The Van Girls are London’s first and only all-female packing and moving service – mostly hired by women, but sometimes men as well. “Guys who hire us kind of think it’s quite novel… and are really surprised by how strong we are,” said founder Emma Lanman.

Lanman started Van Girls in 2011, when she quit her job at the fire brigade and decided to start a business of her own. She’d seen people get excited about female firefighters, and realised it was something of a novelty for a woman to be seen doing a ‘man’s job’. She also figured that lots of women might feel safer hiring an all-female moving service.

“I thought it might actually be a valuable service,” she said. And Lanman was right – it turns out that plenty of women who live alone or don’t live with men are a lot more comfortable hiring the Van Girls – not just for safety reasons but for that feminine touch! Like 68-year-old Jean Hewitson, who moved down the street with her daughter and granddaughter last year. “We’re an all-female household,” she explained. “I thought, yes I want women packing up my house. I thought they’d be more sympathetic to my belongings really, and I’d get on with them better.”

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Once they reach a certain age, lots of women find motherhood exhausting, but not Brooklyn-based Nina Keneally. The 63-year-old still has lots of ‘mothering skills’ that she’s actually more than happy to rent  out through a unique service called ‘NeedAMom’.  Her motto is “When you need a mom… Just not YOUR mom.”

A former theatrical producer and drug-rehab counselor from Connecticut, Nina now spends all her time using her motherhood experience and her associate degree in counselling to help millennials in New York. For $40 an hour plus expenses, Nina will listen to all your problems, offer advice (free from ‘I told you so’), help you plan and shop for a dinner party, sew your buttons back on, bake you a cake, and do all sorts of other things a real mother might do. She’ll even buy and wrap a present for your actual mother.

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Thanks to a new service called ‘Save My Ink’, your tattoos can now last forever. Launched by American tattoo artist Charles Hamm, the bizarre service involves slicing inked skin off dead people and preserving it through a bunch of chemical processes.

Hamm, 60, said he got the idea for Save My Ink – a.k.a National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art (NAPSA) – when he realised how much time and money people put into their tattoos. “You would never burn a Picasso or any piece of art you invested in and had a passion for,” he explained. “Your tattoo is also art with a unique story, just on a different canvas. It’s just like a house, wedding ring, or any other cherished possession.”

“I have over 150 hours of tattoo work on me, and I have almost covered my entire upper-body, excluding my neck and face,” Hamm said. “When I was getting more tattoo work completed on my back piece, a 10,000 dollar investment, I began considering all of the money I had put into my tattoos. I had also read an article in which Johnny Depp stated his intent to have his tattoos preserved, and it all inspired me to begin fully developing Save My Ink.”

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A cool new service in Japan is meant to help busy career women cope with the stress of their hectic lifestyles. For about 7,900 yen ($65), they can hire ‘Ikemeso’ – cute men – to wipe away their tears, quite literally!

Here’s how it works: You call the company and pick one of seven Ikemeso, who will then arrive at your workplace to help you release stress through crying. If you’re in tears already, the licensed “crying therapist” will simply wipe your tears away with the softest handkerchief and comfort you with kind words. If work-related stress hasn’t pushed you to tears yet,  the Ikemeso will play an emotional film meant to induce crying. After the video is over, he’ll wipe your tears away.

There are different types of guys you can choose from, depending on your taste – the little brother, the intellectual, the bad boy, the slightly older hot guy, and more. The service is all set to launch on September 24.

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When 37-year-old Kristy Mazins realised how much people hate confrontation, she developed an entire business plan around it. The former nurse from Melbourne started a service called ‘Sorry It’s Over’ that helps people avoid the uncomfortable task of breaking up with someone. For a fee of AUS $5.50 (US $4.44) or more, Mazins will do the dirty work via text, email, handwritten letter, or even a phone call.

Mazins only needs her customers to provide her with a brief outline of what they want to say, and she will convert it into a heartfelt message designed to ease the pain. Additional services like sending flowers, a box of tissues, a sympathy basket, or a message delivered in person are also available.

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Luxury travel company Oliver’s Travels is offering its wealthy clients an innovative wedding service – a sky clean up. For a hefty fee of over $150,000, they actually offer to pop clouds and induce rain up to a week before their wedding, in order to ensure clear blue skies on the day of the ceremony.

It might sound ridiculous, but cloud seeding is actually a legit scientific technique. It involves the firing of rockets filled with silver iodide crystals into rain clouds from a light aircraft, or from the ground. The icy silver particles freeze the water droplets in the clouds so that they continue to grow in size and eventually fall out of the cloud as snow, turning into rain just before hitting the ground.

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As an increasing number of Japanese women put their careers ahead of starting a family, the number of services that cater to single women is on the rise. One such service is the ‘Solo Wedding’ – a full wedding day experience during which a woman gets to be bride without actually getting hitched.

The absence of a groom at a wedding might sound abnormal, but the concept is surprisingly popular. Ever since Kyoto-based company Cerca Travels launched Solo Weddings in June, at least 10 single ladies have used the service. These are women who have dreamed of wearing a wedding dress all their lives, but never really had the chance to do it.

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They say money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy empathy in China. Lonely businessmen are actually paying women up to $5 a day, just for a few kind words and a bit of understanding. A similar service is available for women as well.

Many young men and women are making quick money by offering the service through Taobao – China’s leading e-commerce website. They call themselves ‘virtual girlfriends/boyfriends’, and they’re willing to listen to their clients complaining about a tough day at work.

Male clients have a range of virtual girlfriend personalities to choose from, including ‘doll-like girls’, ‘mature women’, and ‘the girl next door’. For women, the choices include ‘men in uniform’, ‘CEO’, ‘handsome men’ and ‘comforting men’.

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It’s not easy to apologise, and most people would like to avoid it entirely if possible. Well, it turns out it is possible, if you happen to live in Japan. They have these ‘apology agencies’ through which you could simply pay someone to say sorry on your behalf.

I can see why these businesses are so successful – it’s really tough to face the person you’ve wronged and tell  them that you’re sorry. It’s a highly uncomfortable situation, especially if you’ve made someone angry or hurt their feelings.

By hiring an expert, not only do you get to avoid the discomfort, you also make sure that the person gets a proper apology. These agencies train their employees to handle things based on the gravity of the situation. These people are professionals, and it looks like they can get you out of all sorts of sticky situations.

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When advertising professionals Josephine Wai Lin and Dala Khajak decided to start a business of their own, they knew it had to be something quirky and original. Their new startup is called ‘ManServants’, and no, it’s not a gimmick. The business is basically a man rental service, giving any woman that can afford it the chance to have a good-looking man attend to her every need.

“A Man, But Better,” declares the tagline for the startup, and this pretty much sums up what ManServants is all about. “We believe personal assistants and pool boys are luxuries every woman, or gay guy, deserves – even if it’s just for a day,” the founders write on the official ManServants website.

Their promo video is really something; it claims that for decades women have had to put up with male strippers that they secretly hated. “Ladies, if you hate your friend, and yourself, get her a stripper,” the video advises. “But if you love your friend, get her a ManServant.” You can’t help wondering if the whole thing is a spoof, but the founders insist that it’s a real service. “It’s not a stripper who gets naked and rubs his greasy body all over you,” the website declares. “It’s a ManServant: a gentleman who treats you like a queen.”

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Ossan Rental (or “Middle-Aged Guy Rental”) is the newest bizarre rental service in Japan. As the name suggests, it allows people to rent an average middle-aged Japanese guy for ¥1,000 ($10) an hour.

There are a lot of crazy people-renting services in the Land of the Rising Sun, from the now famous Soine-ya Prime rent-a handsome-boyfriend service, to simple rent-a-friend options and even a rent-a-bare-thigh advertising service. So we have hot young guys and girls for rent, but what about middle-aged folks, is no one interested in paying for their time? Surely there has to be a market out there for them, too, right? That’s probably what the masterminds before Ossan Rental thought when they decided to open the first rental service for middle-aged guys in Japan. The company currently offers only two options to choose from, either the 46-year old Takanobu Nishimoto, a college lecturer in fashion and styling from Osaka, or Mikio Sendou, a former baseball player and current sports commentator from Gifu Prefecture. They both seem like interesting dudes, and the company’s roster is only going to get bigger once the business gets off the ground.

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German entrepreneur Reitner Reuther has made headlines in the national media for offering a very unique service. He gives parents who suspect their children of using illegal substances the chance to find out for sure by hiring a trained sniffer dog.

Statistics show drug abuse among youth is an increasing problem all around the world, but parents in Germany now have a new way of dealing with it without involving the authorities. Reitner Reuther believes his sniffer dog Thor is able to find even the most secret stashes of narcotics that can often be “too sophisticated” for parents to discover, so he set up a website where he offers to conduct discreet searches at the clients’ homes, at a rate of €95 ($125) per case. Thor completed his training to become a police dog in Texas, USA and specializes in sniffing out cannabis, heroin, speed and ecstasy. Parents get in touch with Reitner and they set up an appointment. When their child is away at school, he brings the dog by to search the house. According to his owner, no matter how well the drugs are hidden, nothing gets by Thor.

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Extreme Kidnapping is a low-profile Detroit company that offer clients the chance to get abducted and spice up their mundane lives. The realistic experience includes getting handcuffed, slapped by goons, zapped with a stun gun and even attacked with police pepper spray.

If you need a break from your boring life and feel that extreme sports like bungee jumping or jumping out of an airplane just won’t cut it, you need to look into the services of Extreme Kidnapping. According to founder Adam Thick, “this service caters to the extreme sports adventurer who is bored with what’s currently available; this takes it to a whole other level. If you don’t feel like you’re really being kidnapped and your life is in danger, then we’re not doing our job.” To make sure he offers customers their money’s worth, Adam says he’s not afraid to hire henchmen with a criminal background, who can get mean and rough when they need to. Thick himself is a convicted counterfeiter so you can say that staging an illegal act is right up his alley. It’s hard to describe what an average fake abduction is like, because Extreme Kidnapping offers custom services designed according to clients’ requests, but one thing you can expect is to be genuinely scared.

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Making friends is not as easy as most people think, but it seems that for young men and women in Japan it’s really, really hard. According to a recent article published in the country’s biggest newspaper, some people are finding it so difficult to make people like them that they prefer to pay for rent-a-friend services.

According to surveys cited by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, more and more young people have problems making friends in the real world and resort to actually paying for rented friends in order to avoid being seen alone and labeled as loners by their peers. Tokyo-based company Client Partners offers a variety of unique services like hiring someone to take photos of you at an event, or paying a person to wait in line for you on a gadget’s release day, but one of its most popular is the “rent-a-friend”. For a hefty fee, you can choose total strangers (men or women) to accompany you and act as your friends. It’s not exactly the perfect scenario for a fun night out, but clients say it beats having to face your loneliness, dealing with rejection all the time or being looked down at by your peers. According to representatives of the company, Client Partners has tens of rent-a-friend requests per month, most of which come from lonely young Japanese who have lost all confidence.

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Valentine’s Day, the most romantic celebration of the year, is fast approaching, and while some people can’t wait to declare their love and shower their partners with gifts, flowers and chocolate, for others it’s just a day of painful loneliness. However, Japanese bachelors no longer have to worry about being the only ones at the office who never gets anything on Valentine’s, thanks to a new service called Valentine’s Day Insurance.

So how does this service work, you ask? Well, it’s pretty simple, actually. All a person has to do is visit the Valentine’s Day Insurance website, purchase the ¥500 ($5.50) policy and provide an address where their Valentine’s gift should be delivered. Once they’ve done this, they’re guaranteed to receive a package on February 14, containing chocolates and a personal message from a self-professed beautiful woman called Rieko. I know what you’re thinking, having to buy your own Valentine’s Day present is pretty lame, but for some Japanese men it’s a lot better than having to cope with the uneasiness of being the only ones who didn’t get anything. Well, them and every woman in the Land of the Rising Sun, because here only men receive presents from women, usually in the form of chocolate. In fact, so much chocolate is purchased for the occasion that some Japanese chocolate companies record half of their annual sales in the few weeks before Valentine’s Day.

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