Working with outdoor athletic performance brands at Baleena, we learned that once a product is sold, brands have very limited visibility into how that piece of clothing performs in the wild.

Customer experience was largely inferred from reviews and returns, which capture only edge cases and lack detail. As rental and resale models emerged, we saw these business models as a step-change opportunity: they create repeated touchpoints with the same garment, making it possible to collect richer, more continuous data on real-world product performance and use that insight to inform future product development.

At Baleena, we became particularly excited about the potential to work with Nuuly. Over several years, we had ongoing conversations with Nuuly team members that culminated in a pilot proposal positioning Nuuly as a real-world prototype testing engine. The idea was to use Nuuly’s rental ecosystem to surface durability and performance issues at scale, insights that could then inform product decisions not only for Nuuly, but for sister brands facing similar challenges.