RentSher – Online Rental startup for Anything & Everything
RentSher is India’s first end to end online rental platform where you can find literally anything you want on rental available with complete payment and delivery service. They provide things like kids costumes, toys, accessories; home appliances, electronics, Projectors, sports equipment, camping gear, cycles on rent, and service for event rentals. You can also upload your spare products on RentSher and start earning from the rental value.It is a peer to peer online renting platform with home delivery and pickup; to help achieve customer comfort and also sustainable living in metros by renting and sharing of products.
The idea started when Ketaki and Abhijit as new parents were looking for economical and environment friendly way to raise their son. One idea was definitely to rent some of the things like toys, accessories, gadgets which were sparingly used. Soon they realized that its not just these things but household appliances, gadgets, power tools, travel and sports gear and many other things are better rented than bought not only for economical reason, but also shrinking space in house and environmental effects. They bounced this idea with Anubha and Harsh. Abhijit and Harsh had done their MBA together in Oxford University, UK back in 2007-08; and since then have been friends, colleagues and business venture explorers together; while Harsh & Anubha met in IIT-Delhi – both graduates from CS department; and have been together since! Hence was born RentSher. After a couple of months of extensive market research and business case building, both couples partnered up to form RentSher.
The RentSher is founded by Ketaki & Abhijit in partnership with Harsh & Anubha. Prior to RentSher, Ketaki was lead at Cognizant Technology Solutions where she handled requirement gathering, business analysis, product feature definition, manual and automation testing. She has done her engineering in IT from Shivaji University.
Abhijit is global curator in “Collaborative Consumption Community”. In the past he had co-founded a management consulting company in London before deciding to come back to India, and worked as a Product Manager in Philips. He has background in technical and management consulting, product innovation & strategy and transformation. Abhijit has done his engineering in IT from Shivaji University, India and MBA from Oxford University, UK.
Anubha is Tech Advisor for RentSher and works at Google as Software Engg, Earlier experience in VMWare on Cloud technologies and at IBM Research in Services Innovation. Anubha graduated from IIT-Delhi with Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science in 2008.
Harsh is Corporate Advisor for RentSher and has 10 years of experience in various business development positions in both B2B and B2C space, including venture management, technology licensing and product launch. Harsh is alumnus of IIT- Delhi, where he did his Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science and Technology from 2000-05 and then MBA from Oxford University, UK.
RentSher USPs are listed below :
- Completely transparent, easy to use platform where booking products for rent is as easy as booking a movie ticket.
- Online Rentals for Anything & Everything.
- Scalable as a marketplace; acceptable as doorstep delivery convenience
- P2P enables social sharing and promotions
It is a P2P rental model, however they do not charge the customer for listing (just like OLX); however they provide payment gateway, delivery and hence they charge small percentage of the rental value from the owner or product vendor for every successful transaction.Enterprise business or tie-ups with schools, hotels, event places is also giving good source of revenues. Future sources of income include premium/sponsored listings, cross promotions and more.
RentSher is an effort against mindless consumerism, where buying is promoted as the first impulse; rather than looking at alternatives or reusing. ‘Rent’ here assumes the more general form of sharing, exchanging, borrowing, etc. The ‘Sher’ refers to the tiger, which at one time was the pride of the nation with its magnificent ecosystem – the dense jungles. Those are today endangered by the growing needs of population and the very existence of the tiger is under threat.
Geekopedia wishes RentSher best of luck for future endeavors.
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