Pack light and stay active at Westin Hotels & Resorts. Our gear lending program lets you borrow New Balance fitness gear, so you never miss a workout.
Source: Westin Workout Gear Lending | Westin Hotels & Resorts
One of the most important questions during the Footwear Innovation Summit 2019 in Los Angeles was, “Will the sharing economy work in the footwear and apparel industry?” I initially said that it wouldn’t because people simply aren’t going to wear someone else’s kicks. I failed to think about my own business and how I used to take used kicks, clean them and resale them at considerable pricepoints. What was worse about my answering so quickly was that I knew over twenty years ago in San Diego RoadRunner Sports sold slightly used footwear in their showroom. The sharing economy, as I explained in a post on Resku, “started with hand-me-downs.”
After the summit ended I got a text from Fabian Krauss, Global Business Development Manager at EOS. He hit me with this picture:
When he wrote, he explained, “Yeah, I stayed at the Westin bonaventure, but heard they also have it at other Westins. I tried it, but they were out of large shirts and shorts. Either a bad sign, or a good one since Many people do it. The Shoes worked and they looked pretty new…”
When a person hears sharing economy, we usually think Uber and Lyft or maybe Plato’s Closet. It really never occurred to me that the travel industry could be one of the best ways to implement sharing. While many wouldn’t consider that traveling light would benefit the world or have anything to do with sustainability, consider that business travel generates these numbers (from US Travel Answer Sheet) you can find leisure travel on this link as well:
- Direct spending on business travel by domestic and international travelers, including expenditures on meetings, events and incentive programs (ME&I), totaled $327.3 billion in 2018.
- ME&I travel accounted for $135.9 billion of all business travel spending.
- U.S. residents logged 463.6 million person‐trips* for business purposes in 2018, with 38% for meetings and events.
New Balance appears to have locked into an addiitional revenue stream with Marriott Bonvoy. The opportunity is there for other brands to work with other hotels. But when you consider the decreased weight on flights, the additional miles saved on personal footwear and apparel used, the sharing economy around gear lending is actually a solid option for helping to improve the global footprint. It’s not a lot of course, but it’s a start. As creative minds begin to look at ways to increase sharing in the footwear and apparel industry maybe, the constant churning out of products will slow down… probably not, but we need baby steps. Kudos Westin and New Balance.
