A dress rental catalogue is not a list of styles; it is a list of garments. Two customers can both love the Emery dress, but only one of them can have the size 10 on the 14th. Inventory that is tracked per style instead of per garment produces double-bookings, wrong sizes at pickup and the Friday phone call nobody wants to make.
Style, variant, unit
Three levels keep it straight:
- Style — the dress as the customer sees it: name, photos, description, price.
- Variant — a size, and sometimes a colour, of that style.
- Unit — one physical garment, with its own tag, barcode, condition and history.
A style with three sizes and two of each is six units. Availability is answered at the unit level and shown at the variant level: "size 8: 1 free for your dates".
Size tags and barcodes
Give every unit a size tag in the system and a barcode label on the hanger or the care label. The tag is what the storefront reads to show size chips; the barcode is what staff scan at pickup and return. Scanning does three things a spreadsheet never will:
- Confirms the exact unit that left, so the return is matched to it
- Timestamps the return, so the cleaning buffer starts from the real moment
- Flags the unit for inspection before it goes back on the rack
In Share Marketplace each unit carries its size as a tag, labels print from the portal, and scan-out and scan-in run from a phone.
Sizes on the storefront
The customer picks dates first, then sees the sizes that are free for those dates. That order matters: showing sizes before dates invites a booking that fails at checkout. The embedded storefront shows size chips per date range and greys out what is booked, so the size 6 that is out until Wednesday simply is not offered for Tuesday.
Colours and other attributes
Some styles come in several colours. Treat a colour like a size: it is a variant with its own units. If a style also comes in petite and regular lengths, that is a third attribute. Keep attributes to what changes availability; fabric care notes belong in the description.
Importing a large catalogue
A boutique with a few hundred pieces can enter them by hand. A wardrobe house with thousands should import: one row per unit with style, size, colour, serial and cost, so the system creates the styles and hangs the units under them. Share imports from a spreadsheet with a serial and barcode column per row and has been used for catalogues past ten thousand pieces.
Condition and retirement
Record condition on return (a note and a photo are enough) and retire a unit when it should not rent again. A retired unit stays in the history for the bookings it was on but disappears from availability. This is also where wears per unit come from, which feeds pricing decisions.
Setup checklist
- One listing per style, with the sizes as variants
- One unit per physical garment, tagged and labelled
- Dates first, then sizes, on the storefront
- Scan at pickup and return
- Import by spreadsheet when the catalogue is large
The dress and wardrobe rental software page shows how units, sizes and scanning fit together in Share.