How to Be an Umbrella Entrepreneur

Sometimes somebody gets a really good idea that makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.

That good idea is about umbrellas.

Renting Umbrellas

According to Rentbrella, their story starts when Nathan Janovich was leaving a subway. Rather randomly, he says he thought, “If bikes can be shared, why not umbrellas?” After that (they tell all very sparsely on their website) It appears that his friend Freddy Marcos suggested pairing umbrella sharing with Out of Home Media. Because Out of Home Media is public space advertising that would include ads on umbrellas, they could generate ad revenue.

Rentbrella first launched in Brazil during 2018 and in New York–with lots of people and more rainfall than the U.S. average– in 2021.

The rest of the tale is entrepreneurial history.

Their kiosks, each stocked with 100 umbrellas, are in office buildings and apartment house lobbies. To use one, you download their app, submit your payment info, scan the QR, and enter the code:

And out pops your umbrella.

In NYC, the first 24 hours are free. After that it’s $2 daily until Day 4’s $16 charge for buying the umbrella.

The Umbrella Company That Folded

During 2017, E Umbrella launched in 11 Chinese cities but their business model did not quite work out. People just had to pick up their umbrellas at subway and bus station stands, leave a 19 yuan deposit ($3.70) and then a 10 cent fee for every 10 minutes. However, perhaps because there was no keep-the-umbrella fee and the minutes charge was a hassle, weeks after the Chinese startup began business, most of its 300,000 umbrellas were stolen.

Our Bottom Line: Entrepreneurs

At this point, we can move beyond umbrellas to the entrepreneurs that make sharing them possible.

Different from what we expect, there is more to an entrepreneur than starting a business. As economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) explained, entrepreneurs are the source of “creative destruction” because their businesses render others obsolete. With their new products and processes, entrepreneurs bring jobs, progress, and productivity. Not necessarily concerned with risk, they change consumer habits, develop new means of production, and new forms of economic organization.

So yes, we can debate who truly is an entrepreneur. However, Steve Jobs nailed it when he told us that, “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”  Similarly, Henry Ford probably said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

My sources and more: Thanks to Slate Money’s Emily Peck for linking me to Anne Cadet’s Substack and the rentbrella story. From there, Reuters and the NY Post, here and here had the Rentbrella history.

Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.