The RealReal

The RealReal, Inc. is an online and brick-and-mortar marketplace for authenticated luxury consignment. Based on the circular economy, The RealReal sells consigned clothing, fine jewelry, watches, fine art and home decor. It employs an in-house staff of experts including horologists, gemologists, art curators and luxury fashion authenticators who inspect items for authenticity and value.
History.
The RealReal was founded in 2011 by Julie Wainwright, an e-commerce entrepreneur. By July 2018, the company had raised $288 million in venture capital funding.
In 2017, The RealReal opened its first permanent retail store in New York City. It also opened pop-ups in San Francisco and Las Vegas. In 2018, it opened its second retail location in Los Angeles. In 2019, The RealReal opened a third retail location, its second in New York, on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. In 2020, The RealReal opened a fourth retail location in San Francisco’s Union Square, a fifth in Chicago on the Magnificent Mile and a sixth in Palo Alto, California. In 2021, the company opened additional retail locations in Brooklyn, New York, Newport Beach, California, Greenwich, Connecticut, Austin, Texas, and Dallas, Texas. As of April 2021, The RealReal had 16 Luxury Consignment Offices across the U.S., 11 of which are in its retail stores.
In early 2019, The RealReal announced it would be adding a half-million square foot e-commerce space in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to its existing e-commerce centers in Secaucus, New Jersey, and Brisbane, California. In 2020, the company announced it signed a lease to open an additional e-commerce center in Phoenix, Arizona.
On May 31, 2019, The RealReal submitted a preliminary filing (S-1) to the SEC to go public.
On June 28, 2019, The RealReal went public on Nasdaq under the symbol REAL.
Controversy.
The RealReal has had multiple claims from luxury designers that items on their website were counterfeit. Most notably, in 2018 Chanel filed suit in the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York, alleging The RealReal for hosted counterfeit (fake) Chanel on their website and misled customers that an affiliation existed between the two.
In early 2020, TheRealReal was sued in a class action lawsuit regarding misstatements to investors, alleging that authenticators were given very little training and strict quotas that resulted in the potential for counterfeit or mislabeled items to make it through the company's authentication process more often than purported. 
Sustainability.
In 2017, The RealReal announced a sustainability partnership with luxury fashion brand Stella McCartney, which launched in 2018.
It also established the first Monday in October as National Consignment Day, an annual holiday. The following year, to mark National Consignment day, The RealReal launched a custom sustainability calculator. Developed with environmental consulting firm Shift Advantage, it measures the environmental impact of consignments processed by the company. In 2019, the company marked National Consignment Day by launching a second sustainability partnership with luxury brand Burberry. For National Consignment Day 2020, The RealReal announced its third sustainability partnership with Gucci. When consumers consign or buy Gucci on The RealReal through the end of 2020, a donation will be made to One Tree Planted to support its mission to protect biodiversity and reforestation.