Sports Rental: An Agile and Eco-Responsible Model

What future awaits the sports industry in a post-Covid context?

New health measures, travel restrictions, and random closures of stores and gyms are radically transforming the sports landscape.

In this disrupted context, how can consumers continue practicing their favorite sports? How can we facilitate their mobility while responding to new economic and health constraints?

This is now a fundamental movement that sports industry companies must imperatively address. Consumers are seeking:

• Accessibility: reducing financial barriers
• Flexibility: adapting to changing situations
• Sustainability: limiting environmental impact
• Simplicity: avoiding ownership constraints

However, innovative economic models exist that can respond to these new consumer needs, which are not satisfied by traditional retail offerings.

Rental emerges as an innovation-driven model: quickly adapting to uncertain economic contexts, reducing usage costs, enabling easier access to services, all while fighting waste in a circular economy logic.

Sports Equipment Rental Facilitates Service Access

Evolving your business model and offering sports equipment for rental allows you to relieve customers of the usual constraints linked to ownership.

Indeed, many items are expensive to purchase, which often means additional constraints. Owners must manage:

• Regular equipment maintenance
• Repairs in case of breakdown
• Storage and security
• Value depreciation

Removing Financial Barriers

A rental offer also helps break down entry cost barriers.

This is the bet of Dance, which offers long-term electric bike rentals in the UK. The startup just raised €15 million to extend its promising activity to other European cities.

Starting from the observation that on-demand shared micromobility providers are expensive and often have availability problems, Dance decided to circumvent these difficulties and make this means of transport accessible to everyone.

Expanding the Customer Base

A rental offer therefore allows you to democratize access to a product — which becomes a service — and offer it to a broader customer segment.

This transformation of product into subscription service opens new markets and responds to the expectations of customers concerned with flexibility.

Rental Responds to New Mobility Modes

Reinventing urban mobility, quickly adjusting to the post-Covid context, and responding to social distancing constraints: what if a rental offer allowed you to solve this complex equation?

The Electric Bike Market Explosion

With social distancing measures, electric bike sales exploded in the UK (+230%).

By offering a long-term rental service, Dance aims to reinvent urban mobility and allow consumers to stay healthy, all at an accessible cost.

The "Mobility as a Service" Model

Reinventing urban mobility is not reserved for startups.

Cycling practice has also seen a clear increase in France following the first lockdown and could well become permanent. To respond to this new trend, Decathlon and its new bike rental program propose a new "mobility as a service" model.

This approach transforms the customer relationship: instead of selling a product, companies offer a complete and flexible mobility solution.

Rental Helps Preserve Resources

Many sports items mobilize enormous resources that are not used optimally and generate far too much waste.

For many of them, they are bought new to serve only a few days or weeks per year. This underutilization represents considerable economic and environmental waste.

Optimizing Resource Use

How to preserve resources in a product's lifecycle?

Offering a good for rental allows optimizing its use and thus avoiding waste. This logic fits perfectly into a circular economy approach.

Innovation: Sports Shoes by Subscription

And why not rent sports shoes?

Swiss brand On just launched a first fully recyclable shoe by subscription. Under the "On running" program, for €29.99 per month, customers will receive 2 pairs of shoes per year.

The process:

• After 6 months of use, the customer returns the shoes
• They automatically receive new shoes
• Old pairs are recycled in a circular logic

This new program is currently accepting pre-orders. Indeed, knowing demand in advance will allow the brand to plan production and avoid waste.