E218 Emily Bailey, Director of Data Products & Machine Learning at Rent the Runway

Today's guest is Emily Bailey, Director of Data Products & Machine Learning at Rent the Runway in New York. Founded in 2009, Rent the Runway is transforming the way modern women get dressed by pioneering dynamic ownership and enabling women to rent, subscribe to and purchase secondhand clothing. They have been named on CNBC’s “Disruptor 50” five times in ten years and have placed on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list multiple times.

Rent the Runway is disrupting the $2.4 trillion fashion industry through their in-house proprietary technology and a one-of-a-kind reverse logistics operation. Emily leads a team of talented data scientists and machine learning engineers who work on problems that span all areas of the business and many technical domains, such as recommender systems & personalization, dynamic pricing, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and operations research.

In today's episode, Emily tells us about:

The impact Rent the Runway are making in the retail industry,

How the pandemic has impacted the business,

Leading and building a successful data science team,

What they look for when hiring into the team &

Interesting projects they are working on at Rent the Runway