-Founder, CEO and President Jennifer Hyman.
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McGrath arrives from Afterpay, where she was a marketing vice president, and has prior experience at apparel companies. She spent 10 months as Bandier’s chief marketing officer and had stints at Coach, Alexander Wang and Net-A-Porter, per her LinkedIn page.
Dive Insight:
Rent the Runway’s marketing plans have escalated in just a few months, culminating in a spot in the C-suite.
In December, Chief Financial Officer Sid Thacker told analysts that the apparel rental company had been thriving despite cuts to its marketing budget, and that little would change in the new year.
As the new year dawned, however, Rent the Runway unveiled a restructuring plan that entailed laying off 10% of its corporate workforce and cutting the chief operations officer role, and said it would boost its marketing spend.
“The company has worked over the past several years to shore up critical aspects of the customer journey to propel growth in 2024 and beyond, and is now focused on investing more into areas of the business that reignite the growth funnel, including marketing, consumer product, customer experience and more, enabling RTR to capture more of the large and growing rental subscription market,” a spokesperson said in a January email to sister publication Fashion Dive.
Those goals now fit into McGrath’s job description, and Hyman said in a statement that McGrath has a proven ability to meet them.
“We are focused on supercharging our market share by creating emotional and lasting connections with our core customers — and reaching net-new audiences,” Hyman said.
Rent the Runway has struggled in recent years, landing on Retail Dive’s bankruptcy watch list for digital natives. The company said it will soon focus anew on workwear, which it called “one of the core use cases for a Rent the Runway subscription.” The company said it’s planning “product, experiential and influencer work around the category beginning this spring.”
