•Rental-based collaborative consumption is studied for renting in business-to-business context.•Renting behaviour of workwear garments is studied from inventory and product movement perspectives.•Discrete event simulations are used for analyzing the product lifetime. Increasing population and improving living standards have continued to amplify the consumption of textiles and apparel, which has created challenges in resource management and sustainable development. In this context, renting-based collaborative consumption business models (CCBMs) have received considerable attention in recent times. Consumption through renting allows the replacement of ‘ownership’ of a product to ‘usership’ which creates new opportunities for the companies as well as for the customers. For the development of renting-based CCBMs or decision making in rental activities by the companies, one of the fundamental requirements is the baseline characterization of consumers’ renting pattern – which includes general rent duration, renting frequency, inventory management, rental product movement, etc. – that acts as input from the operational aspect of a rental business. In this context, the paper aims at investigating the general renting characteristics for workwear garments through data analysis of about 5.4 million garment-rents to multiple business customers over 6 years. Further, the implications of the renting characteristics are investigated through discrete event simulations under various scenarios of inventory management by the customers. The findings from the study are anticipated to help the rental companies in operational and strategic decision-making.