Instagram Kit Lender
Kit Lender is an outdoor equipment and apparel rental service founded by Forrest Shinners. He appeared on Shark Tank to pitch the rental service, in the hopes that an investor would help him with exposure and distribution.
Kit Lender rents out ski equipment and clothes like gloves, goggles, boots, jacket and ski pants. You can also have access to specialty underwear and socks.
Read on to learn more about Shinners, his background, and how he plans to expand his business moving forward.
Here’s what you need to know about Kit Lender:
1. Kit Lender Provides Affordable Outdoor & Skiing Equipment
Kit Lender provides a wide range of outdoor equipment. You can also pick-and-choose which pieces of equipment go into your assigned “kit.” All you have to do is chose your gear on the website, and they’ll deliver it right to the front desk of the ski lodge that you are staying at. Once you are done with the equipment, you are to put everything in the pre-paid return shipping envelope provided and leave it at the front desk.
Some of the most popular kits include the “North Face Kit,” which comes with a jacket, pants, goggles and gloves, and the “Marmot Kit,” which has a similar list of items. Each kit comes with a designated minimum of days that they need to be rented (usually three), and they range in price from $30-$50.
Those who are concerned about getting the appropriate size needn’t worry, as Kit Lender provides a size and fitting guide for both men and women. The guide includes sizes for pants and shirts, as well as goggles and gloves.
2. Shinners Worked As a Reporting Analyst Before Founding Kit Lender
Forrest Shinners attended the University of Vermont, where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration, Accounting & Finance. After he graduated, he got a job as an asset manager at Tocqueville. On his LinkedIn profile, Shinners states that he “increased gross sales over 50% and acquired 80 new clients in the North Eastern territory in 2012,” and “increased gross sales over 100% and acquired 10 new clients in the Colorado territory in 2012.”
Shinners then worked as a reporting analyst at Rockefeller Capital Management. During his five years there, he created and maintained “access databases to support Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) reporting,” and responded to “marketing requests to update RFPs; leveraging FactSet, Bloomberg and RockIt Systems.”
It was while Shinners was working at Rockefeller that he came up with the idea for Kit Lender.
“It wasn’t until I moved to New York City back in 2007, working in finance and meeting lots of people who either had never skied before but wanted to, or skied only once every few years, that I realized one of the biggest things holding them back from going more often was the high upfront cost of good ski clothing,” he told NS Business.
3. Shinners Founded Kit Lender After Lending Equipment to a Friend
Shinners detailed his childhood and how he became interested in skiing on the Kit Lender website.
“Growing up as the youngest son of two ski shop workers, it’ll come as no surprise that I’m an avid skier,” he wrote. “With the scrabble slopes of Stowe, Vermont as my backyard, I soon came to love all outdoor activities, and you can only imagine what the closets at our house looked like. Even to this day I still bring friends home to deck them out for whatever outdoor adventure may come our way.”
Shinners then recounted how a chance encounter with a friend led to him creating the business.
“This past winter while I was doling out the usual flurry of jackets, pants and mitts, a friend who had shown up to Vermont in the dead of winter wearing nothing but sneakers and jeans said, ‘I feel like a pro! This is awesome. You should charge for this,'” he said. “And thus Kit Lender was born.”
“For those that did own ski wear, the majority of the year these clothes were just taking up space and collecting dust,” he further explained. “After thinking about this, it occurred to me that every ski shop or resort rents skis, but no one rents ski clothing. Naturally, I turned to google and quickly discovered no one offered the ability to rent ski clothes online either. That’s when I had my ‘ah-ha’ moment.”
4. Shinners Plans to Expand to Other Sports Equipment In the Future
Shinners is confident that Kit Lender will continue to grow, and feels that the business will eventually offer other kinds of sports equipment.
“We are currently focused on ski clothing rental and providing high-quality gear to our customer,” he said. “In the future, we may expand into other sports or adventure travel.”
“We currently own all the gear offered on the platform, but we have ambitions to move to a purer share economy model where people can exchange or rent their own equipment out when they aren’t using it,” Shinners explained.
“Currently, we are headquartered out of Stowe, Vermont, with the customer service and fulfillment out of a warehouse and office space there,” the founder added. “We are currently exploring moving our operations west to better service our customer base in Colorado, Utah and the Sierra Nevadas.”
5. Shinners Wanted a ‘Shark Tank’ Panelist to Invest In Kit Lender
Shinners was looking for a Shark Tank panelist to invest in Kit Lender so that the business can expand to other locations. He talked about the financial situation with NS Business, and the challenges he’s faced thus far.
“Lack of capital has been one of the biggest challenges the company has faced,” he admitted. “Because this is self-funded I have had to keep my day job to support myself and haven’t been able to grow as fast as I’d like.”
“I haven’t been able to build the website and back-end operations I’ve wanted, it’s also taken time to build the team, and have the money for marketing,” Shinners added. “I hope to be able to move the fulfillment to Colorado so we are closer to one of our major markets… I think the business needed more capital early on, so having another person to work and invest time and money would have been very helpful in our growth.”
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