Find out the secret to appraising resale according to therealreal.
LOS ANGELES — “I mean, this is a little sketch but you can see it ripped,” The RealReal Inc.’s senior valuation manager Sean Conway said under his breath as he carefully inspected the Gucci tag affixed with red threads — always two — attaching the label to the Gucci Coco Capitán T-shirt.
Conway himself found his way into the streetwear community as a kid. At 12 he had already amassed a closet of some 40 pairs of sneakers. Today, that collection’s more than 500, cut down significantly from its peak when it numbered 1,000 before Conway sold off a bunch of pairs after moving from New York to Los Angeles.
“We don’t have the guy searching our site constantly for sneakers yet,” Conway said. “We do get some. We need more guys searching for sneakers. People don’t know we have them yet, so it’s a big opportunity.” Where The RealReal looks to hit hard is nabbing a different customer than the Flight Clubs, Goats, StockXs and eBays of the world. That would be the customer who wants to hit the easy button and have someone take care of everything in exchange for maybe higher pricing or less competitive commissions.
Once he’s done looking through pieces to be consigned, he enters his notes into the company’s system and the product then gets funneled to copywriters who perfect the description for the public. Pieces are assigned conditions based on a scale of pristine, excellent, very good and good — the lowest value The RealReal would accept.
It’s a business that began back around 2000 when Project Blitz owner and president Andre Ljustina was selling sneakers on eBay in his parent’s garage and through his own ingenuity and skill at maintaining relationships and ferreting out the best of the best, he’s parlayed the start-up into a full-fledged business.
Typically, they’ll have product laid out for Conway to see and then price. Fast-moving items like the backpacks that sell around $200 on other reselling sites can potentially achieve $350 to $375 on The RealReal, Conway said. The more rare pieces Project Blitz keeps as its unique calling card — in much the same way brands make product specific for some retailers in a bid to control distribution and their brand equity.
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