Winter Wear Steps Into The Rental Zone

With winter almost here, it’s almost time to reopen those trunks and suitcases holding the family’s woolen and warm clothes. The sweaters, shawls and jackets go through trials before being rolled out for the season.

This is a familiar routine for anyone who lives in a city or town with a winter to speak of, and every season brings the same challenges of keeping up with the trends and the changing needs of everyone in the family. 

For everyday wear, keeping an old favourite sweater or cardigan makes sense, but going on a holiday or dressing up for an occasion in winter changes things. Plus, if you live in Mumbai or Chennai or any other temperate city with no real cold months, buying winter wear for that occasional trip to the mountains or cold cities means spending on things you will barely touch once you’re back home.

Take a casual look at the online aisles of winter wear on Myntra or AJIO or any fashion platform. The total expense adds up rather quickly and grows quite large when the whole family needs new winter clothes. 

For instance, Decathlon lists a snow jacket somewhere at ₹5,999 and a winter parka at ₹6,999. And those are some of the less pricey options out there when it comes to gear that keeps you warm in true cold. 

Beyond the price, there’s the responsibility of cleaning, storing and maintaining it until the next use. For many, this is simply not worth the hassle. So can rental change the game? 

Mumbai-based winter apparel and thermo-layer brand Kosha is offering winter wear rentals with a good number of options starting at ₹990 for seven days. Bengaluru’s SharePal is renting a wide assortment of products at rates as low as ₹50 per day, while Mumbai-based Roamwear has packaged winter wear into its travel wardrobe rental for women.

Rentals are not a new idea in India. We touched upon the circular fashion economy earlier and Gen Z’s interest in thrifting and value-conscious shopping is being seen in winter wardrobes too. Just like in wedding wear and designer fashion earlier. 

Unsurprisingly, the market for winter rentals is quite large in markets where winter travel is a major tourist attraction. But players such as Finland-based Winterent, Sweden’s SkiStar, Austria’s SkiGala and Japan’s Soranoshita offer outdoor winter clothing near ski retreats. These largely target tourists and not individuals in the region. 

That’s the key difference between these players and the Indian startups we spoke to. In India, winter wear rental is undoubtedly an experiment. The question is: is the market big enough for the startups to scale?

Where’s The Ceiling?

Rishav Jain, managing director, Alvarez & Marsal India, says the idea of creating a shared economy matters more than which category is being targeted. Anything with a high average selling price and low usage can move into the rental or shared economy game, especially in a market like India. 

Kosha founder Yuktie Jhangiani Verma believes that traction is inevitable even though the category is small today. 

“This is a brand new space. It is still too early to define its absolute ceiling, the growth momentum is undeniable. Exciting shifts are happening across consumer behaviour every single month,” she added. 

One of the key differences between renting and direct sales is that the former targets premium products that are not widely available or are out of reach of individuals due to their price.  

This is why rental for winter wear as a business is positioned and linked with travel. Startups are targeting customers that are booking ski trips, treks or their next European winter holiday. This makes rental a small add-on cost to the overall travel budget.  

“Fashion renting works when the item costs above roughly ₹6,000-8,000 and you expect two or fewer trips. Rental typically prices at 10-20% of retail per rental period, so a ₹10,000 jacket at ₹1,490 a week is a clear saving, compared to another jacket that sells for ₹3,299, where that rental price will be 45% of directly buying one. In the latter case, most customers would prefer to buy the jacket than rent it,” TDV Partners’ founder and managing partner Ujwal Sutaria said.

For instance, a published comparison by Indiahikes’ Crosstrek says renting a full set of trekking gear comes up to ₹2,435 for six days, compared to ₹18,250 for buying that same gear. This includes trekking shoes, a padded jacket, rain jacket, backpack and accessories. These are indicative prices rather than what a typical customer might end up spending if they take their time researching the options in the market but not everyone has the time for that.

Sutaria said that as more and more Indians make international trips, the market for rentals is growing. India reported 32.71 Mn overseas departures in 2025, and Japan alone went from 233K to 315K+ Indian visitors between 2024 and 2025. The market for Indian tourists to Northern European destinations like Sweden, Iceland and Norway has grown tremendously in the past two years.    

“Viable categories are heavy parkas, ski and snow suits, snow boots and trek gear. Frequency is the ceiling, because by the third trip the customer buys,” he added.

But purely depending on customers planning travel can end up becoming a paradox for rental platforms. More travel plans means more rental opportunities, but it means customers are also more likely to purchase rather than rent every time. 

Which is why rental platforms cannot just market the affordability; it’s also about keeping up with the latest styles, materials and trends. Even a short weekend trip can be a window for rental platforms. Some are targeting customers that change their wardrobe with the destination rather than using their existing winter wardrobe.

“When you rent, you have the flexibility of a changing wardrobe with every itinerary. You get a sleek trench for a city break, a technical parka for sub-zero trips, and a vibrant ski jacket for the slopes, all at a fraction of the retail cost,” Kosha’s Verma told Inc42.

Small factors like holiday photographs and social media posts influence choices too. Customers who want a different look on each trip may keep renting even when they can afford to buy. The stigma around rented clothing is disappearing fast among metro users. 

So what can brands do in this space to scale? According to Sutaria, customer experience and discovery are the critical levers here. Distribution also matters because the category is sensitive to other parts of the economy i.e. travel. 

Founders in this space added that resale of retired rental stock is a second revenue line but that requires a captive audience base as well. 

The next demand signal is therefore whether customers return for another itinerary, and whether those orders extend beyond the same short travel season. And that dictates the whole economic model for rental platforms. 

Going Beyond The Rental Season 

Once the holiday is over and the heavy winter coat comes back to the platform, the startup has to prepare it for another paying customer. 

So maintenance and upkeep is a central challenge and can skew unit economics. Any company in this space has to provide for reverse pickup without which the rental proposition does not work. 

The dry cleaning and storage is managed by platforms to limit the exposure to costs and to maintain high quality of products. At Kosha, Verma said, clothes go through a 10-point checklist before being rented out again.

So the key metric here would be rentals-per-SKU. The margins are baked into the rental fee, so the actual growth should be seen in the number of rentals for every jacket, coat or sweater in the inventory. 

This is just like the RentoMojo or Furlenco business model, and it’s a parallel for which we have numbers too. 

As per recently listed RentoMojo’s disclosures, the company had 8.51 Lakh items as of March 2026, of which 83.34% were out on rent. Items purchased nearly ten years ago had already earned 5.12X their original cost by this point in time. 

More than 56% of the assets added in 2017 and 60.92% of those added in 2018 were still generating revenue in FY26. These are metrics that even rental platforms have to track, and the shelf life of a wool sweater may be much shorter than that of a hardwood table or other items that Rentomojo offers on rent. 

In other words, the business for fashion rental platforms — which includes winter wear — depends on how much of the stock is out on rent, how long each item lasts and how much it costs to put it back into circulation.

For winter wear, the peak demand sits in a short travel season, so the share of stock out on rent across the full year is also another number to watch when assessing startups and their operations. 

As of now, none of the companies we have spoken to have hit the kind of scale to speak meaningfully about these metrics and their revenue in detail. That itself gives us a clue as to how winter wear startups are still figuring their way around the economic models of this business. Perhaps the end of this winter season may give us an idea of where this is headed.  

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• Bengaluru-based Upliance.ai builds AI-powered kitchen appliances designed to simplify everyday cooking. Its flagship device automates chopping, stirring, grinding and heating through a smart jar, built-in weighing scale and touchscreen-guided recipes.
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