One of my neighbors is moving in a couple of weeks, and they’ve been setting all sorts of goodies out by the curb. Most of the time, those things are gone within a couple of hours. Today, they had the requisite moving sale/garage sale to get rid of more things faster.
This sort of hand-me-down mentality may seem antiquated, but it absolutely the premise behind a really cool business called Zilok.com, which launched in the middle of 2008.
The idea behind Zilok is amazingly simple: There is probably stuff in everyone’s closet or garage or attic that you might have outgrown or that might have been bought in some misguided buying spree. You might have upgraded to another product. Zilok creates a peer-to-peer rental network for those items.
It may sound like a weird example, but when I peeked online just now to look at the site, the top listing under the recently rented items was one of those street-vendor ice cream carts. It just proves that there is a market for everything or at least just about everything. You can rent locally or you can rent from other countries. Zilok covers the United States, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Zilok gets a fee when a rental transaction transpires, although it isn’t part of the rental contract that gets signed.
Although other start-ups attempted to create platforms for rentals in the past (notably in the dot-com bubble), the founders of Zilok really timed this one right. They have tapped into a consumer mentality that has shifted dramatically in the past 18 months. If someone can save money by renting an item they may use only once or twice, you can bet they’re going to find a way to do it. Likewise, why shouldn’t someone make money from something that you don’t use every day?
Just read a related article about Zilok that points to these other sites with similar business models. The include:
- Chegg.com, which manages rental of textbooks
- Babyplays.com, where you can find toys
- Rent-instead, which features a broad selection of items that can be rented
