RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Convenience, sense of community, respect for the environment, and sustainability. These are some of the factors that lead more and more people to join businesses based on the sharing economy – a consumption system in which it is no longer necessary to purchase a product or service to enjoy its benefits. These are the cases, for example, of streaming video platforms or transportation applications.
The model has been expanding worldwide since renting – and no longer buying – has gained the consumer’s preference. Here in Brazil, many Brazilians have already discovered this model’s advantages, especially when the use is not so frequent. “The change in customer behavior, which is becoming increasingly engaged with conscious consumption, is already visible,” says Sebrae-SP business analyst Marcos Gomes Rabello. “The Brazilian consumer is starting to become familiar and involved with this economic segment. The proof of this is the large adhesion to shared business models,” he observes.
According to the consultant, this consumer mentality stimulates the emergence of more opportunities in the market. “The openness of Brazilians to experimenting with new business formats and the success of some companies in this segment are a strong indication that there is still a lot of markets to be explored,” he says.
Entrepreneur Denise Della Nina Andrade is one of the entrepreneurs who have turned this new reality into a successful business. In 2015, she opened OkiPoki, a toy rental company aimed at children from one to three years old. She got the idea from her own experience with motherhood. “I was that mom who wanted to buy everything she saw for my daughter. But, in the end, I could see that it was all costly and I would use very little. So I thought that if there were a way to rent and share these objects, other mothers would want them too,” she recalls.
At first, Denise started with OkiPoki rentals only through a website. Later, the business grew, and she saw the need to have a warehouse to manage the stock and maintain a physical point of service to offer more direct contact with the customer. Today, she can serve the entire São Paulo capital and also the ABC region.
Besides toys, her business includes renting other items for small children, such as car seats and food seats – according to the customers’ needs and requests. Her stock is about 350 pieces, and her average ticket is R$170 (US$30) per customer per month. “When the person comes to rent some product, they can choose from keeping it for 15 days or even for a few months, according to their need.”
After the product returns to the warehouse, it goes through a sanitization process and is packaged to be made available to another child. As the business grew, the company also began to receive requests to sanitize toys and children’s items in customers’ homes and maintain other toys. Denise decided to incorporate the service, but without losing its focus – the rental of toys for use at home.
In Denise’s opinion, OkiPoki has yet another differential when compared to traditional toy stores. According to her, her business involves a relationship of trust, respect, care with the product, and the awareness that other people will use it. “I took a shot in the dark. I had no idea what that relationship of customers to toys would be like. So far, I haven’t had a customer who has taken the product and disappeared, for example. ”
As in any business, setbacks exist, but the company has assimilated these situations well, says the entrepreneur.
“The accidents that happen – the dog ate the ball, the baby broke the toy – do not reach 2% of our rentals. We are prepared to deal with that. “Currently, the company has 80 to 130 toy rentals a month. The number grew with the pandemic: there was an increase in demand and demand from parents with children of different ages than initially postulated.
“We had to increase our stock and recorded an increase of about 30% in sales. Although the future is still uncertain, we expect growth between 30% and 50% for the next two years,” she says. Denise’s positive outlook is also based on the confidence that the shared items market is here to stay and that there is still plenty of room to expand. “I see as a trend the option of renting products instead of buying them. We have been in the market for six years, and we realize that it is not a passing thing. Not only the financial part is advantageous. It also has the ecological, environmental issue; imagine how much plastic you spend to produce a toy.”
For travel
The entrepreneur Luciano Bello also bets on the trend of sharing products. He is currently ahead of Volume4Trip, a startup focused on renting and sharing travel accessories for cars, such as luggage racks, bike racks, and roof racks. The business’s inspiration also came from personal experience: after his son’s birth, the family’s travel luggage grew considerably.
Equipment for carrying more luggage in the car became essential items, but the prices were high. The idea, then, was that it might be interesting to rent the products while they were not in use. And Bello went further: he considered the possibility that anyone could do the same by registering on a platform. The idea came about in 2018. After Bello participated in the Startup SP Program and reformulation, he relaunched his site in 2020. He has already started reaping the fruits of the high demand at the end of the year.
“In one month, we had more than a hundred people registered. The demand for rental equipment is real, especially during the vacation season and the end-of-year festivities,” he says.
Today, Bello has his own stock of equipment that he makes available for rent to registered people willing to rent their products through Volume4Trip. The dynamic is simple: the owner registers on the site and advertises for free. The ad goes through moderation, is published, and, after the rental, the platform keeps 30% of the value and the owner 70%.
Among the challenges of his business, Bello points out some people’s resistance to temporarily give up their belongings. “I am working to show that it is possible to have guarantees for equipment loans as well. It is important to work on changing this idea of ownership and also the confidence that the equipment will return in good condition,” he explains. Bello believes that enjoying an asset is the most important thing, regardless of whether you own it. For this reason, he has focused on security and transparency policies so that more and more people have access to the tools and the concept he wants to convey. “The post-pandemic future contemplates a lot of outdoor tourism. I believe that this also has everything to do with my proposal. And product sharing is here to stay.”
The entrepreneur notes that younger people are the most favorable to this trend, but he has also been talking to the 45 to 50-year-old audience. “We get a lot of families on trips and also groups of sportsmen looking for support for bikes, for example. ”
Sebrae-SP analyst Marcio Rabello confirms that, in fact, young people are more likely to try out this business model because they seek greater freedom, besides exerting a strong influence with their way of consuming products and services. “When they don’t want to anymore, they simply pack their bags and leave for another challenge without many ties or items to carry,” he says. The consultant also points out another profile that uses this business model: the “convinced saver”, who analyzes all the possibilities before deciding on a purchase.
Models for the future
The sharing economy concept has been popular since the middle of the last decade, especially in the US and European countries – before the Covid-19 pandemic, the expectation was that by 2025 this market would be worth around US$335 billion. This figure must be reassessed with the impact of social distance on leisure activities, travel, home rental, and even face-to-face work. The pandemic has brought new possibilities for sharing and the need for more controlled costs.
The sharing economy market basically involves three models: access to goods and services, where people pay to have access for a certain period of time; redistribution, a model based on moving goods that are no longer being used to places where there is demand; and collaborative lifestyle, which seeks to engage communities of people and has the ultimate goal of sharing everything from goods to space and time.
Source: Exame