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This study aims to explore young German consumer perspectives of rental fashion platforms by studying their perceived benefits, potential barriers as well as preferred clothing categories to rent from. This “new” kind of shopping has not yet found great success among young German adults, although there is a substantial margin of growth for this generation.

This qualitative study was conducted through 24 in-depth semi-structured interviews with young female and male German consumers out of Gen Y and Z. The analysis of the data was supported by the software NVivo.

Results indicate that young German consumers value renting clothes for occasions, to frequently change up their wardrobe, out of sustainability aspects and because of efficiency and convenience reasons. However, an entry barrier to the use of rental platforms still persists through a lack of awareness and information, as well as price and high demand issues.

As the interview’s focus group was set to young German consumers, a generalization of the findings to consumers from other countries or out of other generations might be limited.

Managers first need to lower the currently existing entry barrier that prevents many consumers from renting fashion online by raising their awareness and providing them with sufficient information about the platform’s processes as well as their terms and conditions.

This research intends to better understand young German consumers’ attitude toward rental fashion platforms and why renting fashion has not yet achieved more success among them.The results first give managers helpful insights for implementing successful marketing strategies by focusing on spreading awareness among young German adults to stem current entry barriers. Second, these results serve as a basis for future quantitative research that deepens the understanding of the correlation of current findings with other variables (e.g. age, the importance of material possessions in consumers’ lives).

The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate a leadership development program with focus on transformational leadership and communication. It is explored whether these aspects of leadership can be trained in the course of a two-day intervention. Furthermore, it is tested if pre-training differences among leaders have an influence on the effectiveness of participating in the leadership intervention.

In the study, 38 leaders took part in the two-day training session. The control group consisted of 59 leaders. Information was collected from participating leaders’ followers (n=356) on pre- and post-training measures of transformational leadership as well as on communication skills (attentive and impression-leaving style).

Results show that transformational leadership behaviors improved more after training in the experimental group (EG) than they did in the control group. Also, ratings of the attentive communication style improved more in the EG compared to the control group. Furthermore, participants of the leadership development program benefitted to different degrees from their training. Participants who initially had a medium score showed the best improvement.

The present study advances the scope of leadership development by also considering the trainability of communication skills. Also, insights on the contingency of training effects are provided.