Formal wear rental at the UBC bookstore : a triple bottom line feasibility report
Creators: name: Fan, Boyuan (Theodore)
name: Fu, Xiao Hang (Carol)
name: McGowan, Patrick
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2015

description: This report assesses the financial, environmental, and social impacts of implementing a formal wear rental service at the campus bookstore at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The primary goal is to determine if the potential benefits, in these three areas, of implementing such a service outweigh the detrimental effects. The financial analysis accounts for the business feasibility of running a formal wear rental service on UBC campus. Major factors considered in building this business model include purchasing costs, maintenance costs, rental price, and rental period. The service will be providing six categories of formal wear: suits for men and for women, dress shirts, tuxedo, tuxedo shirts, and formal dresses. After series of analysis, it is suggested to target the market at the CO-OP students and graduating students at UBC, as they show great potential in utilizing this service. Based on this marketing theme, the suggested price for rental is $27.00 for suits, and $46.28 for tuxedo and formal dresses, with rental period of one day. This would cover the cost of purchasing and cost of maintenance for 15 sets of formal wears within one month. Judging by the great potential of the market and the short period for return value, it is recommended to implement the formal wear rental service on UBC campus. The environmental effects of the rental service fall into two main areas: energy consumption (carbon footprint) and pollution. The evaluation of benefits and drawbacks of the project in these two areas is based on each rental service provided to customer. In one successful rental service cycle, an existing formal wear is used rather than a new one needs to be manufactured and an extra cleaning process for the existing formal wear is requested after the service. Based on this stimulation, the rental service consumes a small amount of extra energy and water from cleaning process while saving a huge amount of carbon footprint and pollutions from producing process. The service is concluded to be environmentally beneficial overall. It is suggested to be implemented and choosing eco-friendly laundry services near the campus is also recommended. An analysis of the social impacts of the rental service focused on the primary concerns: the UBC community, the student body, as well as producers and local retailers. The benefits to the community are increased employment opportunities for professionals and students. One area of employment is retail salespeople for the purpose of displaying, selling, marketing, and also inventory and purchasing managers. Additionally, maintenance and repair staff would be required to clean and maintain the formal wear, and may be staffed within the bookstore or alternatively outsourced to local business. Other opportunities include information technology (I.T.) professionals for inventory management and systems design. On top of providing work, the service brings additional traffic and revenue to the bookstore. The larger volume of customers directly and indirectly increase sales in all departments of the bookstore, and profits could be used to maintain or improve existing infrastructure. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”