three months of Nuuly

and how it compares to Rent the Runway

I’m happy with Rent the Runway, and have not been looking to add another monthly subscription to my budget, so I hadn’t yet succumbed to the siren song (ubiquitous Instagram marketing presence) of Nuuly. However, I was given a gift code by a contact there for a free three-month trial—unprompted, and without any knowledge of Rabbit Fur Coat. A chance for some service journalism! Challenge accepted.

This was my first order:

What came over me?! A few factors: I was attending an anniversary party for my old job and obviously wanted to show up looking sharp. I also had two weddings coming up this summer and was hoping to lock down an outfit early on. But none of these dresses feel like me. I tend to shy away from bodycon dresses—there are two in this order. I also wouldn’t have worn the rose dress either to that party or (obviously) as a wedding guest. In addition, none of these dresses were made out of cotton or silk or linen—this was a fully synthetic order. I think this first order was a free-for-all—it didn’t feel real because it wasn’t my money (the catch-22 of the influencer!). None of these dresses looked particularly good on me. I ended up wearing this to the party instead:

Because I didn’t like any of my choices from May, I sent back the whole order at the end of the month. When my next shipment was unlocked, I saw a recently added pair of Agolde jeans, still available in all sizes. I added them to my cart in two sizes, then frantically searched through the rest of the items I’d added to my “closet” to select four other items before I lost out on the jeans. This was my next order:

June was better than May, which isn’t saying much. I only wore three out of the six things I ordered, but I was wearing at least one of them almost every day! The jeans ended up fitting in both sizes, and the lace Farm Rio shirt was in heavy rotation during a very hot month.

As for the orange shirt… I don’t know. I love orange, but something about that specific shade feels a little too Halloween-adjacent. I liked the styling on the model, but I think I fell for the old “hand in the pocket” styling trick—you can’t walk around like that the whole day! And why did I choose to spend not one but two of my precious spots this month on that dress? It looked good on the model, but it looked cheap in person and it wasn’t a great fit on me.

I figured at the end of the month I’d hold onto the jeans and the black lace shirt and swap out the three items I hadn’t worn. This is when I realized Nuuly’s fatal flaw: you have to send everything back. In order to get anything new, I would also have to return the three items I was wearing constantly, with no guarantee that they’d be available in my size if I wanted to reorder. More on this later on!

I almost decided to skip the last month of my trial so that I could hold onto the Agolde jeans a bit longer, but instead I decided to purchase one of them so that I could properly use my last month. So I bought the ones that fit better (I waited for a discount code to show up, and ended up getting another $20 off the sale price) and returned the rest so I could order my next batch.

I did marginally better with my July order. I ordered all summer dresses, with at least three in silhouettes I already know are safe bets on me. All of the casual dresses fit—the pink dress, which was a potential wedding guest dress, didn’t work perfectly (the straps on the slip are too long), but was potentially salvageable with a couple well-placed safety pins if I had wanted to experiment. But I just don’t think any of these dresses felt like me.

The dress I ordered in both the black and the blue is very cute, and that silhouette will always appeal to me. This particular style hits too low on the body, though, and I ended up having to continually hike up the front of the dress so my bra wouldn’t show. And while it is made of cotton, it’s a cotton voile that feels relatively thick.

I wore the yellow dress to a welcome party for a wedding, and while I liked it, I didn’t love it. (It was also fully lined, which is a lot of fabric for a warm-weather dress!)

The brown dress feels like a dress given to a character in a Disney movie who is supposed to be poor but beautiful… like Cinderella, pre-emancipation from evil stepmother. I liked it, but I wasn’t wild about it, and didn’t end up wearing it because I found it hard to gauge what occasion it would be appropriate for.

And the black and white dress was fine—not as striking IRL (it benefited heavily from the way it was styled and photographed).

PROS of Nuuly

• Option to filter by fabric: I cannot believe Rent the Runway does not have this function! This saved me a lot of time when looking for summer dresses, as I was uninterested in anything that wasn’t cotton or linen.¹

• Adaptive clothing: Anthropologie recently rolled out a selection of current SKUs with adaptive modifications, and many of these items are also available for rental through Nuuly. In the size range I have selected (items in 2, 4, and 6), there are about 250 adaptive styles available.

• User-friendly: These are minor quibbles, but still affect the user experience. Rent the Runway is a glitchy platform—if you’re trying to look back at a previous order and an item was taken out of rotation, it disappears. If something goes on sale, you don’t get an alert, and when an item moves from rental to final-sale only option, it doesn’t show up in a search unless you’re specifically looking in the sale section. When you purchase something from your rented items, you don’t even get a confirmation email (or a record in your order history). Nuuly feels a little easier to navigate, even as someone relatively new to its interface.

• Size inclusivity: Below are all the sizes that Nuuly offers and that users can filter available options by. (Many items are offered in sizes 1X and up, but you can only filter using the equivalent options below.)

  

  I did some searching by size on Rent the Runway—the largest available size is a 22, and when I searched for dresses in a size 22, there were only 77 styles available for rental at that moment, and 218 total styles in that size. For comparison, a search for dresses in a size 4 yielded 1,800 available styles, and 2,870 in total. (The options for a search for items in a size 12 and a size 14 yielded similar results to the search for the size 4, but if you are at the top of the available size range on Rent the Runway, your experience will be starkly different from those in the middle or lower end of that range.)
  On Nuuly, when I limited my search for dresses to anything available in a 22 W, there were 882 available styles, and 1,421 total styles in that size. A search for dresses in a size 4 yielded 3,796 available styles, and 6,649 total. That’s still a significant difference, but the sheer amount of offerings on Nuuly does make it a much better option for anyone who doesn’t fit into straight-size clothing.

NEUTRALS of Nuuly

• Brand exclusivity: Many of the clothes on Nuuly are in-house brands from URBN, the umbrella company of Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie. Even some of the garments from other designers seem to be customized for Nuuly—for example, the Farm Rio top I rented doesn’t seem to exist for purchase anywhere else on the internet.

• Cost and plan customization: Nuuly is $98/month, for one shipment of six items. Rent the Runway’s minimum number of shipments per month is two, but two shipments of six items a month on Rent the Runway is $175, which ends up coming out to a similar cost per item (lower cost of entry with Nuuly). [Edited to add, thanks to Sab in the comments! Rent the Runway does have a lower tier—one shipment a month of five items for $94—but it seems difficult to downgrade, as these are the only options I get when I try to change my plan on the app. Not sure if this is deliberately obtuse or just poor design.]

  

  no choice to downgrade to 1

  You can add bonus items to shipments on both Rent the Runway and Nuuly—on Nuuly, these cost $20/item, and are limited to four bonus spots a month. On Rent the Runway, a “bonus item” costs $31, but adding one automatically changes you to a higher level plan, which would renew the next month unless you go back in and change it (easy enough to do, but I don’t like that that’s the default).

CONS of Nuuly

• No event rentals: An event rental is a separate purchase on Rent the Runway, but it’s nice to have this feature, and not only do they let you select a free backup size with a one-time rental, you can switch out your pick if it comes in time for you to try on and realize it doesn’t fit or isn’t what you were hoping for.

• You can’t pick your new rental until your old one is on its way back to Nuuly (or at least scanned by UPS.) It’s mildly frustrating to not be able to choose anything new until you can make it to a UPS store or drop-off site. With Rent the Runway, you can choose your new garments as soon as you click “swap”—if you don’t send the old ones back in a reasonable time frame, they can “freeze” your account, but functionally that doesn’t do much unless you’re trying to purchase something.

• In the same vein as above… there’s no ability to schedule a UPS pick-up. This was a smart decision for Rent the Runway—I bet they are getting more packages back on time because of this. They were partnered with a company called Returnmates for a while, but I think that was just in major cities, whereas the UPS pick-up seems to be a universally available option.

• No plain product shots: This is so dumb, but I do have to note it… Rent the Runway includes a flat-lay product shot on every listing. If you use a digital closet/styling app, this is crucial. Most clothes on Nuuly are photographed on at least two models with different body types, but there are no solo product shots.

• No social features. This is a con for Rent the Runway, too, but I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity for Nuuly, whose user base skews much younger (couldn’t find much hard data on this, but judging from the age range of the customers leaving photo reviews, Nuuly’s user base is heavily weighted towards Gen Z and millennials, whereas I regularly see women in their 40s and 50s leaving photo reviews on Rent the Runway.) Classpass has had barebones (in a positive way!) social features for years, with easily adjustable privacy settings to opt out of any and all of them. Something like this with Nuuly, where you could let friends see your current rentals, past rentals, or favorites lists, would be amazing.

  

  Classpass social features

• The biggest con—and the one that will stop me from extending my trial: you have to return all of the items at the same time. I’m sure there are financial and environmental benefits to this, but I feel like there are just as many drawbacks. For one… every month that you change out your selection, you’re returning all six items, which means they’re cleaning all six. With Rent the Runway, I’ll often go several months only switching out one or two items, which means they’re only paying to clean those specific items. If I hold onto the entire contents of a shipment because I want to keep wearing one or two items from it, that means those other four or five garments are sitting unused in my closet when others might want to rent them. It seems like a reasonable assumption that adding the ability to switch out individual items would improve circulation and availability.
  What I love about Rent the Runway is the lack of the scarcity mindset I so often have with clothing. It’s difficult to break out of the “If I think I want it, I need to get it now!” mentality, but Rent the Runway alleviates that feeling. I can hold onto something for as long as I want, give it a full try-out as a permanent part of my wardrobe, and make that decision on my own timeline. The way that Nuuly works negates that benefit for me.

FINAL VERDICT: If Nuuly had the option to exchange individual items rather than just sending everything back, I would absolutely consider continuing my subscription. But I do think Nuuly is a great entry point for clothing rental, and for people who are often left out of and neglected in traditional fashion spaces, there is real value in this service! Also, if you find yourself spending a lot of money at Anthropologie, Free People, or Urban Outfitters, I could see this being an effective way to cut down on spending (ability to try out new arrivals and eventually purchase the items you like at a discount).

If you work at Rent the Runway or Nuuly and you want to hire me as a consultant… there’s more where this came from!

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece and you’re a new subscriber, I think you’ll find this post helpful:

1. Not always accurate, though! The pink dress I rented was listed as silk, but the slip (attached) was made of polyester.