I love the idea of rental businesses for a very simple reason – people pay you to use something, but you get to keep it. It’s like selling the same thing over and over again but only having to buy it once. How far can you go with the rental model? Well how about renting jeans?

I just heard about a company in The Netherlands, Mud Jeans, which for around 6 Euro a month will rent you a pair of high end jeans for a year. At the end of the rental period the customer can then either return the jeans, buy them outright or replace them with a new pair.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but I’m the sort of person who thinks you should be able to buy a decent pair of jeans outright for less than £40. The market isn’t for an old folk like me, that’s for sure.

I’m telling you about this because it opens up all sorts of possibilities. If you can make money renting something like jeans, what other seemingly ‘un-rentable’ products could form the basis of a business?