What does it take to keep Nuuly clothes fresh?
We took a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in between the bags’ journeys to and from our homes.
On any given day, dozens of black and gray square zippered bags, lined in pink and blue, can be found inside large cartons at UPS stores across the city.
The stacks of bags, from Philadelphia-based clothing rental company Nuuly, mark the final step in a monthly rental process that allows women nationwide to rent clothing from the brand’s vast online catalog. For $98, they can pick six items of clothing ranging from elevated daily wear to formal gowns. The clothing is delivered by mail and returned through UPS in Nuuly’s signature recycled plastic bags.
The bags are shipped back to a 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Levittown, where everything from Anthropologie halter dresses to Rachel Antonoff’s pasta-print puffer jackets shuffle back into Nuuly’s massive rental operation.
“I know it’s a Nuuly return day when I see all the boyfriends lined up outside UPS,” said Miranda Stephen, who has subscribed to the clothing rental service for three years.
Nuuly, launched in July 2019, is part of the URBN family, which houses brands like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, FP Movement, Anthropologie Weddings, Terrain, and Menus & Venues.
“Our business is predicated on the idea of keeping units of clothing in inventory and in circulation as long as possible,” said Dave Hayne, chief technology officer at URBN and president of the service.
Our goal is not to feed any inventory into a landfill.”
The ubiquity of Nuuly bags at UPS speaks to the success of this vision. In 2025, the service has over 300,000 subscribers with about 20,000 added just in the last quarter, ending Jan. 31. Driven by that subscription bump, the brand’s revenue for the quarter increased by 56% to $113 million. The company also opened a 600,000-square-foot warehouse in Kansas City last year.
So what does it take to keep the clothes fresh and the business thriving? We took a behind-the-scenes look at what happens between the bags’ journeys to and from our homes.
What happens when the boxes are returned?
Fresh off the UPS trucks, the Nuuly bags are stacked on pallets inside the giant warehouse in Levittown. The warehouse, not far from the company’s head offices at the Navy Yard, is a wonderland of carousels, jangling hangers, and rows and rows of over a million pieces of clothing. Spread across the floor are 750 associates engaged in an almost dancelike movement of processes.
The clothes go through an elaborate sorting, cleaning, and mending operation before they can be rented again. Software identifies each piece of clothing by its unique ID that logs its rental history and care instructions. Nuuly associates inspect the bags, occasionally finding forgotten keys, notes, and even customers’ own clothes mistakenly returned.
The average base salary for a warehouse associate is $40,000 a year and includes health insurance, a 401(k), paid time off, and an employee discount, according to Glassdoor.
“The longer someone’s with us, obviously, the more they graduate into different pay bands,” Hayne said. “In order for us to be competitive in this market, we need to be probably well over $10 at minimum wage at this point.” Nuuly workers are not unionized.
Wash, rinse, dry, steam
Next, the clothes are sorted: blue bins for wet wash, orange bins for dry cleaning.
Those bins are then moved to a giant room lined with numerous 50-pound dry cleaning and washing machines, dryers, a bag sanitizer called the “Nuubulizer,” and a 250-degree steam tunnel.
After they are washed, clothes make their way to the inspection stations. Associates stand in their stations, surrounded by the smell of freshly washed laundry, inspecting racks filled with the clothes, pulling each item, and placing it on an easel. A 16-step checklist is used to check for stains, smells, rips, holes, missing IDs, and any other “failure reasons.”
A white sweater, for example, with a faint reddish stain is sent to the mending station, where associate Tarun Gulati steps in. He consults a spotting guide that lists all kinds of stains — from grass to gravy, blood to wine — along with the appropriate cleaning solution. He applies a solution, all of which are developed in-house, to the stain he suspects is wine, then uses a combination of steam and suction to lift it. Blood, he says, is one of the toughest stains to remove.
If an associate like Gulati finds holes or rips in a garment, it gets moved to a different area with tailoring stations lined with a library of buttons and thread for repairs. Close to 1,000 clothing items are repaired in the warehouse everyday.
The name Nuuly came from the need to “connote that it’s not new, but it’s newly something,” Hayne said. So a garment will always go back into inventory “if we think someone will be happy renting it.” When a certain style stops being rented as often, the brand then lists it at a steep discount on its sister brands’ websites. Sometimes, they will end up in the stock for the brand’s thrift store, called Reclectic, in the Franklin Mall, and sometimes they are upcycled and listed on ReNuuly online.
Once cleaned, repaired, and steamed, garments are reentered into Nuuly’s three-level carousel system, which holds over 1 million items. Unlike traditional warehouses, Nuuly’s system randomly distributes items to available slots for efficiency. Using an automated conveyor system, the carousels are filled and emptied with a deceptively simple precision.
Back to the bag
The clothes go out the same way they come in, but this time guided by an outbound label. Associates will pick orders and send them back on the conveyor system. An associate then groups orders from the outbound piles. No matter how big, small, puffy, or slinky the clothes are, they are folded with an almost wizard-like skill that makes them all fit into the zippered bags.
A Nuuly subscriber returns clothes without cleaning them. It’s better that way, Hayne says, because not everyone will know the best method to remove a stain or have access to the cleaning agents best suited for a material. And if a subscriber “falls in love with any of the items that she has with her, she can choose to purchase those items. We usually add a nice discount,” Hayne said.
“When the month is over, she ships them back to us in a prepaid label that goes out in the bag, and we then process them in, launder them, clean them, repair them, if needed, and put them back in inventory,” he said.
It’s a dance that never stops.