Erento

erento is the largest online rental marketplace in Germany. The company considers itself at the forefront of the collaborative consumption movement, also known as the sharing economy. Founded in 2003 by Chris Müller and Uwe Kampschulte as a Berlin start-up, today erento is operating in the UK, Finland, Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

erento
Type of businessPrivate
Available inMultilingual
Founded2003
Headquarters
Berlin
,
Germany
Key peopleEugen B. Russ, CEO
Industrye-commerce
ProductsOnline rental marketplace
URLwww.erento.com

History

The company was founded in 2003 by Chris Müller and Uwe Kampschulte as an online marketplace for rental items within Germany. erento quickly grew to Europe's largest rental marketplace, with locations in Germany, the UK, Austria and Switzerland. In 2006, erento offered approximately 200,000 items for rental. That number tripled to over 640,000 rental items offered on erento in 2007.[1]

In 2007 Holzbrinck Ventures, one of Germany's largest, most successful venture funds raised its holding in erento to 13 percent. Later in 2009, founder Uwe Kampschulte left the company and was replaced by Oliver Weyergraf.[2]

In November 2013, erento grew again by acquiring Finnish online rental platform iRent.fi. Established by the Laakeri Group, iRent.fi has a significant peer-to-peer rental community. With this purchase, erento took a significant step in the direction of the sharing economy and collaborative consumption models, an ongoing goal of the company. As a result of this merger, erento now operates actively in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and Finland.[3]

Business progress

The customers of erento are rental "landlords" that offer their rental items to erento's more than 50,000 daily website visitors. These rental items include physical wares, like sports cars, tools or mobile homes, as well as services. In 2010, the business model was transformed from a commission model to a contact based model. With this contact model, each rental "landlord" can offer a certain number of articles online each month. The items are then advertised via erento's vast marketing networks. When a user searches for an item, the contact details of erento's "landlords", such as website and phone number, are shared directly with the public.[2]

gollark: .
gollark: I came up with what seemed like a good way to decide how big a drive a type of item needs, anyway
gollark: I assume I could probably work something out via ComputerCraft and cycling drives out every 15 minutes for moving stuff around.
gollark: I imagine it'd cause exciting problems if any autocrafting ran while defragmentation did, but you know.
gollark: One day I'm going to figure out some way to properly defragment these stupid drives... they're used SO inefficiently right now.

References
  1. "Internetbörse: 1.., 2.., leih!". manager magazin. 18 July 2006.
  2. SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany (15 January 2007). "Neuer Internet-Zukauf: Holtzbrinck-Gruppe steigt bei Web-Vermieter ein". SPIEGEL ONLINE.
  3. "US-Nachahmer: Wo deutsche Startups internationale Trends setzen". handelsblatt.com. 2 June 2010.
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