Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
The RealReal runs an online marketplace that resells authenticated secondhand luxury goods like handbags, watches, and clothing.
The RealReal is a resale marketplace for luxury stuff. If you have a designer handbag or a fancy watch sitting in a closet, you can send it to the company, and it will authenticate it, photograph it, list it online, and sell it to someone else. It's a middleman for secondhand luxury goods — a consignment shop scaled up to internet size.
The business works like this: the seller ships in an item, or the company picks it up, then its team of gemologists, watchmakers, and brand experts check that it's genuine and grade its condition. Once listed and sold, the seller gets most of the money and The RealReal takes a cut — a commission. So the company earns money from the spread between what a buyer pays and what the seller receives, plus fees for things like shipping. Buyers come for discounted prices on authenticated goods and the confidence that they aren't getting a fake. It also sells some inventory it owns outright and runs physical stores where people can drop off items and shop. The problem it's trying to solve is trust. When you buy a used Chanel bag online from a stranger, you might be buying a counterfeit, and that risk kills the deal. The RealReal's whole pitch is that it takes that risk off your hands with its own experts. That trust is also the business's biggest cost — authentication is labor-intensive, and the company has spent years trying to make the economics work while losing money. It went public in 2019, which gave it cash but also public scrutiny of those losses.
Julie Wainwright had already run Pets.com, and that company had failed very publicly. That made her next move harder, because few people wanted to hire the face of a famous failure. Then she watched a friend happily pick through designer goods on a consignment rack, and she saw the opening: secondhand luxury was already popular, but it was scattered across shops and felt risky to buy online. Her answer was a trusted version, where The RealReal authenticates every item, takes a cut of each sale, and even comes to your home to pick things up for free.
The business rested on a simple promise: if you buy here, the item is real. In 2018, Chanel challenged that promise head-on, accusing the site of selling fake handbags and of taking it upon itself to decide what Chanel goods were genuine. The company denied it, but a customer had already complained about exaggerated gemstone details in a separate suit. From then on, the question of who really checks authenticity would follow the company everywhere.
On a late June day in 2019, the company sold shares to the public on Nasdaq, raising $300 million, and the stock jumped about 45% on its first day. Suddenly this was a company worth over a billion and a half dollars, at least on paper. Going public meant the full-service authentication model now had to keep investors confident, not just customers.
A few months after the IPO, a CNBC investigation reported that the authentication process was less careful than advertised, with workers who were undertrained and pushed to hit quotas. Investors took it seriously: the stock dropped more than 19% over the next two trading days, and a class action lawsuit soon claimed the company had misled people in its IPO paperwork. The very promise that built the business was now its biggest risk.
In June 2022, Julie Wainwright stepped down as CEO. The company put its president and operating chief, Rati Sahi Levesque, and its finance chief, Robert Julian, in charge on an interim basis while it searched for a permanent leader.
Early in 2023, John E. Koryl became CEO, with a mandate to cut costs and finally reach profitability. He had a mountain to climb: the stock that had once traded near $29 on its first day was down to around $2.50, and the company had lost $98 million in 2019, $176 million in 2020, and $236 million in 2021. The growth story was real, but so were the bleeding losses.
The fix started late in 2022: lean harder into consignment, pull back from buying inventory directly, reduce what sat in warehouses, and change how consignors were paid. It worked. In the fourth quarter of 2023, The RealReal reported a profit for the first time since going public, four years after the IPO.
In late October 2024, the company turned to Rati Sahi Levesque, its co-founder and second employee, as CEO, replacing John Koryl. She had worked across nearly every part of the business and had helped design the turnaround, so she knew where the levers were. The same quarter, the company beat expectations: revenue rose 11% to $148 million and losses shrank.
By mid-2026, the numbers showed the turnaround had turned into steady growth: total goods sold reached $617 million in the quarter, up 22%, the fourth straight quarter above 20%. A new AI tool called Athena, which helps sort and take in items, was on track to handle nearly half of all items by year-end, and management raised its outlook. Two clouds remained: pressure on how much the company keeps from each sale, and a heavy debt load.
In late October 2026, The RealReal hired Alexis Hoopes, who had led global fashion at eBay, as chief merchandising officer. Her job was to shape what the site offers: the right luxury mix, more personal recommendations, and growth powered by technology and data. The hire marked a new phase, less about fixing the machine and more about growing it.
The RealReal is a small company in a market it largely had to invent, competing for both supply and buyers against resale platforms like eBay and newer rivals chasing the same luxury consignment customers. Its bet is that scale and authentication expertise will eventually make the math work. For now, it's a business still proving that secondhand luxury can be a real, profitable machine rather than just a fashionable idea.
Saved answer · last researched 31 Oct 2026