Why Buy That Fancy New Camera or Chainsaw When You Can Rent It?

Logo of Zilok.com, the online rental marketplace

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: Zilok.com
Why It’s a Gem: A super-lean business model provides a green way for customers to both save and make money.

With the success of such super-sites as eBay and Craigslist, you might think there wasn’t room in cyberspace for another customer-to-customer website. But Zilok, which came on the market just two years ago and already has sites in five countries, has carved a green niche for itself by providing an alternative to buying and bartering: renting.

Not only does this idea come at a time when our sagging economy is making us rethink our long-standing belief that we “need” to own as much possible, but it’s also an environmentally friendly solution to what to do with all that clutter we have stuffed into our closets and garages. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: Today we’re talking to Jeff Boudier, U.S. General Manager of Zilok. First of all, I want to know, what does Zilok mean?

Jeff Boudier: Zilok means the online rental marketplace, because we made up that word. It’s definitely one of the web 2.0 names. We wanted something short, something catchy, and something people could associate with a new brand. And that’s what we’re doing today. We’re creating a brand.

LR: Can you explain what your business model is?

JB: The idea is that we have so much stuff that we barely use. And Zilok is a place where you can find anything that you would like to rent, from either someone else or from a rental business around your house. And on the flip side of things, if you have things that you don’t use, you can put them on Zilok for rent to other people and start making money with them.

LR: I saw something interesting when I looked you up in Google, that people could try a Mac, or a computer before they buy it, which sounds like a wonderful idea. Is that a nice-size business for you?

Jeff Boudier, U.S. General Manager of Zilok.com

JB: I want to say it would be a side business. Really our business is not to rent things ourselves. This was more of a perk to our local community, if you will. What’s interesting is that you put a platform out there, and all of a sudden some usages that you wouldn’t have suspected start to appear. And trying out new products is one of them.

LR: Oh, that’s a wonderful idea. Especially in this very, very trying market. Tell me, how is your business doing in this economy?

JB: It is doing very well. It is doing very well for a few reasons. One is that it’s very much in tune with people’s concerns, because we allow people to save money, we give them a new way to make money, and also we’re providing the most sustainable way of consuming. Because it’s renting, there is less wasteful consumption. Another reason that I think is more profound is that there is a switch from an economy of ownership to an economy of usage.

LR: Great. So, how many online items do you have today for instance?

JB: Today, if we only look at the United States, we have more than 100,000 items available.

LR: Ok. Now what would be the number one thing that you rent? What would be the thing people go to first?

JB: We have a few most-popular items. These are things that we wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated before. For instance, strollers are very popular. Digital cameras, the high-end ones with high-quality lenses, are also very popular. Another item is the Nintendo Wii video game system. We actually have many more requests than we can satisfy. It is definitely a very popular item.

LR: You know, it just sounds absolutely brilliant to me, because with obsolescence built into absolutely everything we buy. For instance, if you go on this trip to some foreign country and you want this fabulous camera, by the time you return, they will have upgraded it. So, it’s a great idea to do this. I love the greenness to it.

Are there some things you can’t rent, like firearms, that sort of thing?

JB: We did include a few exceptions in our terms of use. Firearms is one of those. We also don’t want people to start renting pets. I know it kind of sounds crazy, but it is not, because we actually started that launch on the particular business model of pet rentals. So we don’t want to allow that.

LR: Because the French love their dogs much more than they love each other. The nicest I’ve ever been treated in France is when I was traveling with my dog. [Boudier is French.]

JB: Yes, I think you’re better treated than if you were with your little one.

LR: Well, definitely that. But that I can understand. Can you tell us how many hits you get a day?

JB: The rough figure is we get about 200,000 people coming to the site every month.

LR: And how do you get names? How do you advertise, in other words?

Homepage of Zilok.com

JB: Actually, we had a lot of interest from the media since we started. And that has been one of the primary ways for us to get people’s attention. We’ve been on TV, and actually in every country that we started the business, people started being so interested. We’ve had lots of traction this way. Two-thirds of our traffic is also due to all the search engine optimization that we run, which is kind of a core expertise.

LR: That’s a core expertise of management?

JB: We’ve been doing it in-house, until now. And we started collaborating with one of the best in the field recently, to bring it to yet another level. It’s all rentals, but really what we want is to build a place where you can find anything.

LR: So, you own no inventory, is that correct?

JB: No, we have no inventory.

LR: For the people who’ll be reading this blog, can you give them some advice about marketing in this very troubled time?

JB: Yes, on a few different levels. In general, I think it’s very important to communicate that anything that spreads out your message to the world has to really communicate what value it brings to your end user or your end customer. It doesn’t matter really too much who you are, or what you do, what your product is, what are its specifications. It’s why is it useful to people? Why is it helping people save money? Why is it helping people make money? I think that is how services and products should be marketed today.

And the other thing is about communications. We know that brand communications and corporate communications are not a one-way road now. It’s a two-way road. So it’s very important to instantly and directly communicate directly back to your users, to your members, or to your customers. Every customer is a potential blog-writer or potential Twitterer. The new tools of communications are making the buzz and spreading customer experiences much wider and much faster. So it’s very important to be very agile around these things and to be very reactive.

LR: Well, I’m smiling. You can’t see me, but the things you think are important are the very things that I write about in my book. So it’s just kismet that we happened to talk today, and that you happened to repeat so many of the same values that I think are important, too.

Because Zilok's transactions happen in person, the site's search results displays locations as well as prices.

I love what you’re doing. I talk about community and transparency, and I talk about being a good citizen of the planet and what you’re doing, besides the value and unique selling proposition that I talk about — those are the first two things you mentioned — you’re also doing well by doing good because you’re so green.

JB: I think it’s a very important point. It is much truer now than it probably was a few years ago. And it has to do with the fact that so much communication, you can have so much impact by spreading the word, creating a tribe, like Godin. So doing good is a way for you to get people’s appreciation and the way for you to start a viral kind of cycle. Because it’s by doing good that people will be appreciative enough to spread the word for you and do your marketing, and your sales.

LR: They’re your ambassadors. And the problems in our society are so dire today, that if the private sector doesn’t do its part — we can’t expect government to do everything. We really have to step up. We have to be good citizens.

JB: It’s interesting, because I thought, as a French man, you were going to end your sentence as “the government and the public will have to step up.”

LR: Oh, no, no, no, no. We’ve seen that that doesn’t work. Corporate America has been deaf to the needs of society in the past ten years. I mean, look at the debacle we’re living in because of this tyranny of instant gratification that has pervaded our society. But, I love what you’re doing. How many employees do you have?

JB: Well, take a guess.

LR: I would say small. I know Wikipedia has only twelve people, so maybe you could do it with as few as that.

JB: We have about fifteen people worldwide.

LR: Fifteen people worldwide. How fabulous!

JB: I know, and it’s a very distributed team, and it really works great this way. We’re very agile, and very responsive. And we can interact directly with people. So, I think it’s the way to go, if you want to do something big, you have to do it small, you have to be lean, you have to be agile, and you have to dream big.

LR: Absolutely. Well, I wish you the best of luck. I know you’re going to be even more successful than you are today. It’s a wonderful concept, especially for this 21st century, and I look forward to hearing from you sometime in the future, and especially if I want to rent a chainsaw.

JB: Well, thank you very much. It was a great pleasure; I’m really looking forward to reading your book, and I will most definitely get back to you about it.