PAINT YOUR NAILS 💅

PAINT YOUR NAILS 💅

January 14, 2026 • Issue No. 28

My friend Gabby invited me down a TikTok rabbit hole this week and I jumped at the chance. The topic at hand had an air of schadenfreude — it involved corporate dishonesty, tough competition, and the canary in the coal mine who’d come out victorious. It gave “the girls are fighting” if the girls are women CEOs in blazers going balance sheet for balance sheet.

The Corporate Dishonesty: In June 2025, Christine Hunsicker, founder of a plus-sized clothing rental platform called Gywnnie Bee that was rebranded as CaaStle was indicted on charges of fraud to the tune of $300 million. The Justice Department alleges that Hunsicker used falsified documents — fake bank statements, sham tax returns, and more — to raise money from investors. 

The Tough Competition: Clothing rental companies like Gywnnie Bee, Nuuly, Rent the Runway, Armoire, and Vivrelle exist at the intersection of fashion and sharing economy tech and it’s a tough lane to navigate. Fashion is known for razor-thin margins; even luxury houses like LVMH (the company that owns Louis Vuitton) are enduring downturns in profitability. On the other hand, every tech company hopes to become the next wildly profitable company du jour a la Google, Apple, Meta. Whichever fashion rental company is the first to carve out a consistently profitable lane in an unforgiving industry will have done the impossible. 

The Canary in the Coal Mine: Jenn Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, has been in the game and watching the field sprout up around her since 2009. As early as 2023, Hyman noted that CaaStle wasn’t delivering on its (sham) statements. According to Hyman, Hunsicker didn’t have the warehouse space, the inventory, or the shipping volume to justify its projects and that anyone with eyes could’ve seen that this company was a castle of fraud. When the indictment news came out, it was clear that Hyman had been right all along. 

The bottom of the rabbit hole was a mic drop from Jenn. “The fall of Christine Hunsicker and the collective realization that she is a fraud came as no surprise to me she was an unscrupulous and unethical competitor who plainly lacked the industry knowhow, operational chops and customers to run a viable and legitimate business…Now with her paper thin veil of legitimacy torn away, the world can now see that the emperor has no clothes — not even rented ones.” 

The tea was piping hot! ☕ I’ve been a member of Rent the Runway since I rented a gold gown to wear to Senior Ball in college, so I was curious to see what else Jenn had to say on TikTok. There were pop culture opinions (she hates the Oscars, loves the Grammys), dating advice (have fun in your 20s, get married in your 30s), and trend tips (everyone at RTR has a beaded phone chain and Salomon sneakers). But it was a nugget of business advice that stood out to me. 

In a TikTok video from October 2025, Jenn retells the story of taking a meeting with an established fashion CEO. It was the early days of RTR and Jenn was there to convince this company to sell some of their inventory to her, an unknown with a crazy idea about renting luxury fashion, when she received one of the best pieces of advice about her career. 

Jenn was in the meeting making her pitch and thought it was going well. The CEO looked Jenn up and down, got her attention and told her: Jenn, get your nails done.

“You’ve chosen to be in the fashion industry. Fashion is about how you present yourself. You have to care about everything about your self-presentation when you’re coming in to meet with me, the heads of one of the most important brands. That may seem superficial to you, but there are spoken and unspoken signals that you’re actually going to make an effort to care about the tenets of this industry: preserving their brand, you care about the business, you care about the relationships you have with people, and you care about how you present yourself.” 

Jenn was taken aback. This was a business meeting and her business wasn’t about manicures or nail polish, but she says this advice has stayed with her over the past 15 years. 

Jenn boils her takeaway down like this, “Even if you’re trying to disrupt an industry and do things differently, you have to build trust. Be rebellious in your ideas and how you’re presenting a new business proposition, but at the same time, [build] real relationships with the folks in the industry — with the incumbents — so that they’re taking you seriously.”

As a person who keeps a manicure, this advice feels like an affirmation — but it’s also more than that. There is no shortcut to relationship building, we can’t expect to be constantly disruptive, and productive, and trusted. There’s also no (legal!) shortcut to exponential profits and unicorn status, real things, meaningful things are built like a TikTok For You page: brick by brick. 

💎 Avoid getting distracted by others, stay your course, and like Jenn says… get your nails done. 💎

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