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" 1. Process the NO With Other People JENNY: the first time I remembering hearing no in the business world was with Jenn was when we started pitching Rent The Runway, and we met a lot of initial resistance from designers who were worried about what renting would mean for their brands. Having a co-founder at that moment was really important because my initial reaction was leaving that meeting and feeling pretty upset by it. Where do we go from now? Diane Von Furstenberg is a very powerful person in the industry and has some doubts about what we&amp;#039;re doing. And I think that&amp;#039;s when I looked to the power of a co-founder who started to open my eyes to some of the opportunities ahead. Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster and having a co-founder during certain moments to lift you up and to help one another can be really important. JENN: I got negative feedback after a meeting at my first job. A woman in her 30s pulled me aside and told me that as a young woman in the company, I shouldn&amp;#039;t speak up, I should sit towards the back and present myself as more sweet and feminine as opposed to loud and aggressive. It was very difficult to hear and I started crying. I went home, I talked to friends about it, I talked to my parents about it, and honestly, I had to develop my own inner strength to say, you know what, I don&amp;#039;t want to be her. A few weeks later, I had a conversation with a much more senior man in the organization who was my mentor. I confided in him and he basically said, &amp;quot;Jenn, you&amp;#039;re amazing. Your ideas are better than anyone else&amp;#039;s in the room. That&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m your mentor. Don&amp;#039;t listen to this woman.&amp;quot; that was a really crazy thing for this senior guy to be saying to me, especially in a corporate environment. But I think he had seen that this was a cross roads for me and if he told me to listen to her advice, he was going to change the course of my career in a negative way. So he had a choice whether he was going to try to lift me up or push me down and he chose to instill confidence in me, that I should just be myself, and myself was going to be louder and more opinionated, and he said that was going to end up being great for my career. 2. Figure Out Why You Heard No &amp;amp;amp; Refocus JENNY: Designers initially resisted our idea because the economy was suffering and there was a general fear about preserving brand equity. But Jenn and I were able to really listen to their concerns, digest them, and figure out ways to enhance our business so that we could actually be helpful to designers and address all of those concerns up front. Jenn: After our first meeting with Diane Von Furstenberg, I saw an opportunity to expand her reach and expand her market to a different demographic, a younger demographic, and to make people fall in love with designer fashion in a new way: by letting them wear it and develop a kind of organic affection and memory of that product. So it was really by hearing from her in a lot of ways how the industry hadn&amp;#039;t changed for many, many years and in feeling that because the industry had been following the status quo for so long that no one had explored those opportunities before of how powerful it would be. Jenny: During the first trial we had where we actually rented dresses to women at an undergraduate college, we saw girls putting on designer dresses and just looking and feeling transformed. They were looking more confident, there was an extra bounce in their step and we saw that hey, there&amp;#039;s really deeper something going on here than the value or the designer label. It&amp;#039;s transformation to those young women, and in that way it&amp;#039;s so different than fast fashion, it&amp;#039;s so different than getting a knock off version. There&amp;#039;s a real value here that consumers want by wearing these designer labels. it&amp;#039;s really lead to making our business as strong as it possibly can be and now a real marketing channel that helps introduce young women to these designer brands. 3. Restructure An Ask That Addresses Initial Concerns Jen: I think another thing we did after hearing that initial no was familiarize ourselves more with the industry and go into dozens of subsequent conversations with people from the fashion industry with open ears and asking a ton of questions. So from the initial meeting with Diane, we asked her what were her fears about the idea, what were her doubts. And we used a lot of her responses to inform other conversations we had with stylists and fashion PR people and other designers and retailers. So it was kind of like from one hub there were many spokes of how we evolved the conversation and gain more insight in how we would have to evolve the business model so that it was beneficial to designer brands. Jenny: So when we fundraised for Rent The Runway, we were pitching the concept to venture capitalists who are typically men in their 50s and 60s, so getting them to relate to the value of renting dresses and why on earth women need to many options for what to wear and then also just to stand in front of them as two young women ourselves who had never started a company before was quite challenging. Between finessing our sales skills, but also figuring out ways to show them rather than just tell them the value we were offering to women was really powerful. So for example, we took videos of our core consumer talking about their closets and the concept of renting and how they felt when they put on a great dress. We videoed some of the initial trials that we did early on where women were actually putting on dresses and you could see how they were actually more confident and empowered when they wear these and there was really a moment for our first investor Bain-where there&amp;#039;s so much opportunity with female consumers and I think we&amp;#039;re at a time when people understand that and they&amp;#039;re willing to embrace that fact that women bring a different perspective to the table that can lead to real business opportunities. More: Join Our Power Girl Movement  3 Outfits That Will Land You An Internship In Fashion How To Use Your Passion To Give Back "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/fashion/style-advice/tips/a22012/rent-the-runway-founders-how-to-deal-with-rejection/>