luxury-resale
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Julie Wainwright and the second life of beautiful things
A friend bought a secondhand designer piece. Julie Wainwright saw a business. After Pets.com, she built The RealReal around a deceptively demanding promise: make strangers trust what was in someone else’s closet.
ShopShops turned the shopping trip into a spectator sport
A failed store-directory idea became a live shopping marketplace. Now ShopShops is bringing the conversation of the boutique to the complicated business of pre-owned luxury.
Liyia Wu Put the Shop Window Inside the Phone
She began with a travel directory nobody needed. Then Liyia Wu noticed that the most useful part of a shop was not the shelf, but the person standing beside it.
Charles Gorra Put a Price Tag on Fashion's Most Polite Mystery
A finance-trained founder discovered that the grandest handbags had a surprisingly ordinary problem: nobody could say what they were worth. His answer became Rebag - and a campaign to make secondhand luxury feel less like bargaining and more like banking.
Elizabeth Layne
Elizabeth Layne is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rebag, the New York-based e-commerce company that buys, sells and trades secondhand luxury handbags and accessories. A Brown and Harvard Business School graduate, she has spent her career building marketing engines for fast-growing consumer brands - launching Birchbox's marketing while still in business school, running brand and retail marketing at Bonobos before its Walmart acquisition, and scaling Appear Here across London, Paris and New York. At Rebag she has helped turn data tools like the Clair Report into marketing that pushes luxury resale toward a mainstream audience.
Bob's Watches
Bob's Watches is the world's largest online marketplace dedicated to pre-owned Rolex and luxury watches. Founded in 1999 and reshaped by CEO Paul Altieri after 2010, the company pioneered the transparent 'Rolex Exchange' - publishing live buy and sell prices for every model, like a stock exchange for watches. Based in Newport Beach, California, it authenticates and holds its own inventory of certified used Rolex, Patek Philippe, Omega, Tudor, Cartier, Audemars Piguet and more, letting collectors and first-time buyers transact at fair market value.
Rebag
Rebag is a New York-based online and retail marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned luxury handbags, watches, jewelry and accessories. Founded in 2014 by Charles Gorra, the company built proprietary technology - most notably Clair, an appraisal index, and Clair AI image recognition - to standardize resale pricing and pay sellers upfront. It aims to bring transparency and liquidity to what it calls an opaque secondary luxury market.
The RealReal
The RealReal is the largest online marketplace for authenticated, pre-owned luxury goods. It pairs human expert authenticators with proprietary AI to vet handbags, watches, fine jewelry, apparel and home items before resale, handling consignment end to end - pricing, photography, listing and shipping. Founded in 2011 and public on Nasdaq since 2019, the company has grown to more than 30 million members and positions itself at the intersection of luxury, technology and sustainability.
Rati Levesque
Rati Sahi Levesque is the President and CEO of The RealReal, the publicly traded luxury resale marketplace she helped build from a single employee desk in 2011 into a $2 billion GMV business. A born-and-raised San Franciscan with a UC Santa Cruz economics degree and a former Russian Hill boutique behind her, she succeeded founder Julie Wainwright in October 2024 and steered the company to its first year of positive Adjusted EBITDA in every quarter.