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.
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Appearances
And March went from first, I think they shut it. In fact, I know they shut it down on March 12th. First 10 days, growing 42%.
It's very good. Very good. Very good. People are in the mood to start thinking about spring and they're thinking again. Soon from that day, that month of March ended at minus 46% versus a year ago.
So you couldn't physically ship product. We couldn't. No, demand dried up. Demand came back in April, but it was bigger than that. We couldn't pick up product. And we were allowed to operate in New Jersey. We're processing at the time was the biggest op center, but we weren't in the Bay area.
We still had an op center in the Bay area and we weren't, we clearly, if people lived in New York, it was a terrible situation in New York. New York was the single largest market for the RealReal and we couldn't pick up product. When you think about a marketplace, let's just talk about dynamics. When you have buyers and sellers, you're not a way station. You are a way station, not a warehouse.
So if your product isn't selling, then your sellers are unhappy and then you may not have the right buyers. But if your products don't sell for your sellers, they aren't going to give you more product. So you need to have a rhythm. And the real world developed a very specific rhythm through optimal pricing, not best pricing, optimal pricing. Where sellers could expect that.
Within 90 days, 90% plus would sell through.
COVID stopped that, but it picked up again. And oddly enough, by the end of April, when it was two weeks, then we were like in it, we didn't know how long we'd be. By the end of April, people started buying handbags and shoes and then other things, but a lot of handbags and shoes and jewelry. All right, let's go back to the necessity to keep product flowing through.
So 90% of the product flows through in a quarter, which means by the end of everything, April, May, June, The inventory is being depleted very quickly, but it's not being added back because we couldn't pick up products. In California, really the only states that really acted like COVID didn't happen, Florida, Arizona. Florida was, Arizona, not a great big market for the company.
Florida, good, but not of the caliber of the other states. And a little bit of Newport in California, which wasn't big enough. You had these little pockets where like you walk in and you're like,
No, they didn't have the shutdown restrictions. So the company was in trouble.
Oh, look, it was surreal because also we had supposedly they were short sellers. So we have one operating op center that's in New Jersey. And at that time, we had a couple in New Jersey, one in Secaucus and one in Perth Amboy. We had the Bay Area one that we needed to leave anyway, the Bay Area, because we'd grown out, but shut down.
In fact, when we were just trying to move product to New Jersey so we could process it and give people their returns.
No, the sheriff showed up and put it like, we're going to throw you guys in jail. I'm like, oh, come on. Anyway, we finally got the product.
Oh, no, the whole thing was nuts.
We had to open a new op center, which we got going in Phoenix. And then we had some odd calls coming into the Perth op center from people saying we were killing our employees, not following protocol, which wasn't true. I'm on the phone with the mayor. I'm on the phone with the head of police in New Jersey saying... walk through, we're following protocols. Are these calls coming on in-state?
Are they coming in or out of state? They were all out of state. So you know it was a short seller.
Some directly from the brands, because remember, they couldn't sell their product either.
Some directly from the brand, some from people that resell for the brands, a product that couldn't move. So the caliber of the product was great because it never made it on the shelves. Yes. But the margin was horrific. We did the same exact thing during COVID.
If it didn't sell once, it's not going to sell the second time. This is the beauty of resale.
I got fired by the board.
Showing 81–100 of 189 · page 5 of 10
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