She Built Rent the Runway for 18 Years. Then She Chose to Leave.

Jennifer Hyman didn’t set out to build a fashion company. In November 2008, midway through her MBA at Harvard Business School, she watched her sister agonize over — and drop thousands of dollars on — a dress she’d wear exactly once, to a wedding. Hyman figured there had to be a better way to wear expensive clothes without owning them. She pitched the idea to a classmate, Jenny Fleiss, and in 2009 the two of them launched Rent the Runway, a service that let women rent designer dresses instead of buying them outright.

It worked, at a scale few campus pitches ever reach. Hyman built the company into what Wikipedia and Rent the Runway’s own materials describe as the first company to go public with an all-female founder/CEO, COO and CFO lineup, taking it onto Nasdaq in October 2021 at $21 a share — a roughly $1.7 billion valuation, per Bloomberg’s coverage of the IPO. Fleiss had left the company in 2017; Hyman stayed on as the sole founder-CEO running a newly public business, the kind of moment that ends most founder profiles on a high note. It isn’t where this one ends, because what came next tested her far more than the IPO did.

The stock cratered. It lost roughly 90% of its value within a year of going public and kept falling, hitting $0.31 a share by March 2024 — a 98.5% decline from the IPO price, according to Fortune. To stay listed on Nasdaq, the company carried out a 1-for-20 reverse stock split in April 2024. Then, in October 2025, Rent the Runway closed a recapitalization that converted $220 million of debt into equity, cutting total debt from $340 million to $120 million and pushing the maturity out to 2029 — a restructuring FashionUnited reported was meant to buy the company room to grow again rather than just survive. It’s the kind of stretch that ends careers, not just stock charts — Brynn Putnam, by contrast, got to leave Mirror on the good news of a $500 million sale. Hyman stayed through the bad years and ran the recovery herself.

By early 2026, the turnaround was showing up in the numbers: the company reaffirmed guidance for double-digit revenue growth and a 4% to 7% adjusted EBITDA margin for the year. That’s precisely when Hyman chose to leave. On May 13, 2026, Rent the Runway announced that Hyman was stepping down as CEO, president and board member, effective two days later, staying on only as an advisor through January 2027. “Building Rent the Runway has been one of the greatest privileges of my life,” she said in the company’s statement. “Rent the Runway is stronger today than it has ever been, and that is exactly why this is the right moment for me to step down so Rent the Runway can write its next chapter.” Retail Dive quoted her framing it plainly: after 18 years, she’d decided it was “as good a time as any” to hand the company off. It’s a different exit than the one that closed Elizabeth Stein’s chapter at Purely Elizabeth — no acquirer, no payout headline — just a founder choosing to walk away from the wheel while the car was finally running well.

Teri Bariquit, a board member and 37-year retail veteran who had been Nordstrom’s chief merchandising officer, stepped in as interim CEO during the search for a permanent replacement. That search ended this month: Paige Thomas, who joined Rent the Runway as chief commercial officer in June 2026 after more than 30 years in retail leadership — including stints as Saks OFF 5th’s president and CEO and Signet Jewelers’ chief merchant — was named CEO, president and board member effective September 14, 2026, the day before this was published. Hyman isn’t on the board to see it. She left the job before the company found out who’d run it next, which is either a remarkable amount of trust or the clearest evidence yet that she meant what she said about it being someone else’s chapter now.