Every year, Italians spend billions of euros on items they use fewer than ten times in their lives. A camping tent gathering dust in the attic. A drill used to hang three pictures. A mountain bike bought with good intentions that never saw a real trail. The problem isn't that we buy too much — it's that we don't have a viable alternative.
Lendmates was born from this observation. And in just a few months, it has started to change consumption habits in concrete ways, especially in major cities.
The hidden cost of items you don't use
An unused item isn't neutral: it takes up space, depreciates, and represents tied-up money. The problem is that until now there was no simple and safe way to monetize what you own without the hassle of selling on general marketplaces — which require time, shipping, and nerve-wracking negotiations.
Three real stories from the Lendmates community
Chiara, 34, Milan Navigli
Chiara listed her 4-person trekking tent, a pair of technical sleeping bags, and a 70-liter backpack on Lendmates. She received her first request in less than 48 hours. "I had no idea there was so much demand. Now I've earned more than what I paid for the tent. And I haven't even sold it."
"Now I look at my belongings differently. I no longer see them as expenses. I see them as assets that can work for me."
Davide, 28, Turin
Davide wanted to try cycling before investing €1,500 in a road bike. He rented a Specialized Roubaix from a lender in Turin for a weekend. "I pedaled 80 km and realized cycling is for me. Then I bought my own bike — but I saved myself from the wrong purchase."
Federica and Luca, 30 and 32, Rome
A couple from Rome who host dinners and aperitifs on their terrace. Instead of buying folding tables, chairs, and glasses that would fill up the entire storage room, they rent them each time from lenders in their area. "I spend €25 each time instead of €400 to buy them. And I don't have to worry about where to store them."
The model: access instead of ownership
The principle behind Lendmates is simple: you don't need to own an item to use it. And you don't need to sell it to stop maintaining it. There's a third way — peer-to-peer rental — that until recently didn't have a reliable infrastructure to support it.
Lendmates solves the three main problems that have always blocked peer-to-peer rental:
- Trust: verified identity for all users, deposit managed by the platform, review system.
- Simplicity: three steps to list or book, integrated payments, QR code for handover.
- Protection: security deposit that protects the lender, disputes managed by the platform, no risk of being left without a refund.
The environmental impact you don't see
Every item rented instead of bought avoids the production of a new product. This isn't about ideology: it's simple industrial math. Less demand for new products = fewer resources extracted, less energy consumed, less waste generated at end of life.
A bike rented 50 times a year prevents the production of 50 new bikes. A tent shared among 20 families has a production impact 20 times lower than 20 individual tents. At city scale, these numbers become enormous.
🌱 Each completed rental on Lendmates has an estimated CO₂ impact of about 0.3 kg of avoided emissions compared to the equivalent purchase. A concrete result, not just a slogan.
Milan is just the beginning
Milan was the first city where Lendmates saw significant growth, thanks to an urban density that favors proximity exchanges. But the platform is active across all of Italy, and demand in provincial capitals has grown faster than expected.
If you want to understand how much you can earn with your items, start with the guide on the 5 most requested items by borrowers. You might already have some at home.
Change doesn't always come through revolutions. Sometimes all it takes is an app that makes easy what used to seem complicated. Lendmates is proving that peer-to-peer rental is not only possible — it's convenient, safe, and ultimately more sensible than buying.