![](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/screen-shot-2017-05-05-at-10-54-24-am.png?w=738\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Last night, at an event<\/a> in San Francisco, I sat down with The RealReal<\/a> founder and CEO Julie Wainwright, who is renowned in\u00a0startup circles for a variety of things, including her role in\u00a0winding\u00a0down<\/a> the e-commerce company Pets.com during the dot.com era; being one of the bigger personalities in the industry; and launching what\u2019s become one of the fastest-growing consignment startups among a handful that received funding roughly six years ago.<\/p>\n Some no longer exist<\/a>. The RealReal has meanwhile garnered $123 million in venture funding and is on track to see $500 million in gross merchandise value this year \u2014 nearly half of it through the company\u2019s mobile app.<\/p>\n She attributed that success so far to zeroing in on\u00a0the luxury market, taking possession of consigners\u2019 products, and focusing on trust above all else, by ensuring that every item that The RealReal sells to a customer has been inspected and authenticated before it get shipped out the door. She also said the company is weighing a strategy of opening a series of brick-and-mortar stores, starting first with one New York location that\u2019s currently in the works.<\/p>\n Excerpts\u00a0from our sit-down, edited for length and clarity, follow:<\/p>\n TC: You\u2019ve raised a lot of money, including a $40 million<\/a> Series E round last year, but you\u2019re also very much in growth mode. For the VCs in the audience: might you raise another round anytime soon?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: No. We\u2019re good for a while.<\/p>\n TC: You started with apparel, but\u00a0you sold $100 million in watch and fine jewelry last year.\u00a0Is that now your best-selling category?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: The reason we went into jewelry was we were trying to cater to our consigner base, who was saying, \u201cCan you sell this for me?\u00a0Can you sell that?\u201d And we said, \u201cYou\u00a0can bring in your jewelry and watches; we have a gemology and a watch expert on site.\u201d And it just exploded our business.<\/p>\n TC: You\u2019re talking about valuation offices, which you\u2019ve been launching<\/a> across the U.S. over the last 18 months. You and I talked about these recently, but they seem to be underreported.<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: It\u2019s true. We did a little test in Midtown [in New York] around 18 months ago. We now have six offices now across the U.S. and soon to be seven. We wanted people to\u00a0comparison shop because we know you make two-and-a-half to three times more money if you sell your fine jewelry to us. We also wanted to remove any friction. [Jewelry consignment] is\u00a0sort of weird space. If you\u2019ve ever tried to sell jewelry to anyone else, it\u2019s a pawn shop environment; it\u2019s a little gross. So we wanted to bring the whole process up front, have a discussion with people, and have it be transparent and respectful.<\/p>\n TC: Back to your best-selling items . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n JW:\u00a0<\/strong>For men, it\u2019s Rolex. For women, there are three across alls age groups: Chanel, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton.<\/p>\n TC: Meaning clothing or jewelry or both?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: Apparel is our number one product in unit and dollars.<\/p>\n TC: Are men buying or selling on The RealReal? What\u2019s the gender breakdown?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We actually don\u2019t get enough men\u2019s consignment, so it sells through faster. Twenty percent of our shoppers are men who are shopping for themselves. They\u2019re buying watches, primarily, and leather goods, but also apparel. Their average order size is smaller, but you men [in the audience] don\u2019t like to return things, despite that we have a return policy. So that\u2019s good; it all evens out. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n TC: What\u00a0percentage of shoppers are also consigning items?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We have about\u00a0four buyers for every consigner, and half of our consigners buy.<\/p>\n TC: How do you ensure then that you have a constant flow of goods? We sat down a few years ago and you\u2019d mentioned that summer is particularly tricky because your consigners are on vacation.<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We do a lot of lead generation that drives people to the site. We have sales people in the field who will go and clean out closets, including in the Hamptons. Also, demand isn\u2019t that great in the summer, so it balances out. Things slow down around the third week of June. In the middle of August, it goes crazy again.<\/p>\n TC: Shipping takes a week. Is there a way to speed that up?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: At some point, we\u2019ll designate that certain items will arrive faster or we\u2019ll say, if you want items today, here\u2019s your selection [of things to choose from]. Hopefully, by the fall, if you\u2019re in New York and you order from our New Jersey warehouse, you can get your item the same day.<\/p>\n TC: What about the company\u2019s demographics? Is it all over the map?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: A third of our\u00a0buyer base is millennials. And they still buy Hermes, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, but after that [as they age] it\u2019s a lot of Gucci, Saint Laurent, C\u00e9line. We\u2019ve been been able to to track brands by age and I\u2019ve met with all the top brands and I tell them that I\u2019m the gateway drug for their brands, and some are in trouble.<\/p>\n TC:\u00a0Such as?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: Dolce is in trouble. We pick it up from people over 40 [years of age] and sell it to people over 50. There\u2019s a\u00a0whole disconnect with its advertising and they know it. They aren\u2019t reaching millennials at all.<\/p>\n We can also predict trends. If we get a lot of [a particular kind of inventory], it isn\u2019t good for the brand and we have to drop the prices. We don\u2019t give out raw numbers, but women in the audience, I can tell you right now, if you have Valentino Rockstuds<\/a>, hand \u2019em over, because the party is over.<\/p>\n TC: How much do items sell for on average?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We don\u2019t give that out, but Net-a-Porter\u00a0just announced that it\u2019s average basket is $430 dollars, and ours is bigger. The highest sale we\u2019ve had is $100,000, and we\u2019ve done it a couple of times.<\/p>\n TC: What sold for $100,000?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: This is good. From one our valuation offices, a Saudi princess consigned a Van Cleef & Arpels diamond cuff that retails for $250,000. Four days later, we sold it to another Saudi princess on the other side of the U.S for $100,000. That flew, but we do sell $30,000, $40,000, and $50,000 \u00a0items on a regular basis.<\/p>\n TC: Are most people buying one item at a time? And what percentage are recurrent shoppers?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: They\u2019ve buying almost two items on average, and they\u2019re buying often. We don\u2019t give out that number of recurrent buyers, but it\u2019s a high number.<\/p>\n TC: How much of your business is coming through mobile versus the desktop?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: Three years ago, on every panel I sat on, the refrain was, \u201cApps are dead.\u201d Well, our app generated about $100 million in GMV this year and it accounts for the majority of visits to the site. It\u2019s still not half our sales, but it\u2019s getting there.<\/p>\n TC: What\u2019s on the roadmap?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We have now have about 75 people who are gemologists, watch experts, art curators or brand authenticators and in December, we decided to put a handful of them into a pop-up store<\/a> in [New York\u2019s] Soho for two weeks to showcase merchandise leading in to the holidays. We did more than $2 million in revenue. Half the shoppers were new to The RealReal. Some had heard of us but they hadn\u2019t shopped because they didn\u2019t understand the quality. So now we\u2019re opening our first real store in Soho. It\u2019ll have a valuation office, but it will really be selling.<\/p>\n When you have 100 Birkins on the wall and people have\u00a0never seen that\u00a0\u2014 even at Hermes\u00a0\u2014 they tend to call their friends.<\/p>\n TC: Will you open another in San Francisco?<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: If that works, we\u2019ll do a few of them. But we\u2019ll start with one.<\/p>\n TC: A lot of high-end boutiques like Louis Vuitton never discount their items; is there room for partnerships? [Editor\u2019s note: this was actually an attendee\u2019s smart question.]<\/strong><\/p>\n JW: We\u2019re in conversations with them. A key tenet of what we do is sustainability; we\u2019re a circular economy company and brands are starting to understand that if something\u00a0has a resell value, someone will pay more for new (knowing they can sell later), so we\u2019re a value add.<\/p>\n LMVH group, too is taking sustainability seriously. While they destroy product, they\u2019re conscious that it\u2019s not a cool thing to do and there might be a partnership in the future because they like the circulation [economy]. I tell them: My consigners are your buyers. I\u2019m paying them out hundreds of millions of dollars, and they\u2019re taking that money, and they\u2019re buying new products that they know have a high resell value. So at some point [these brands] will\u00a0come around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/screen-shot-2017-05-05-at-10-54-24-am.png?w=680\")
Last night, at an event in San Francisco, I sat down with The RealReal founder and CEO Julie Wainwright, who is renowned in\u00a0startup circles for a variety of things, including her role in\u00a0winding\u00a0down the e-commerce company Pets.com during the dot.com era; being one of the bigger personalities in the industry; and launching what’s become one of the fastest-growing consignment… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-340208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}