Rent instead of own. With VAUDE Rent you can combine adventure and sustainability.

"Having is better than needing" is a popular formula of limitless consumption, celebrated in books, on T-shirts and in countless YouTube videos. Possession regardless of actual need promises a lot of status in this logic. We offer a different promise with the new edition of our rental service VAUDE Rent (in german): "Own less. Experience more." Currently, the rental offer includes tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, backpacks and bike bags as well as selected outdoor clothing, e.g. for ski touring.

Simply set off on an adventure, for example bikepacking or a big hiking tour - without owning a sleeping bag, tent, sleeping pad or the right bike bags. Sounds easy? It is!

Renting something instead of owning it can be very useful and above all practical. For example, if you just want to try something new. It doesn't matter if it's your first hiking tour since childhood, if you're a passionate mountaineer and want to go on a gravel tour for the first time, or if you finally want to go on a ski tour yourself. Many outdoor adventures require specialized equipment. Finding the right products and getting to grips with the technical details can be a huge pleasure for some people, but getting to grips with it theoretically is still different to simply testing it out in practice.

For example, is the tent the right size or is the sleeping bag warm enough? These are questions that even qualified personnel in outdoor specialty stores can only answer to a limited extent, because they are very individual. With VAUDE Rent, you can find out before you buy. This also includes recognizing in a very basic way whether a product is so important or brings so much joy that you "have to" own it. Maybe it turns out that it makes more sense to rent suitable equipment only for the time you actually use it: because you might need a warmer sleeping bag or a smaller tent for the next outdoor event.

At VAUDE Rent, renters can find the right equipment quickly and safely. The rental offer is clearly structured by product categories and with just a few clicks, the desired rental items can be called up, including descriptions and tutorials, as well as their availability. Then it's just a matter of selecting products and rental period, entering shipping and billing data, paying - and a few days later the parcel service rings.

Convenient: The shipping costs already include the return shipment. Our online store is directly linked to the rental service, i.e. for all rentable products, you can choose between purchase or rental in the web store. "As a company, we also take care of professional cleaning and preparation after the rental, thus offering a complete carefree package for all renters," adds Klauer.

The rented products are delivered in an environmentally friendly upcycled shipping bag. We sew these ourselves in our upcycling workshop from material scraps that are left over from the production of our Made in Germany bike bags.

Jana Möltner does not work for VAUDE. She was a test tenant before the offer went live. Together with her partner Benjamin Bader and their dog, she was on the road right from their Bavarian front door. Her conclusion:

"We definitely want to do this more often. On foot, we perceived the area around our home in a completely different way again and discovered new favorite places!"

Because the weather didn't want to cooperate at all, the planned weekend adventure with an overnight stay in a tent was spontaneously reorganized into two day trips; what remained with Jana and Benjamin was the desire to make up for the action with a tent. Quite uncomplicated, without buying two large backpacks, sleeping bags, sleeping pads and tent again. Jana and Benjamin also noticed in this process that the chosen backpacks were almost too small for their needs. It was good that they did not buy the backpacks and could simply return them

The low costs and great security are among the main advantages of the VAUDE rental offer. A family of four needs equipment for a four-digit purchase price on a one-week hike with a tent. But the purchase cost is not the only argument for rental equipment. Renting is a way to make more conscious consumption choices. By consuming less overall, you can reduce your own ecological footprint and thus conserve valuable resources on our planet.

"In skiing, renting is already very well established and ski rental is offered in many sports stores and ski resorts."

In the podcast conversation with Ina Remmers, Anna Rechtern points out that it is already common practice in winter sports to rent skis along with boots and poles. Ina is the managing director of the neighborhood platform nebenan.de. There, people can borrow necessities from tools to party costumes close to home. Ina is a professional when it comes to "shareconomy" and was a guest on our VAUDE podcast: for many people, renting products is not only a question of the purchase price, but also of the increasingly expensive living space: "Not everyone has enough space for extensive outdoor equipment and the storage space also costs rent."

"In addition to saving our own financial resources, a rental service also conserves ecological resources. Each rental product is used more often, the footprint for each individual use decreases, and less needs to be produced overall." Robert Klauer

When a company values renting so highly, the question almost inevitably arises as to whether they are not harming their own core business. Our head of sales Jan Lorch has a clear answer to this: "Renting also makes economic sense for us because it is a resource-decoupled business model based on closed-loop thinking. We see thinking much more strongly in terms of closed-loop systems as the key to a climate-friendly future."

That's why we continuously invest in the quality of our products and in sustainable business models, for example in our VAUDE Academy for sustainable business (in german) or in services that promote long product use with offers in the areas of rental (in german), resale or repair. However, the rental business is not only sustainable for the renters and for us as a company, but also in the big picture if it succeeds in bringing people a little closer to nature again and raising awareness of its inestimable value for all of us.

"We quite often hear the wish that companies should lead the way," says Anna Rechtern in conversation with Ina from nebenan.de, and both agree on the importance of pioneering offerings. At the same time, they both have to laugh a bit when they think about how commonplace renting instead of buying and using instead of owning can be and how natural it once was. For example, when it comes to books. Anna, who recently moved, has used this opportunity to rediscover public libraries, for example: reading books without buying them!

"People then quite often say, 'That's right, libraries, that used to be something.' And honestly, who really reads the majority of their books more than once?"

The question of usage can be applied to quite a few products. A drill is only actually used for an average of eleven minutes in its entire product life, Ina adds.

"So why buy one when it's easier, cheaper and more climate-friendly?"

• Curious? Then go here (in german) to the VAUDE rental service.
• You can listen to the entire podcast here (in german).
• Read more about VAUDE's sustainability efforts here.
• Any questions? The VAUDE rental FAQ (in german).