I came across another novel sharing site last week, Blubangle is a jewellery club. For a fee, starting from £14.99 a month, members can use jewellery up to a given “gems” or points value, which when they return it, enables them to take out further jewellery up to the same “gems” value. The concept is very similar to a favourite website of mine, Lovefilm which enables me to rent two films a month for £3.99. It also reminds me of handbag rental club called BagBorrowOrSteal bizarrely recently renamed Avelle (why on earth rename an innovative website with a memorable name, and even worse give it a meaningless name, but I digress). A good look around BagBorrowOrSteal has shown me that they’ve diversified into jewellery, sunglasses and watches too, and there’s some beautiful items. BBOS also operates a more straightforward rental process rather than a points system.
This points based club system is starting to ripple through into all kinds of areas. It’s fairly well established for property Destination Clubs where people buy membership which gives “points” or the right to use a portfolio of properties in several countries and of many types. Some destination clubs also enable members to buy an equity stake in the property portfolio.
The club system has also spread to cars, with examples like the Classic Car Club and Ecurie. And to boats with examples like Pure Latitude.
There are all kinds of variations in the business models for these clubs, but they are all looking for the ideal way of sharing, enabling members to delight in the good things in life, without ending up with a massive credit card bill and a major storage headache for all the stuff we enjoyed once and never got round to using again.