Good morning. Today, a mid-aughts retail staple for young shoppers says it has a new growth engine.

Leaders at Urban Outfitters had to push through some very valid concerns before they started the clothing-rental service Nuuly in 2019. The results now look like yet another argument for disrupting your business before someone else does.

Here are some of the latest numbers on Nuuly, via the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Jennifer Williams:

• Net sales surpassed $568 million for the year ended Jan. 31, exceeding a $500 million target executives set last February
• Average active monthly subscribers have reached 420,000, up 40% from a year earlier
• And the service now accounts for around 10% of Urban Outfitters’ overall revenue.

So far, so good. But perhaps even better, Nuuly is also driving shoppers to buy from the company’s other brands, which include its namesake label as well as Free People and Anthropologie, Jennifer notes.

Executives had worried before Nuuly’s introduction that a rental business would cut into shoppers’ spending on tops, dresses and more from those other brands, said Frank Conforti, Urban Outfitters’ co-president and chief operating officer.

That hasn’t been the case, according to Conforti.

“We’ve actually found the exact opposite, that it actually has been, you know, accretive to those brands,” he said.

• I’ll call out one more point for marketers on Urban Outfitters: the company’s turn toward venues where consumers take the lead, like Canva, the graphic-design platform popular for making gift wish lists.
  
  “The brand has seen great success in diversifying their social platforms and optimizing their creative, across Reddit, Pinterest, and TikTok,” said Conforti, the co-president, on the company’s earnings call. “The brand’s recent partnership with Canva was a highlight, generating significant engagement through thousands of holiday wish lists. Moving forward, the team is leaning further into user-generated content and exploring emerging platforms to amplify the brand voice.”
  
  Urban Outfitters President Shea Jensen echoed the importance of spreading out.
  
  “I think our mission in marketing is really to connect with customers and provide a great experience,” she said. “Increasingly that means finding them on a diverse range of social and digital platforms. And so in the past quarter and I think looking ahead that means really accelerating our efforts on platforms like Reddit, you heard Frank mention TikTok, Pinterest, connected TV and even out in OpenAI platforms.”

The fierce consumer advocates called high-school students are testing marketing claims from the smartphone-pouch company Yondr—using magnets, rocks and tables.

Yondr promotes its “Phone-Free Schools Program” as an easy way for schools to keep kids from using cellphones. Students put their phones in Yondr’s signal-blocking pouches when they arrive, then get them back out when an administrator unlocks the pouches at the end of the day.

As AI companies have discovered, however, it’s hard to control product outcomes when “adversarial” consumers go off-label.

The New York Times reports on the scene soon after Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles deployed Yondr’s system, as recalled by student Joel Nam:

Yondr deployments have worked better elsewhere, defying some teachers’ expectations that cellphone addiction would push teens to resist. Other schools just put phones in a designated locker or plastic caddy.

Whether the Yondr jailbreak in Los Angeles was funny or not depended on your perspective. Yondr secured $19 million in sales to schools last year, the Times reports.

Joel wrote an opinion piece in his school newspaper calling Yondr the district’s “million dollar failure.”

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