Time To Get Real; Julie Wainwright On Rocking The Fashion Industry

Time to Get Real: How I Built a Billion-Dollar Business that ROCKED the Fashion Industry, by visionary businesswoman Julie Wainwright, was released today. The book is an autobiography focusing on the career of one of the only American women to take a company public, The RealReal, a billion dollar online marketplace for luxury goods that Wainwright founded and built before stepping back in early 2022.

I was able to speak with Wainwright about her book, her career and where she thinks the business of fashion will be heading as we continue to navigate the twenty-first century.

“The RealReal changed the way people shop and consign,” the author told me. These are and were cultural shifts that Wainwright encourages with her work. She understands the importance of shifting the fashion industry towards more sustainable practices. So much so that the brand’s focus on sustainability in fashion made it a natural choice for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CE100 USA’s first luxury brand member.

But how does a person start such a thing, where does one even begin?

“The first challenge,” Wainwright said, “was getting consignors because, up until when we were about $750 million in top line revenue, 50% of the consignors had never consigned before. And the repeat rate for consignors was always really high, but for most people, it was too hard to consign.”

Even that had to be broken down further, into steps, to make sure the people who would be consignors (and clients) would understand how The RealReal worked, and what benefits the company offered.

“The first thing there,” Wainwright told me, “was letting people know that they had trap value in their home. And then secondly, explaining that we all, we do the work. And then lastly, that it had to be a competitive percentage to them. Especially in some key categories. If you look at a Rolex watch, Rolex watches are pretty easy to sell anywhere. There’s a lot of venues.

“If The RealReal was offering a percent to someone that was less than they could get any place else, it probably was not going to work. You had to get competitive where you needed to get competitive, explain, you do all the work, but it really was changing mindsets. And that’s why we had a sales team that went to your house.”

In 2025 that might sound old fashioned, but it is a vital reason the company was able to grow the way it has. But you can’t send random strangers to someone’s home to look at potentially valuable vintage pieces.

“I knew there was absolutely no way this was going to work if we waited for product to roll in on its own,” Wainwright said of her first consideration on this point. “We always had a mail-in option, but no one’s going to do it. And I say this in the book, it’s going to be hard to return things. We have to explain condition. We had a lot of things we had to explain. Having a sales rep and the sales team was just precious to the company as they develop a relationship with the consignor and the consignor then develops trust in them. They can explain it for you because if we tried to do it with only a corporate message, it wouldn’t have worked because all the consignment was local. but the consignment was consolidated in two different warehouse areas once we went into New York. But if you have someone that you can talk to, if you can reach them locally, and especially in the early days, they really were advocates, advisors, and evangelists for the brand.”

The people repping the brand were people clients might run into at a supermarket, who understood the culture and the language of a community.

“They were people that lived there,” Wainwright agreed. “And some of the best ones were salespeople that had quit a department store, you know, and they wanted more freedom. They had a client list and they were happy to go out and talk to their clients and they sold in.”

I asked Wainwright if she could tell me a little more about this.

“We had a woman in Las Vegas, I think she still works at the company,” the author told me. “She used to be the GM at Neiman Marcus in Las Vegas. And, you know, she didn’t want to work there anymore. She wanted more freedom. She wanted to work the hours she wanted to work. And yeah, it worked out really well. So again, working with people that knew people that maybe had sold in, but also people that understood the luxury brands. At the beginning, there were a lot of moms getting back into the workforce who had done something in the fashion world. It could have been PR, but they’d done something and they were excited to do this job.

This writer has been thinking a lot about the death of the commercial, or at least the monumental shift that marketing has to make now that we can (mostly) pay to skip the commercials. Brands have to figure out better ways to advertise, and I was very curious to know what Julie Wainwright, established expert, thought about where things could be heading.

“You know what,” she said, “they are dying, but really entertaining ones go viral.”

The Dollar Shave Club commercials stuck out, as an example, Wainwright remembers their successes, and she isn’t sure that the era is entirely closed. I watched it again after we spoke (link to the commercial here), and remembered it immediately. Then I found myself rewatching a 13 year old commercial a couple of times. It is an excellent advertisement. I see her points.

“I thought this guy’s brilliant. Riding around in his warehouse, talking about why his blades only cost this and you don’t have to pay for that. And he’s got the whole warehouse involved and it is still a funny ad. And he basically says, our blades are eff-ing great in the ad. I thought that was really brilliant. And here’s the thing, the guy was very funny, but he never went off message. He talked about the brand. He told you why his were better. He didn’t try to do something clever that wasn’t related to the brand or people didn’t understand why they should buy it. But I think clever ads are going to have to reign. I think things that can go viral. You’ve got more platforms to advertise now.”

Before I asked her about the book in dept, I wanted to know when its author knew that fashion mattered to her, maybe a little bit more to her than to others. Its a question I ask a lot because it helps me understand the person I am speaking too. I had that same experience, my own version. Thinking about her own past, Wainwright shared a story from her life.

“My mother was at the Academy of Art in Chicago, which was later merged with the Art Institute, to become a fashion illustrator. So in my grandparents’ home, my maternal grandparents’ home, there were incredible costume designs. She really liked period designs, but there were hand drawings of different men and women in period designs through the ages. And rightly or wrongly, my mother also taught me the color wheel before kindergarten. She explained, I think she knew I was going to be short because I’ve always been short, why certain color combinations are better on different bodies and why certain lines are different for elongating. She literally schooled me in visual effects of fashion when I was in kindergarten. I don’t know what happened to them, sadly, but her drawings as a kid were so inspirational because they were of a period. You know, there were some from the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1940s.”

Even if early experiences like this are subliminal, they do not leave us. We are all the products of everything we have experienced over time, tempered by the skills gained from what we have chosen to personally invest in. Wainwright’s career may have started outside of fashion, but the work that interested her provided an invaluable education.

“When I joined the software publishing industry in the mid 1980s,” the author told me, “there were a lot of women in high places in the tech world, and especially in the software world. At that time, it was a pure meritocracy. But it didn’t last long. By the 1990s it had all changed. Everything had changed. By the way, half the engineers were women at software publishing in the beginning.”

I asked Wainwright if her work felt more like a career or a vocation. Because a reader feels from the way she writes that she cares very much about the work she does. Increasingly this writer is understanding that caring is not as commonplace as a younger me believed.

“No,” Wainwright told me, “I don’t think that way at all. Because look, I was deep into marketing and brand management and product marketing. And even when I moved overseas, I applied strategy, and the best brand marketers and product marketers are strategic. Even at Clorox, when I was there, you couldn’t go be in marketing without doing a stint in the field to learn sales. It was absolute, once you got promoted, they threw you out so you could understand how your programs were implemented, how the sales team works, how they were incented.

“I ran huge P&Ls,”. “I would say my whole focus has been running P&Ls in large areas of business. Which I would put down to every step I took, whether conscious or unconscious, allowing me to be a good CEO because I had done so many of the jobs. People don’t necessarily do that anymore.”

It can happen again, I said to her.

“I hope so,” Wainwright replied.

What would help that be more possible? Surely she has thoughts.

“I don’t even know if it’s something I would recommend,” Wainwright said with a smile, “but we still had to code for a while, which was weird. We had to code our demos, and I’m like, ‘I have to code?’ It’s what I learned. You know, these are skills I never thought I would use, but we had to learn how to write our own programming. We had to program our own demos to show off to the press because the tech team didn’t have time to do it.

“I would say that learning all these different functions, then running a company, especially one the size of The RealReal, which was big and complicated, I had done so many of these jobs or had some experience with them. It was incredibly helpful.”

Wainwright told me about dropping out of college mid-way through, taking six months off of school and finding work as a riveter on the General Motors line. She found a mentor, someone who saw her capabilities, a boss the writer told me had made a point of guiding her through the process of learning shop floor automation.

“It was incredibly valuable,” Wainwright explained. “You know, this is going to sound bizarre, but when I look back, seeing how they were doing it was incredibly valuable. You know, if you went into one of the RealReal operations facilities, a lot of it is human driven, it’s a very sophisticated operation. But I just think being there and watching it and getting trained in that way, as a young adult at the age of 20, it sort of takes away any fear because you learn a lot.”

Julie Wainwright began her corporate ascent working in software development and brand management for The Clorox Company. She became CEO of Berkeley Systems, then Reel.com, then Pets.com before founding The RealReal in 2011. I asked the author how the company’s compared, was working in fashion any easier, significantly different?

“The RealReal is incredibly complicated,” the founder told me. “And as time went on, you know, and every business starts small. So I’ll give you an idea. When we first had even actually part-time people working, skewing product, we would time them. How long would it take to describe a product? How long would it take to measure? How, how are we going to authenticate? Then we had to sort of separate out into authentication lanes and we had to hire a couple experts right away. How long does that take? We had to do time studies, like old school time studies, to understand what an average time was, because at the end of the day, you’re paying someone a salary and there has to be a throughput that actually is economical.”

“It became a bad thing to talk about setting quotas for people in the op centers,” the author continued, “but at the end of the day, they all needed goals. They needed accuracy goals. They needed quality goals, number goals and accuracy goals. And that needed to be measured every single day, because otherwise you don’t know if you’ve got, it’s a job performance issue and it’s also an economic issue. When your average selling price is higher, you’ve got some latitude. And that’s where we started doing time studies right away. As the company got bigger and bigger, it was clear that the only thing that we needed to focus on was developing software for the op centers that was unique, that would help move that forward. When I left, we were writing copy off the photo, having humans QC it, and then the whole dynamic changed. It was step by step, just like anything, started in my house, went to a bigger op center. It became really important when we hit, it wasn’t even that critical when we hit a hundred million and top line. But by the time we got to 500 million, everything had to be looked at and rescaled.”

“The worst thing,” Wainwright told me, “both as a consignor and as a business owner, is to have inventory piling up. You have to find what I call ‘optimal pricing.’ Optimal pricing is velocity of sale within a 90 day window. And that was set up for two reasons. One is if you give someone your goods and they’re gone out of your house, 90 days, it feels like a long time to get paid because you still have to get things processed. It could be, you know, a quarter, it could be four months. So an optimal pricing point within a 90 day window. Secondly, as the business is growing, it’s really hard to estimate op center space. If you are holding onto product too long, you’re going to have tons of, then you’re priced it wrong, number one. And number two, you’re adding a lot of expense without any benefit to the consigner or the company. So, the pricing model was critical.”

For The RealReal, a business that takes pieces on consignment, Wainwright understood that there needed to be ways to qualify and quantify prices, in a manner that is perhaps specific to the apparel industry.

“This is sort of morbid, but when a top designer dies, their things heat up. It’s just the way it goes, or they change houses, things heat up. That’s where the humans come in, machine learning is never going to capture that. That’s where you always need human oversight with good machine learning. But pricing, optimal pricing had to be in place in order to keep the op center space efficient, and to keep the consignors happy.

“I know this is getting really nerdy,” she said, “but all of this was thought of at the very beginning, by the way, it was always thought of scale, which meant we had to have very deep, deep taxons. A Fendi bag is a Fendi bag. But Maybe it’s a baguette, maybe it’s a baguette with sequins. Maybe it has a leather strap. Maybe it has this, maybe it’s this year. You had to get a lot of descriptions, especially on key things, the value changed based on how deep your taxons went. If people get upset because their things weren’t priced right, it was because it was such a special item that the taxons wouldn’t have caught it, even then. But all the product taxons go very, very deep. So you can then price by not just by brand or type, but by what attributes that product has.

Certain leathers, but also different, you know, they have chain straps, or they don’t have chain straps, it’s a flap bag, and it’s this size. You have to take in all the colors, you have to take in condition. It’s a complex multivariate pricing formula that I’m sure is always being refined. I mean, it’s constant refinement through technology with human oversight.”

I ask the author if there was any advice she had for young women. Cliche? Maybe a little. But how could I not?

“You have to work hard,” Wainwright said. “I mean, honestly, nothing comes easy, but for me, it’s worth it. I would also say, it’s really important for women to make their own money. So they have choices that they make that aren’t put on them because they don’t have money. So they make the choices for the right reason. And it builds confidence, it gives them options. It puts them in a position where they’re not compromising. And it’s hard. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.”

Time to Get Real: How I Built a Billion-Dollar Business that ROCKED the Fashion Industry by Julie Wainwright, from BenBella Books, is now on sale.

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