Julie Wainwright
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Julie Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Oh, now you're back in the VC world. When you look at venture capital, the percent of money going to women has actually declined dramatically. And I don't see that changing because there's now a wave that where inclusion or at least the semblance of inclusion has gone the other way and perhaps it's swung too far. Now, the venture capital world is still very male.
It's changed a little bit, but the big funds are still run by men. But, you know. All you need is a couple women doing great things. And then things do change. It's not impossible. Obviously, I raise money. You raise money. I think in my lifetime, I've raised over a billion dollars. I added it up for fun.
It is. If I can do it, anyone can. I went to Purdue. I didn't go to Stanford or Harvard.
So you are the outlier. That is not normal.
Simply stated, The RealReal is the place where you buy and sell luxury consignment. On a more sophisticated level, the company was set up to provide a lot of service to people for getting their product into. It's not a self-posting site, The RealReal. consolidates products. There's at least three different op centers, at least it did when I was there. I left two years ago.
And at those op centers, things are inspected, they're authenticated, and the RealReal controls the pricing. And it takes things like fine jewelry and watches, the largest group of gemologists, I think, in the world work at the RealReal, handbags, clothing, a little bit of art and home. And so for men and women, the fashion, that concept was when I introduced it was completely new.
No one had actually focused on the luxury end of the market. No one had taken possession unless you were in a brick and mortar store. No one had leveraged technology to help set the right pricing. And authentication was an ad hoc consideration.
Yes. Why do you think that was? My vision was different than your vision, to be honest. I had access to capital and I always focused on getting the product in and didn't worry about demand. So focused on getting all the supplies and I built up a big infrastructure. And I do think that the luxury customer and consigner wanted a level of service that your model couldn't deliver.
I know that you think the stores supercharged us. They didn't, didn't. I have to say the stores were, when we first opened a store, which I- By the stores you mean, so the real real- The real heads brick and mortar stores. And we opened our first store in Soho, I think in 2017 after a pop-up. And the pop-up in Manhattan did change perception. Yeah. It did change people's perceptions.
Oh, it was in the data. So the data showed that we changed people's perception. And how do I know that? People that had previously shopped only online and then went into the store, not only did their average order size go up, their propensity to consign and buy went up. So it had a halo effect. Yes. And then the Soho store after the pop up was next. Same thing. The L.A.
store on Melrose also big boon. So those were local things that happened.
Their average order size went up. Average order value went up. So I think the biggest problem, the company was supply limited. It's always constantly about getting new product. But having said that, their propensity to consign went up. It made it even easier. So we would come to your house, but then you could also drop it off.
It makes sense. So yes, it did change the economics, but it also costs more money and it created, here's the interesting thing. When you post a thing online, it's also in the store. So it created a technical challenge and, It added another level of urgency, but the infrastructure to get those stores going was not trivial.
The trade-off wasn't clear when we first got started and the model had to evolve.
Yeah, so that we were trying to solve for that not happening, which doesn't mean we didn't miss ship things. But the goal was if you're paying $400 for something, Or any money, really, that's a luxury good. And you expect to get the right thing at the right time and to make sure it's authentic. The other thing we did, we got people to think about recirculating their goods.
Because if you bought it on the rail rail, you should be able to resell it when you're done with it.
Depends how long you sit on it and how bad the usage is. But yes. Yes.
I want to know why we did that. Why? Well, all right. Another skill for an entrepreneur, you're always solving the most important problems. And one of the things we wanted to see happen were sales. No kidding. And people were hoarding. So literally, they would put – someone would get on the site early, and they would put 60 or 80 things on their cart. That makes sense.
And they would leave them in the cart for hours. And we're like – and especially – so it's still a problem. You still don't want that to happen, obviously. But in the beginning – we were running sales three times a week with only 60 or 70 products.
That was by necessity, not by design, because we didn't have enough product. We wanted to aggregate the product under themes and make sure that we actually had enough product to execute on that theme. And so if people come to the site, and there's no product to buy, everything's on hold, then you don't have customers.
Showing 21–40 of 189 · page 2 of 10
← Previous
Next →