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.
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.
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.