Employee number one at a public company. Thirteen years inside the warehouse, the merchandising floor, the engineering room, and the boardroom. Then the corner office. Then the first profitable year.
Rati Sahi Levesque does not arrive at work each morning to a building she founded. She arrives at a building she built. There is a difference, and she has spent thirteen years insisting on it. In October 2024 the board of The RealReal handed her the title that matched the work: President and Chief Executive Officer, succeeding founder Julie Wainwright, joining the directors, retaining the COO portfolio. Employee number one in 2011. Employee number one with a corner office in 2024. The company crossed two billion dollars in GMV the following year and posted positive Adjusted EBITDA in every quarter for the first time in its life. The receipts came in.
The story starts in San Francisco, where Levesque was born and raised, and it never really leaves. She studied economics at UC Santa Cruz, worked in the financial industry for a while, then did the thing the financial industry rarely produces: she opened a shop. Anica sat on Polk Street, edge of Russian Hill, stocking the kind of avant-garde designers the city had stopped carrying. The luxury consignment rack at the back of the store turned out to be the experiment that mattered. Customers brought in their Margiela and their Lanvin and their Comme. Rati priced them, sold them, learned what a person will actually pay for someone else's coat. She was running a price-discovery engine before she had a word for it.
When Julie Wainwright was looking for a first hire to help build a luxury consignment startup, she found a merchant who already understood the unit economics of strangers' closets. Rati joined in 2011. There was no team yet. There was barely a process. There was a thesis: that the luxury market would happily expand into resale if someone could promise the bag was real. That promise turned out to be infrastructure. Authentication centers. Photographers. Copy desks. Pricing algorithms. White-glove pickup. A small army of brand experts who can spot a wrong stitch on a Chanel from across the warehouse floor. Levesque touched all of it. Sales, merchandising, product, technology, operations, marketing - she ran or co-ran each, in sequence. By the time she was Chief Merchant, she was also overseeing the warehouse operations and the engineering team. Few executives at public companies can claim such breadth without having parachuted in for a fix; she did it by staying.
Then came 2022. Wainwright stepped down. A new external CEO arrived. The market punished growth-at-all-costs companies. The RealReal had to learn discipline in public, with a stock price as its grade card. Levesque, made President and COO, became the operator turning every knob: store footprint, consignor mix, take rates, marketing efficiency, warehouse throughput. In late 2024 the board promoted her into the top job. The 2025 numbers - revenue up to $693 million, Adjusted EBITDA at $42 million, a $33 million year-over-year improvement, positive EBITDA every quarter - are the kind of receipts that quiet a long argument about whether resale can be a real business. The 2026 guide calls for $2.39 to $2.45 billion in GMV. The company is now leaning hard into AI for authentication and merchandising, which is the natural next move when you have fifteen years of luxury condition data to feed a model.
Her public voice is calm and merchant-flat. She talks about trust the way restaurateurs talk about service - as a daily practice, not a marketing claim. She likes to point out that The RealReal does not set the price of a used Birkin; the consumer does, and the company is the venue that surfaces the number. She likes to talk about circularity not as a moral position but as a consumer behavior already in motion. The line she keeps returning to is some version of: the customer is smarter than they used to be, and the smart customer wants the loop closed. That is not idealism. That is inventory.
It's not The RealReal sitting here and setting the price. It's the market - the consumer telling us what they will pay for something.- Rati Sahi Levesque
When she took over in late 2024, the company had spent years in growth mode and a stretch in restructuring mode. The first full year on her watch closed differently. Revenue grew. Margins expanded. The four-letter word that public investors had been waiting to read finally appeared in the right column: positive.
Source: The RealReal annual filings. Bars indicative; values labeled.
A $33 million year-over-year improvement in Adjusted EBITDA, landing at $42 million or 6.1% of revenue. Q1 2026 followed with GMV up 24% and margin expansion of over 400 basis points. The turnaround is no longer a story. It is a number.
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The consumer is just smarter than they've ever been. They're like, "why wouldn't I participate in the circular economy?"- Rati Sahi Levesque, Business of Fashion
Anica, her Russian Hill boutique, was a small experiment in what people will pay for someone else's clothes. The lessons traveled. The RealReal is the same experiment, with a warehouse.
Sales, merchandising, product, engineering, warehouse operations, marketing. She didn't rotate through them as training. She ran them. Inside The RealReal, there is no organ she hasn't operated on.
She does not talk about luxury as taste; she talks about it as data. Price is consumer-set. Inventory is consignor-supplied. Trust is the only durable moat. The rest is operations.
She is betting that the luxury industry stops treating resale as a threat and starts treating it as a feedback loop - on pricing, on brand strength, on which silhouette holds. AI authentication scales her thesis: that trust at industrial scale is the unlock. She wants the secondary market to be the default, not the alternative.
It is a sentence she repeats often, in earnings calls and interviews and side-of-stage conversations, with the steady cadence of a person who has actually counted what trust costs to build. The authentication center exists because of it. The take rate is defensible because of it. The 2025 EBITDA print, in the end, was a trust print.