Nation witnesses launch of luxury rental businesses

Meanwhile, inside another office building in Beijing, four 20-something entrepreneurs have already fixed the prices for their luxury rental business.

With an investment of 1 million yuan, mainly for the purchase of secondhand bags, Zhang Cheng, a 28-year-old former management consultant, and three equally ambitious young people, founded Meikka.com in July with the ambition of building a reference for the luxury market.

The company offers about 50 bags, including brands such as Chanel, Prada and Dior in store. Most of the items are secondhand products and owned by the website. The rental fee averages about 100 to 200 yuan a day, and the longer a client rents a bag, the cheaper it gets.

"We're targeting a younger clientele," said Zhang, differentiating his website from Secoo.

Zhang described his customers as college students or freshly graduated office workers aged from 20 to 25.

Nearly 20 orders have been placed on the website, which started late in July. Zhang said the figure is close to their expectations.

"There's a lot of education to be done in the market and we're asking for quite a large sum of money (as a deposit)," Zhang said.

Although similar websites such as Rent The Runway and Bag Borrow or Steal have been creating quite a stir in the local market, if not internationally, it's believed that the rampant counterfeit market in China and the lack of a party culture, which deprives women of occasions to shine, are two of the main obstacles.

The people behind the two websites emphasize the authenticity of their products by saying that they have professionals telling the real products from the fake, but the "professionalism" of the professionals can be hard to judge, insiders said.

Zhang is confident as he believes that Chinese shoppers are getting more and more "Westernized", which can been seen from people's willingness to shop for luxury goods online.

A Boston Consulting Group report said that online sales now account for only 3 percent of China's total luxury market, while in the United States, they account for 12 percent.Meanwhile, McKinsey & Co predicted that by the end of 2015, the Chinese luxury market could be worth more than $27 billion, with e-commerce seen as a major growth engine.