It was announced today that Rent the Runway has selected Galway for its first ever international technology office. Rent the Runway created the world’s first living, sustainable closet by enabling women to rent versus buy their clothing.
The centre in Galway will be the first operation for Rent the Runway outside of the US. The privately owned company has five physical locations in the US, 11 million members, and 1,800 employees.
Rent the Runway aims to initially hire 150 engineers and technology developers over the next three years. The prospective team, to be based in the Claddagh area of Galway city centre, will tackle core technology challenges that are critical to Rent the Runway’s overall success and will influence the future of the next generation of services.
The new international office in Galway will enable the company to expand its engineering and product development footprint and new Rent the Runway employees will have the opportunity to launch or grow their careers across a number of roles in software engineering and development.
The Irish teams will also be working on projects to expand and enable RTR’s unique fulfilment network, leverage data science to bring personalization and insight to all aspects of RTR’s systems and experiment with new data-driven applications. The team will work hand-in-hand with the US-based Research & Development teams.
Rent the Runway’s Galway office will be temporarily located at the Portershed. The company expects to relocate to a more permanent home late Summer 2019 at the newly-renovated Piscatorial School building, a prime waterfront location overlooking the Claddagh in Galway City Centre. Claddagh meaning shore is an area close to the centre of Galway city, where the River Corrib meets Galway Bay. It was formerly a fishing village, just outside the old city walls. It is just across the river from the Spanish Arch, which was the location of regular fish markets where the locals supplied the city with seafood as recently as the end of the 19th century. People have been gathering seafood and fishing from the area for millennia. It is one of the oldest former fishing villages in Ireland – its existence having been recorded since the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century.
Welcoming the news, Deputy Anne Rabbitte said:
I am thrilled to see Rent the Runway choose the West of Ireland to open their first ever international office and create 150 new high-tech jobs. Galway City will be a natural fit for this innovative, progressive and creative company. Galway warmly welcomes new firms in niche, highly skilled areas and Rent the Runway will join a growing number of disruptive companies based here. I wish them well for the future and delighted to see them locate in the Claddagh, especially since the clothing that the people of Claddagh wore really made them stand out from the Galwegians around them.
The brightly dressed women layered on blue cloaks over red petticoats with a brightly coloured head dress to finish it off.
All of their clothes were homemade and Claddagh women stuck to their traditions, wearing these outlandish outfits right up to the demise of the village, when their fashion was completely outdated.
Rent the Runway Chief Technology Officer, Josh Builder added,
From the start, it was clear that Galway was the perfect location for our new office – the city has an atmosphere of creativity, mirrors Rent the Runway’s cultural values, and excitingly, will be the European Capital of Culture in 2020. There is an incredible opportunity to tap into the growing STEM talent in the region, and we are eager to begin establishing our Irish footprint.
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