Circular Tech Map Category Spotlight: Rental

The Circular Tech Map is our way of keeping track of the digital tools that help the circular economy actually work. Our first category spotlight looked at Repair. This time we're turning to Rental.

The idea behind these spotlights is simple. Rather than comparing or reviewing anyone, we take one slice of the map and ask: what's actually going on here? What are the companies doing, how are they going about it, and what does that tell us about the category as a whole?

Rental is a natural next step. Paying for access rather than ownership keeps products in use for longer, and it shifts the incentive for the business towards making things that last. But renting something out well is much harder than selling it once. Every item has to be tracked, delivered, collected, checked, cleaned, repaired and sent out again, often many times over. That's a lot of moving parts, and it's where the digital layer earns its place.

This time we also had a head start. Season 9 of HappyPorch Radio was dedicated entirely to rental, so alongside what we see on the map, we've woven in some of what we heard from the founders, enablers and experts we spoke to across that season.

Broadly, the companies split into two camps

The first rents things out directly.

These are the businesses that hold the stock, run the subscriptions and handle the deliveries and returns themselves. Whirliruns a toy library where families rent, swap or buy from a shared catalogue. Dress for a Night does short-term designer dress hire, and For The Creators offers maternity and postnatal clothing on rental memberships or one-off rentals.

It's not all fashion and family, though. Homie offers household appliances on subscription or pay-per-use, including for shared laundry rooms. Revra (formerly FlexiPhone) lets people rent, upgrade or own refurbished iPhones on an annual plan. And Love Board Games does exactly what you'd hope: monthly subscriptions for physical board games, posted out and sent back.

The second camp doesn't rent anything itself.

It builds the software other businesses use to run rental. Supercycle is a Shopify-native circular commerce platform that lets merchants run rentals, subscriptions, memberships and resale from a single product page and checkout, taking care of the inventory, orders, returns and serialised items behind them. BIYU is a modular, API-driven platform covering the whole rental lifecycle, from adding a "rent now" button to a storefront through to asset tracking, fulfilment, returns, maintenance and product passports. Circuly is a subscription management platform for physical products, handling billing, asset tracking, repairs and returns. Booqable takes care of online bookings and back-office rental management for rental businesses of all kinds.

This second camp is where a lot of the season's conversations ended up. A theme we flagged from the trailer onwards was the role of enablers, the tech platforms and logistics providers that make rental viable for businesses that couldn't build all of it themselves.

Rental rarely travels alone

One thing that stands out quickly is how few companies in this category do only rental. Most sit somewhere on a spectrum of access models, and the lines between them are blurry.

Rental, subscription and product-as-a-service

A lot of the listings here are tagged as both Rental and Product-as-a-Service (PaaS). Whirli, Homie, Revra and Love Board Games all run on subscriptions, and BIYU and Circuly are built for both. In practice the difference often comes down to what's bundled in: PaaS tends to wrap maintenance, repair and upgrades into the deal, so the customer is paying for an outcome rather than an item. Homie, for example, includes maintenance and repairs as part of its appliance subscriptions.

That distinction got a whole episode of its own, in our conversation on renting vs as-a-service with circular business strategist Patrick Hypscher. And Yann Toutant of Black Winch talked us through what it takes for larger organisations to build and scale product-as-a-service models in-house.

Rental and resale, side by side

The other common pairing is rental with resale. For The Creators sells "gently rented" items through an ex-rental sale. Ecodicta combines rental subscriptions with pre-loved sales and garment exchange. Whirli lets families buy the toys that have earned their place.

This came up in our episode with Ryan Atkins of Supercycle, which runs rental and resale natively in Shopify. A big part of that conversation was treating rental and resale as different points on the same spectrum, rather than separate businesses, and the brand worry that either one will cannibalise new sales.

What the podcast season taught us about making rental work

The map shows who's out there. The podcast season gave us a closer look at what it actually takes to run rental, and a few themes kept coming back.

Operations are the business. Rental lives or dies on the unglamorous parts: reverse logistics, cleaning, quality checks and getting things back out the door. Katie Hanton-Parr of Baboodle talked about the safety and hygiene standards baby equipment has to meet before it goes to the next family. Danai Osmond of Refulfil, who previously helped scale a 24/7 laundry operation at Oxwash, brought that operational lens to the very first episode.

The customer experience has to beat ownership. Büsra Zanner of Wearr built her event-wear rental around getting delivery right every time, because a dress that arrives late for a wedding is a failure no discount can fix. Cirkel Supply takes a similar view, delivering ski outfits straight to holiday accommodation so nobody has to lug bulky gear for a once-a-year trip.

Enablers are filling the gaps, and some started as operators. BIYU's story is a good example. In our conversation with Frans Biegstraaten, we heard how it began as a direct-to-consumer rental service in Amsterdam, with physical stores, same-day delivery and electric cargo bikes, before turning what it had built into a platform for others. Bob Jansen of Firmhouse described a similar infrastructure-first approach to recurring commerce, and Andrew Rough of Advanced Clothing Solutions showed what fulfilment looks like when brands want to offer rental, resale and repair at scale.

The software still has a way to go. Not every product fits the existing tools. Valentin Lheureux of HomeCycle, which rents out washing machines, dryers and fridges, talked frankly about the tech gap and why off-the-shelf rental software doesn't yet fully support circular models. Leah Pollen's episode on leasing and circularity in used electronics showed how much of the challenge sits in the financial model as well as the tech.

Rental spans a broader mix than Repair

While at the moment on the Circular Tech Map repair is dominated by fashion and textiles, Rental spreads its weight more evenly. Clothing is still well represented, from occasion wear to maternity and everyday wardrobes. But alongside it you'll find toys and baby equipment, household appliances, phones and other electronics, and even board games.

That range makes sense. Rental works best for things that are expensive, used occasionally or quickly outgrown, and that describes a lot more than clothes. It also means the software platforms in this category, such as BIYU, Circuly and Booqable, are mostly built to work across sectors rather than for any single one.

Explore further

That's the shape of Rental as we see it today: a category where the product is only half the story, and the real work happens in the systems that track, move, clean, fix and recirculate it. The businesses doing it well tend to blend rental with subscription and resale, and lean on a growing group of enablers to carry the operational load.

Take a look through the Rental category on the map for your work, your research, or your curiosity. And if you'd like to hear it from the people building these models, the full Exploring Circular Tech: Rental season of HappyPorch Radio is a good place to start.