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
So right away, literally within one day of doing it, I'm like, we got to put a timer on that cart. And it never changed.
So we're like, we will never have a sale. But then they hoard everything. Then the customers were gone and they buy one thing. We're like, oh, this is not good.
Never worried about you guys at all. And there's so many reasons for it because everyone thought they were a competitor. No one was doing what we were doing. So no one was taking possession. No one, the company at one point, I don't know where they are now, under me, we had 450 people in the field picking up products. No one had the capability to open stores because you didn't take up possession.
No one was really doing the level. Fine jewelry and watches were a key component of the business. About 34, 35 percent of the sales. You cannot authenticate a piece of jewelry online and nor can you understand the jewelry, nor can you really authenticate a watch. And if you think you can, you're probably selling fakes. So our product mix was different. Our service level was different.
Our ability to market via our stores was different. And I always thought I was in competition with ourselves and it was a capital intensive business. And how do I actually continue to raise capital to keep the business going? Yeah. So was not thinking about the competition a way that you operated throughout your career? No, not at all. This was a unique offering in a unique space.
You have to be aware of the competition, but we had a moat around the business and it was, it was always ours to lose.
I'd have to add it up, but it was in the hundreds of millions.
I think when we did it, an executive at NASDAQ said, you're the 23rd woman founder to take a company public ever.
Oh, I think you're going to have to wait for the book. The book's coming out in June. The book is coming out in June of next year. It's called Time to Get Real.
And it's right now, it's with a publisher in their legal department. And let me tell you, my focus was a little different writing this. I wanted to walk people through this. how the RealReal was built year on year. So it has this sense of urgency. And then I did have to weave in lessons, but I wove in those lessons as I was learning that. So I walked through it, and it's a fast-paced read.
My favorite book of all times for business is Shoe Dog. And the reason I love Shoe Dog is... I love it. I love it for multiple reasons. One is I thought I knew the story. I didn't.
And you felt the struggle of getting Nike to become Nike. And I felt like I was along the ride. I was in the car.
I hope so. And not until June of next year. It is coming out. There are a lot of stories. I can tell you a fun one because remember we were talking about doing drops. We were doing drops because we didn't have enough products. In the early days, we were in a strip mall that was really a bad strip mall. But I needed to rent a warehouse and I got a railroad card style warehouse.
So you walk in and this crunchy brown carpet that was really gross crunched when you walked on it. into the area where we process goods. And then the middle was the photography area. There were little storage alcoves off of that.
But in order to take the right photos on the mannequin, the photographer had to open the one door to the bathroom and step into the bathroom to take pictures of the photos. The back area had a roll-up door and was a proper warehouse with a loft. But the whole thing was maybe 3,000 square feet. And this is how we got started. I thought, well, we have to start somewhere.
And I was floating the money. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to do this. All right, so we get it going. No VC money yet. All right. Just friends and family. No, no VC money. Angel investors. One who was amazing entrepreneur himself. So we're working in this and we realized I had this idea where I need to get to aggregators of products. Who aggregates products? Stylists.
because they know a lot of people, and those people buy a lot from them. So I went down to LA, developed a stylist program, promoted that, went to New York, found stylists, pulled them together, promoted the program, tried some direct mail, And I'm thinking, this is great. We're going to get tons of product rolling in. And of course, nothing's happening. The program didn't seem to be effective.
We weren't getting calls. We'd be checking in. What year was this? Around 2011. So no product. And then we're running the sales. It's going into the summer. And I'm like, we are so screwed because everyone we knew had given this product. I tried, we tried some direct card marketing that was percolating in through the post office, literally a postcard. Oh, like explaining the service.
Well, we did, but we didn't, if someone in LA, we didn't have a team down here yet. We had to fly someone down to get it and drive a U-Haul back. All right. So we're really, it's been scrappy early days. And we get a call from stylists. And I don't think I can mention the celebrity.
I don't think I can because she did not want the sale public when she did it. She subsequently did do public sales on the RealReal. But we get a call. X person wants to clean out her warehouses.
Showing 41–60 of 189 · page 3 of 10
← Previous
Next →