To fit out her new apartment, Caroline, 31, needed a very specific tool: a percussion drill. “No one around me could lend me one and I didn’t want to buy one just for a DIY project, so I turned to renting! “, she says.
At the entrance to his workplace, a connected locker offers one for self-service, among around ten other items such as an iron or a waffle maker. Result : “around fifteen euros spent for 48 hours of use and no unnecessary clutter at home”.
The solution has been offered for three years by Les Biens en commun, a small Lyon-based company of around ten people, driven by a great ambition: “fight against overconsumption, to cope with the scarcity of resources and energy”, summarizes its founder, Yann Lemoine. Today, its device has been installed in around twenty residences, businesses and businesses in Lyon, Grenoble, Paris and Strasbourg.
100% autonomous operation
While he was working at EDF in the early 2010s, this engineer was convinced of the need to “decrease” think of a way to share, rather than buy. «I was inspired by the self-service bicycle, which is a real success, and I said to myself that we could reproduce the model with other equipment», he says. According to a recent survey carried out by Ipsos for eBay, the French consider having purchased on average 36 objects which they use little or nothing.
To stand out from household appliance stores or certain websites, which instead offer long-term rental or leasing (rental with purchase option), Yann Lemoine has imagined a system “everyday” : objects meeting a very specific need, such as a hedge trimmer or a fondue maker, a locker installed in local living spaces, and a very easy-to-use application.
Once registered, simply identify the site closest to you, select a product and a time slot, and pay the requested amount. On site, a code allows you to recover your equipment provided by the application’s partners, such as Groupe Seb, Boulanger, Stihl, Kärcher or Decathlon.
In addition to reducing the ecological footprint, Yann Lemoine also aims for an economic impact, since you can, for example, benefit from a video projector for twenty-four hours for €10 – compared to around €800 to purchase – but also united “by democratizing access to quality equipment”.
After an initial deployment in student residences, the start-up invested in companies and businesses, including the Franprix distribution brand. «This is a real solution for our customers, and we can hope to capture some additional sales», explains Thomas Jourdain, innovation manager at Franprix, seduced by this “100% autonomous” system, which five stores are equipped with in Paris and Villeurbanne. Its biggest success: the steam detacher.
A “narrow and fragile” niche
However, Common Goods are struggling to deploy on a large scale. Ten months after this installation – €10,000 per unit, or €190 via a monthly subscription – Franprix records, for example, a total of ten to twelve rentals per week and «only a few sites are slowly reaching balance». Which does not surprise Maud Herbert, professor of marketing and consumer culture at the University of Lille: “ Since the emergence of alternative consumption patterns in the early 2000s, public support remains in the minority. »
In question, a niche “narrow and fragile”, between the essential daily product, which is better to buy from every point of view, and the non-merchant system – loan between neighbors or barter applications – for the rest. The profitability advantage can also disappear if rental is too frequent. However, if the proposed solution is not also the most practical or the most economical, “few people are ready to turn to it for purely ecological motivations”, explains the specialist.
One option, according to her: mesh the territory, yes, but in a restricted area, and involve the community of users more, by asking them, for example, to maintain the equipment offered themselves. «Maintaining a human scale also allows the company to avoid, in the long term, coming into dissonance with its fundamental values. »
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