In part one of this two-part series about the “Makers: Women in Business” PBS documentary, I reviewed the profile done of Spanx Founder and Owner Sara Blakely. In the second and final part of this series, I focus on the documentary’s profile of Rent the Runway Co-Founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman.

In 2009, Hyman, along with her Harvard Business School classmate Jennifer Fleiss, founded Rent the Runway, an online service that provides designer dress and accessory rentals. Initially a purely e-commerce play, the company expanded into brick-and-mortar in 2013, and now has four retail locations nationwide. Currently, Rent the Runway is a multimillion dollar business with more than 5 million members and 300 employees, and offers more than 65,000 dresses and 25,000 accessories.

Rent the Runway

According to the documentary, Hyman is a refugee from Corporate America, where she once specialized in sales and marketing. She decided to start Rent the Runway after getting an idea inspired by her sister’s closet.

“I was home from Harvard Business School for Thanksgiving break and I was in my sister’s apartment in New York City,” Hyman explained. “She had just bought a very expensive dress that she was about to wear to a wedding she was attending, and I was staring at her closet, which was filled with very expensive dresses that she had only worn once.

“I told her, ‘You’re crazy! What’s wrong with you? How come you can’t wear any of these other dresses again?’ She told me she had been photographed in all of the other dresses, so she can’t wear them again.”

This, Hyman said, was a lightbulb moment for her.

“We were living in this new world that I called the experience economy,” Hyman said. “My sister and myself, we valued the experience of wearing a dress — the compliments we were going to get, how amazing it was going to make us feel — as opposed to the actual ownership of that item.”

Hyman’s idea to “rent the runway” was a paradigm shift in fashion, the documentary stated.

“By nature of offering fashion as a rental, you’re both opening up the market and democratizing something,” Hyman said. However, Rent the Runway isn’t just a fashion company, Hyman pointed out.

“I’m constantly photographed in front of a rack of sparkly dresses with a storyline that says something like, ‘And Jen wanted a bigger closet’ or ‘She had a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear,'” said Hyman. “I do love fashion, and this is a fashion company, but this is a fashion company with a technology soul.”

It’s also a company that has many women employees. In fact, 70 percent of Rent the Runway’s employees are women. Furthermore, the company’s executive team is comprised of 75 percent women — roles that women traditionally aren’t in, especially in technology companies. Rent the Runway is also transforming the workplace. According to the documentary, the company offers its employees unlimited maternity leave and unlimited vacation, and frequent meetings are run entirely by junior staff, most of whom are women. This workplace philosophy stands in stark contrast to the business world Hyman and her contemporaries inherited.

“The reality is, it did suck 20 years ago or 30 years ago,” said Hyman. “I’ve faced a huge amount of sexism and discrimination, it’s true. [But] I just decided that I’m going to be optimistic, I’m going to be positive, I’m going to build a multibillion dollar company and people around me are going to see that women can do it.”

And Hyman said that there are a lot more women like her coming down the pike.

“Let’s just recognize that there’s a whole generation of women in their 20s or 30s who are the ultimate go-getter girl,” Hyman said. “They’re smart, they’re ambitious, they care about their family, they care about philanthropy, and they’re going to figure out how to make this work. These women, they believe that they can really have it all. And if you try to put a glass ceiling or a wall in front [of them], they’re just going to break through it.”