For decades, people have been able to borrow a book from the library, rent a home or car, and more recently rent clothes from startups like Rent the Runway. Now, a new beauty brand wants to offer consumers the chance to rent product packaging in the name of conserving the planet.
Ace of Air, which launched Thursday, is a gender-neutral skin-care and supplement brand, which requires customers to “rent” the primary packaging for a non-refundable $2 per product. The direct-to-consumer brand launched with eight products priced $35-$85. Products are shipped in a special box, referred to as a Boomerang Box, that can be used up to 100 times and includes a return label so customers can return the shipping package to Ace of Air through UPS. Petra Němcová, Ace of Air chief inspiration officer and co-founder, jokingly described its packaging as a “James Bond suitcase.”
Ultimately, Ace of Air is attempting to re-engineer a method of sustainable shipping and packaging, and push consumers to rethink what purchasing a “product” actually means.
“In today’s world, you rent Lime scooters, you rent [clothes through] Rent the Runway, and there are rental cars, so we felt like the rental model was the best way to be all-inclusive and accessible,” said Stephanie Stahl, Ace of Air CEO and co-founder. “We aspire to be the Tesla of the beauty and wellness world.”
Unlike TerraCycle’s Loop system, where customers deposit a specified cost and get it back when they return the empty packaging, Ace of Air customers do not recoup the $2 cost for each product since it’s a traditional rental concept. Němcová said the $2 per-product rental fee is a separate line item at checkout, plus there’s a $3 rental fee for the Boomerang Box. Additional shipping costs vary by location.
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“The rental fee [line item] is purposely designed to remind customers that this is a shared economy, meaning that we are sharing the packaging,” she said.
Stahl said that while Ace of Air was in development, the team conducted a lifecycle analysis on various DTC skin-care and supplement products to understand the negative environmental impact that the product, its packaging and shipping has. What was found, on average, was that the product accounts for 25% of the environmental impact, shipping is 5%, and packaging is the remaining 70%.
According to the Environment Protection Agency, containers and packaging for categories like cosmetics and food make up a major portion of municipal solid waste, amounting to 82.2 million tons in 2018 or 28% of total waste generation. Furthermore, it was estimated that 14.5 million tons of plastic containers and packaging were generated in 2018, approximately 5% of waste generation.
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Although the rental concept is familiar and the sharing economy continues to grow, the difficulty for Ace of Air lies in getting customers to rethink their notion of what purchasing a product means and that they ought to rent it to begin with.
“Even though you own the package, you throw it out, right? It’s not like a house or an apartment [that you rent],” said Stahl.
To do so, Ace of Air is focusing on small pieces of content, such as short posts and videos on Instagram, that focus on the brand’s ethos in a “fun, compelling and feel-good way,” Stahl said. The company will also work with influencers at launch, but declined to specify who, how many, or whether they would be paid or unpaid partnerships. Němcová, a model, television host and well-known philanthropist, has an Instagram following of 155,000 people, while Ace of Air launched with approximately 750 followers.
