The Scoop With Alta’s Jenny Wang: On Partnering with Rent the Runway

Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.

This week’s guest is Jenny Wang, founder of Alta, which is essentially one of the few apps that seem to be succeeding in bringing that mythical Clueless closet to life.

Jenny founded Alta in 2023 and launched it last summer, after raising over $11 million from investors including the Arnault family’s Aglaé Ventures, Karlie Kloss and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu. In the year since, Alta has worked on a number of partnerships, the most recent of which we are speaking about today.

We are partnering with Rent the Runway (RTR), and we will be rolling out the functionality over the next couple of weeks. When you go to any product page on RTR, there will be both avatars and outfits for different occasions, generated by Alta. The partnership essentially brings an AI-driven styling experience to any item on RTR so their customers can discover endless ways to style items and outfits, and it also makes it easy to find other items to complete the look. It’s very cutting-edge technology, and it uses AI avatars.

Jenny Wang looking at the Marimekko page live on the RTR website, with outfits generated by Alta.

So it’s using generic avatars, not digital twins?

Not yet. We made six different generic avatars with RTR, and they range from size 2 to 12.

There is some criticism around the use of generic avatars instead of real people in e-commerce because they threaten jobs within a retailer’s photo studio. What is your position?

This is just the first iteration of the product, and we created the avatar experience in response to customer demand. Throughout this whole process, we’ve been interviewing RTR customers about their preferences, and from what we’re hearing, the desire to envision an outfit on an avatar is real. She is asking for variety, and she is asking to better imagine how these outfit suggestions might work for her. So we are answering that with size diversity, and by investing in a quantity of outfits that is far greater than what RTR could ever shoot, and providing additive content to the existing e-commerce photography experience on the RTR website and app.

We generate around one user avatar every second on the app. It’s real people around the world creating their avatars, and they also upload the contents of their closet. We also have a daily leaderboard of the most popular outfits on the app. People submit their outfits for other users to try on, and whoever gets the most tries sits at the top. It’s really cute.

Have you seen any major summer trends like Brazilcore or latex come through the app?

There have been so many Brazilcore outfits recently. Or this morning, for instance, I woke up and went on the app and saw so many users trying on different versions of the latest Zendaya outfit from the Odyssey press tour.

I remember when The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out, people were posting a lot of Prada outfits as well as one specific outfit worn by Emily Blunt, the one with the Dior shirt.

Alta is essentially a social media app, right? Is this where social media is going?

I think your avatar is your AI-era selfie. The last decade was so much about the mirror selfie as a form of self-expression. And users on the app are so creative not only when it comes to outfits; there are people who add their pets, or their beauty or accessories to their avatar. We also see people add their perfume, cars, or suitcases to their closets and really treat Alta as a form of self-expression.

It reminds me a bit of Letterboxd because both platforms allow users to showcase their personal taste. Who is the Alta user?

It’s a broad spectrum; we have high-schoolers to retirees. But I would say the Alta user is someone who loves wearing a thoughtfully styled outfit and is also excited about using AI and technology to improve their everyday life. But they are creative and playful at the same time. They use Alta both to identify gaps in their closet and make their lives more convenient, but also to emulate a celebrity red carpet look on their avatar.

Abby Orons, RTR head of content, demoing on the RTR app.

How do you figure out who to partner with?

Rent the Runway came to us last year because they were looking for a solution to the styling question. I was introduced to the founder and went to their offices for a meeting, and ended up doing a demo of the app to a room of 20 people.

When it comes to designers and brands, it’s been more organic, and it’s often because someone working for the brand is on Alta, they like it, and they reach out. For instance, we partnered with Public School New York for their return to New York Fashion Week in February. I had mutual friends with the designers who introduced us, and they were also Ulta users. They’d already made their avatars. We did a little pop-up trunk show where they showed their new menswear collection. And Jay-Z got his avatar made by his stylist in Public School and then wore Public School on his tour. So that was so cool to see.

The Paris and Milan Fashion Week schedules are out. What are you looking forward to seeing in September?

For Paris, it would be Zimmermann and Dior. And then for Milan, Dolce & Gabbana.

The F*ck Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person by Keltie Knight and Spaghetti Code by Karlie Kloss, who is one of our angel investors.

Speaking of Karlie Kloss, you have some serious backers. How would you advise other founders to go about finding investment?

I would say to find investors that are really aligned with your long-term vision and understand that the product that you see today is not the product you’ll see in five to 10 years. The technology cycles are compressing very quickly, and what is maybe not possible now could be possible in 12 months, if not six months.

Can you build something that a small number of people really, really, really love and use every day? People who use it so much that they tell their friends about it and post about it organically on their social media. That has always been my focus. Because if you iterate on your product and it gets better 1% each day for your small group of really passionate users, the passionate user base will grow, and over time it compounds.