My second rule is: Be resilient.
Big girls do cry but then they stop and move forward. The buzz building business is a messy one and it is not always going to be a straight upward trajectory. In the case of Rent the Runway, weeks before we launched, we had “secured” what was our dream piece with Vogue. An adorable Vogue writer had rented Proenza and Yigal Azrouel, loved the experience and was planning an exclusive to cover our launch. Then, someone (we still don’t know who) leaked the story of our launch to this very site Fashionista and on Wednesday November 4th, a small piece was posted about our beta launch. The Fashionista post was picked up by InStyle and the general blogosphere, which did not go over well with Vogue. In fact, we feared that we had forever damaged our relationship with the publication we had adored since we were little girls. Vogue pulled the piece and we were DEVASTATED and scared. We sulked for about an hour, had a drink and that’s when we found a connection to someone with a @nytimes.com address—Jenna—which as you know turned into the best thing that ever happened to us.

Even if I went back in time, I would not have been able to change the leak that occurred. It was out of our control and it sucked. But, make lemonade out of those lemons because you never know what buzz can be found elsewhere.