Military Precision Meets High Fashion

The office holiday gala is just around the corner, and you have nothing to wear. Your few fancy dresses are tired, don’t fit or haven’t been in style since 1996. But you don’t want to fork over a car payment for a new gown. Chris Halkyard ’90 says: Don’t.

Since August, he’s been the first chief logistics officer for Rent the Runway, an online shopping service that lends designer clothes and accessories to women who want a onetime “wow.”

“Many of our items are for functions that are really important to the customer—we recognize that,” he says. “So we have to be organized and efficient enough to guarantee they get that gown before the big event.”

Nearly 100,000 luxury gowns and accessories fill its 160,000-square-foot warehouse in New Jersey, offering clients a seemingly endless virtual closet. Rent the Runway partners with more than 300 designers, including Giambattista Valli, Badgley Mischka and BCBG Max Azria to offer everything from floor-length frocks to glittering cocktail dresses. Inc. reported this month that the company’s on track to rent $1 billion worth of apparel by the end of the year.

The company sends every client two sizes of the selected garment, as well as a selection of alternatives overnight if the items that arrive aren’t quite right.

Speed, he says, is the most crucial element of the quality-control process and is one of the reasons the company has more than 5 million users in its first six years. About half the items are inspected, professionally cleaned and redistributed the same day that they return to the warehouse.

“We’ve designed a hardcore system that streamlines the turnaround process,” he says. “Using predictive analysis, we can see when the item will come back and where it’s going to make sure we have enough time to clean it and get it out to the next person.”

Halkyard built his skills in a very different context, serving in the Air Force as a logistics specialist. There, he focused on transporting everything from ammunition, food supplies and jet engines to soldiers.

The New Jersey native enlisted after high school and served four years before enrolling at the University of Maryland. Much of his Air Force logistics and situational leadership experience complemented his studies in sociology, he says, which coalesced to an ideal skillset for the fashion world. Halkyard was most recently the chief supply chain officer and general manager of distribution services for Gilt, a luxury shopping website, and has more than 25 years of experience in logistics roles at Marc Ecko, L’Occitane, FAO Schwarz and May Department Stores (now Macy’s).

“When you’re working in a distribution center environment, you’re dealing with many types of people in a very dynamic, fast-paced setting,” Halkyard says. “So knowing how to incent different groups to work cohesively to come up with uniform goals is absolutely essential to the business.”

Once operated exclusively online, Rent the Runway expanded to the “real world” of retail with the launch of brick-and-mortar stores in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Las Vegas and New York.

Now he looks to explore how to speed up the turnaround process and revamp the shipping model and possibly to open more warehouses. Plus, the company will launch a monthly subscription service in 2016. For $139 a month, clients will rent three items at a time to keep as long as they want.

“Logistics isn’t just looking at tomorrow,” he says. “You need to set the supply chain up for success looking years down the road.”