Why I’m renting all the Christmas presents I give this year
As much of the country prepares for Christmas by hotfooting it around the high street or frantically trying to track down deliveries left with the neighbours, this year, I’m taking a more laid-back approach to the festive season.
I’m absolving myself of most of the wrapping, the prospect of which usually fills me with dread (not least because I am terrible at it), and also spending much less than I normally would on more expensive gifts. This year, I’m hiring my Christmas presents.
From clothing to toys, bicycles to bags, the list of what you can actually rent is growing every year. Much of this has been boosted by the explosion in so-called peer-to-peer rental services which, for the uninitiated, is an arrangement whereby one person lends a stranger something they’re not using, usually facilitated by apps.
I’ve used one of these, called By Rotation, to hunt down a gift for my 19-year-old label-conscious niece. The service boasts over 150,000 searchable listings, with pieces worth a combined value of over £65m; from vintage Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier to Hermes bags and sold-out pieces.
As she’s about to hit the slopes of Morzine in the French Alps for a festive family break, I’ve hired her a pair of designer ski goggles (RRP £795, but £90 to hire for a few days) and a Chi Chi technical jacket (which sells for £600 but costs £65 to hire) to wear on her holiday. They’re someone else’s and she will have to return them when she comes back, but like many teenagers, her tastes change with the fashions, and hiring clothing will enable her to wear something different next year without worrying about putting this year’s items to waste.
Ditto my sister, for whom I’ve bought a gift voucher for a service called Hurr which enables users to hire designer dresses, bags and accessories so that she can wear something fancy to a Scottish winter wedding in February. One in five of us don’t wear the same outfit to a party twice and my sister is eager to scratch the itch of having something “new” to wear without falling into the trap of leaving that thing hanging in her wardrobe to rarely see the light of day again. She’s excited about the prospect of being able to wear something she wouldn’t usually splash out on. (Some pieces on the platforms cost several hundred pounds or even thousands to buy, but can be rented for under £100 for a 72 hour period.)
There’s a Jaguar E Type Series II roadster parked under the tree for my husband. Not literally, obviously, because he’s not that lucky, but there’s a Corgi model to tease the fact I’m hiring one through a classic car hire rental company for him to drive during a long-planned spring weekend away in the New Forest. And while he won’t have the actual car parked outside our home this time next year, he’ll hopefully have the memories without the worry of keeping such a pretty (and prestigious) car on a central London street.
For my oldest friend, I’ve privately hired the wood-fired Nomadic Sauna on the beach near her home in Sussex for a quick blast of heat and then a sea dip.
Even our three-year-old hasn’t escaped my new hiring obsession. For him there’s a subscription to toy hire company Whirli to look forward to, not that he will have a clue. What that means in practice is that instead of receiving one or two toys for Christmas from us, he’ll actually get to choose new toys up to once a month and we can return the ones that have fallen out of his favour.
It’s a positive for him, of course, (what’s not to love about more toys when you’re a three-year-old?) but it’s also a boon for us, his parents, currently drowning under the weight of toy clutter. Whirli offers a variety of levels of subscriptions from £12.16 per month, which enables users to choose from thousands of toys in their catalogue, returning and ordering new ones whenever your child has tired of their existing haul.
These services also offer a cost-effective way of buying big ticket items which kids may grow out of or go off. Take Bikeclub, a bicycle subscription service with over 40,000 members, which is also available through John Lewis. Users pay a fee each month (from £7.99) that amounts to a fraction of the cost of buying the bike. Then you can swap your child’s bike as they grow, or if their tastes change (from a balance bike to one with pedals, or road bike to a mountain or hybrid bike, for example). Bikeclub offers bikes for adults, as does Swapfiets (topping my own Christmas list), which gives capital-dwellers the chance to hire a Dutch-style e-bike on a monthly basis from £54.90.
I know what some of you are thinking. Hiring somebody something isn’t actually giving them a “gift”. And perhaps you’re right in the traditional, box-under-the-tree sense of gift giving. But aside from being much more purse friendly and better for the environment, hiring rather than buying gifts reduces the waste and clutter of buying unnecessary items – a big selling point of the rental movement. Increasing numbers of us struggle with “stuffocation” – the feeling of having too much stuff.
A 2022 survey by waste removal firm Hippo found that over half of Britons have one room in their house they deem ‘unusable’ because it’s filled with clutter. Moreover, who can even remember what they bought for many family members even one year ago, let alone two or three?
Hiring clothes and accessories from a service or another person via an app obviously comes with an element of caution. You need to be more careful with these things than you would with your own possessions. But maybe that’s a good thing? Plus, there are safeguards: pieces come with insurance and both sellers and users are ID-checked, vetted and rated by the app.
If this experience is a success, who knows where it will end? You can already hire Christmas table decorations and place settings from companies like Maison Margaux. And then there are firms such as RoomService by Cort which specialise in renting furniture to homeowners and can temporarily supply you with a bigger dining table (or sofa) for all the relatives who descend on the house. Maybe next year I’ll even rent our Christmas tree (yes, it is possible). Trees are potted, alive and up to 7ft tall. They even collect it and replant it for you after you’re done. Now that’s what I call a surefire hire winner.
