Julie Wainwright: How She Built The RealReal After Losing Everything

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, guys, it's your friend Kate Max and welcome back
to Post run High. Today's guest has one of the
most remarkable reinvention stories I have ever heard. Julie Wainray
is best known as the founder and former CEO of
The Real Reel, the company that completely changed how we
think about luxury fashion and sustainability, and the company that

(00:22):
I have bought quite a good bit of items from.
But her story starts way before The Real Reel. In
her forties, Julie went through one of the most publicly
difficult professional moments imaginable with the fall of pets dot Com,
and instead of letting it define her, she used it
as fuel to rebuild her life and career from the
ground up. At fifty three, she didn't just come back,
she came back by creating a billion dollar brand that

(00:44):
redefined an entire industry. In our conversation, Julie opens up
about resilience, failure, intuition, and what it really takes to
start over not once, not twice, but again and again
throughout life and Guys, this whole conversation really just had
me thinking about life is long, and we cannot be
afraid to continuously start over and reinvent ourselves. So, whether

(01:09):
you love a good founder story, are in a chapter
of change, or just need a reminder that reinvention is
always possible, this conversation is for you. Julie Wainwright, Welcome

(01:29):
to Post Run High.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Hello O kay, and thanks for letting me bring Poppy.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Julie and Poppy welcome to Post Run Him. I'm so
excited that you and Poppy are here. How are you
feeling today?

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Well, I feel pretty good after that invigorating walk. That
was fun.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, so Julie and I went for a quick walk
in Brooklyn before sitting down for the podcast today. Are
you a big walker? Do you like to get outside?

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love walking and hiking. It's a little hard in
Manhattan to hike, but I do love a good hike.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
What else movement wise do you like?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
You know, actually I like to move a lot, but
I would say mostly, you know, I always go to
I usually go to the gym. I have to get
a sweat up, all right, So but I'm more of
an inside runner walker, so the treadmill or the elliptical.
But then walking around Manhattan's fabulous. I mean, what other
city can you walk and see? So much diversity.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
It's so true. It has a movement always been a
big part of your life.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yes, And it was probably because my dad was, you know,
always wanted a jock as a kid, and then he
had me. Then he had and I wasn't. And my
sister Lisa was a great sprinter and was setting records
and she was really fast, and my brother was the ultimate.
When he got his son, he got a a guy

(02:43):
who loved football. But I would say our family was
more outdoors than probably suited me. I was sort of like,
can't I stay inside and read. They're like, nope, We're
going to do this'sp all going yay.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. It's one of those things when you grow up
in an active household. I feel like movement is like
ingrained in you, whether it's you know, playing sports when
you're younger, or literally just getting outside and moving your body.
So I like knowing that. And I feel like a
big misconception sometimes with founders and people that have had
really successful careers is that they don't make time for movement.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
And I always did right every day. In fact, that
was my anti anxiety drug. It still is, and I'm
a morning workout person. So when you get up and
you're like, okay, I looked forward to it. I looked
forward to a good sweat. I mean weight I do
weight training too, but it really was getting my heart
beat up enf that I would sweat and it just

(03:34):
set the day. And if I didn't do it by
the end of the day, I was always grumpy and
I'm like, what is wrong, And I'm like, oh, it
didn't work out. It's just a good release, clears your head,
changes your energy. Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
It's literally therapy.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
It is therapy. That and walking in nature.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yes, and walking, and I feel like that's such a
benefit of having a dog because it kind of forces
you to get outside even more. But it is so
true that living in New York were a natural walk.
We're walking everywhere. But we have to address it, Julie,
because you and I are wearing total opposite outfits right now,
and normally it's the other way around, like I'm an
active wear and somebody comes in the most glamorous outfit.
But for our listeners, Julie is currently in a very cute,

(04:14):
sporty chic fit leggings, long sleeve tops, sneakers, and I
am in jeans ballerina flats and a sweater, which is
very unlike me. We all know that.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
So I thought this was the running show, you know,
and I thought, Okay, I know we're not going to run,
but I felt like I had to dress and I've
watched your videos and I wanted to match your style.
And it was sort of fun to not really worry,
you know, just put on stuff that I would wear
out for a workout. But then I get here and
you're all dressed up and you have cute earrings on,

(04:44):
you get a belt on, it's sort of yeah. It
was like, okay, oh, guys, and a trench coat and
it's a beautiful trench coat.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Thank you. You know. It's so funny because Julie's the
found is the founder of the Real Reel, and whenever
I've had fashion icons in here, I have gotten bullied
in the comments for not dressing appropriately. So when I
had Tim Gunn on the show, who was, you know,
in Project Runway, obviously fashion icon of New York City.
He came in like a proper pair of trousers, beautiful

(05:13):
sweater loafers, and I was sitting across from him in
Adida's tracksuit, and so when I was watching some of
the interviews that you've done this past week, I was like,
Julie always shows up in the cutest outfit. I saw
you did an interview and a Diane von Furstenberg rap dress,
you know, pretty recently. So I said to my team,
I was like, Okay, guys, can we all make a
prediction that she's gonna not wear active word today because

(05:35):
if that's the case, I can't wear active wear because
I know how it goes down in the comments.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
There you go, all right, So we totally flipped the scrap.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, but I appreciate you doing your research.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
I watched your videos. I'm like, I gotta up my game,
you know. And then I'm like, oh, do I have
time to up my game anyway? So I just wore
my normal things that I wear. But it was so
funny seeing you. I'm like, oh, come on. Having said that,
it's very freeing to go to an interview an active wear,
it is, isn't it. Yes, it's pretty amazing, it is.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
I Mean, I feel like, as New Yorkers, we live
so much of our daily lives in comfortable clothes, and
then it's like, of course, sometimes at night if we're
going to an event, we're dressing up. But for the
most part, I like live in active wear or a
comfy pair of jeans and a T shirt. You know, so,
isn't that great? It is.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
I'm sure Tim Gun wouldn't think it's great, but that's okay.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Tim definitely the house without a sudon No.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
I remember him saying that, yes, and that's good. I
love that. I love that for him.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
I do too. I do really appreciate somebody that walks
outside in a good outfit here.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
I love it. I honestly, I think it's so much
fun when you actually see people really dressed. I'm going
to an event tonight and I'm looking forward for the
I mean, it's not a fashion event, but I'm always
cognizant of the fashion and how people dress, and it's
a very specific group. I'm like, oh, I wonder how
they're going to dress tonight. So that's what do you get? Well?

(06:56):
I bought a green velvet not too far off from
this color green velvet atro pants suit with just a
really pretty dulce top under and boblouse underneath. That's really
pretty because I'm not you know, it's just chic and
it will. It's sort of business attire but a little dressier.

(07:17):
So it's just it's just awesome. It felt. It feels
like coming into the holidays. It feels like fall. It's chic.
It'll be fine. And I'm not the star of the show.
So and I'm going with my friend who husband is
being honored and she's just like decked out, so I'm
just going to be there supporting her.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
I love it. That's so fun. I'm obsessed with Metro
right now.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Well, I've I don't know if I should say, I
never have purchased Atro till this year, and a stylish
so we'll just try this suit on. I thought, really
it's and I thought, oh, it's fabulous. And the interior
is beautiful. It's beautiful Paisley, It's so gorgeous.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
I've never seen Paisley done so well. I mean, I
went into the Metro store with my mom kind of
recently because I had seen some of the bags that
they recently put out with like the horse that has wings, right,
that's their logo, I guess. So I was like, Mom,
you have to come into this store like I again,
like I we talked about this a little bit on
the run. But I've never been a big fashionista. I
don't really know that much about fashion. But I feel
like as I've gotten older, and I have a lot

(08:19):
of friends in New York that are in the world
of fashion, whether it's they're in PR They're always going
to events and they have to look greater, like you know, influencers.
They're always dressing amazing two events. So I feel like
I'm around fashion a lot, but I don't fashion a lot.
But I don't know it that well. I mean, I've
always just been like a sporty girl that can put
on a cute outfit and look good. But it's not
you know, it's not it is my thing. I would say,

(08:39):
like I love it, and I love fashion design and
all of that, but knowing brands, and I didn't grow
up with a mom that was like decked out in brands.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
You know.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
My mom was always in a T shirt and a
good pair of jeans, and she always looked amazing because
she was very fit. Right Anyways, I walked into the
Metro store for the first time with my mom over
the summer, and I was just in awe. And now
whenever I see their stuff on, like Netta porte and
go through it. I mean, I just love the designs
and everything.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
So normally the way I shop is sort of the
way the real role was constructed. I check the resell
value because I do flip things fast, and I didn't
check the resale value. So when I'm shopping, I'm very cognizant,
like if I want to sell this, what the price
would be. And with this one, I didn't look because

(09:24):
I don't know where intro is. For a long time
it wasn't great. But sometimes it's like, doesn't matter if
you love it, And I would say sometimes it does,
because you know, people get very disappointed they spent like
three thousand dollars something for something the resell values two
hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
But you're a smart chopper.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I am always cognizant of the difference between the resell
value and the original price, and sometimes some cases I'll
spend more. If you know, I'll be like, Okay, I
can do it, because let's say I want to resell it,
I'm going to get ninety percent percent of what I
paid for it back.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Have you always been a smart shopper or would you
say that that really came into fruition when you started
the real real.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
It really came with real real. But I have to
tell you something funny, because when you look back at life,
you're like, oh, maybe this is also a childhood thing.
First of all, my mother went to art school to
become a fashion illustrator, all right. So that's a little
random thought that popped in once I started the business,
which I never really gave that much thought because she

(10:27):
dropped out of colleague to marry my dad. But when
I go back and look at her drawings, they're all
fashion illustrations from the fifties, which is a fun period
to do that. And then she did period costumes too,
and studied period dressing, all right. So there's that in
the background. But then the other thing is my mother
would go to someone's house and she'd be like, I

(10:50):
love that rug. When you get tired of it, i'll
buy it from you, all right. So she was always
like scavenging other people's homes and people are like, well,
it's not for sale. She goes, well, well maybe it
will be at some point, and I really love it,
so just let me know. And then my dad would
go to that local dump and he would come home

(11:10):
with furniture and refinish it and built like would build
out like he built out his own pool room and
bar area with refurbished furniture or so clearly that idea
was already in my head on some level. But I
had never shopped resell to the start of the Real Rail,
and I'll tell you why. Online it was scary because

(11:34):
things weren't authenticated, and I didn't want to Back then,
it was more eBay and I didn't want to go
back and forth with some seller about a price. When
you walk into the stores. This is pre the real Reil.
I always thought they were interesting, but they just didn't
feel esthetically like a place I wanted to hang out
and usually had to dig. You know, everyone loves their

(11:56):
big fines, so I would say, I know for fact,
I never bought any resale to the Real Rail. And
then once the real Reil started, because remember, as a founder,
you do everything, So I would be opening the boxes
and I'm like, these are amazing.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
So you start getting ingrained in it. You become a
part of that.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
And then I knew early on what consigners I could.
I mean, you know, because I was opening boxes, I'm like,
I can wear everything that person sits here. We wouldn't
let anyone shop the site and for the first day
because we wanted consumers to show. No employees could shop
it for the first day when we got started. But
I remember thinking, every time we get this box it

(12:36):
was someone in Chicago, I'm like, this person is me.
She's like, clearly my body type, clearly she has my
style and I was so excited to get and she
was into more a little more brands like Marshalla at
the time of this was a while ago, you know,
which was it was sort of cutting edge but still cool.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
How do you feel about the Is it Mason Margella
that makes the she with the like cleavage?

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, I'm not a fan. Not a fan. I mean,
I mean, I know, yeah, not a fan. The fashion
girls are screaming, I'm not a fan, and you know
you don't have I mean, there's at some point it
becomes costume of years the right thing.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Okay, So backing up before we get to the real reel,
I really want to dive into your early career and
kind of everything that led you to the real reel
because you started the real real, as you said on
Our Walk at fifty two years old, which is so
impressive and really just a testament. I feel like we
always see those memes online that's like so and so
started ex business at this age, right, So it's like
kind of this idea that it's never too late, you know.

(13:45):
But let's talk about everything that you did before the
real reel. So let's talk about the lead up.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
I had a big career, so I shared my career
as we talked about at Clorox in brand management, moved
to tech, ended up being as CEO and a company
called Systems, which did the flying toasters and the game
you Don't Know Jack. But the only reason I got
promoted to CEO And by the way, and this time,

(14:10):
I'm in my thirties, so if you just go like
late thirties. But they promoted me because the company was
failing and I came up with a plan to turn
it around. And first they said, okay, you do it,
you're president. And then they're like, well, okay, now you
did that, you're now CEO. And the founder wanted to
take a different role, so I wasn't the founder of
the company. So then the founder did sell the company

(14:31):
over the weekend one weekend, and then I'm like, well,
it looks like I have to get another job, and
that's where I learned I should have asked for more stock.
By the way, until then my equity can come and go.
But anyway, the next job was the CEO of a
company called reel dot com our eel dot com. It
was the first site to sell movies. In that case,

(14:53):
it was another founder that sold to Hollywood Video, which
is something most people don't even know about. It was
that poor cousin to Blockbuster and right away, like for
one hundred million dollars. And so then I was offered
the job as CEO of pets dot com because some

(15:13):
young guy was actually owned the URL and was fulfilling
pet supplies out of his second room in his apartment
in LA and he's like, I'm not cut out for this.
So it was funded, and then I raised more money
and I was the CEO of pets dot com. And
then we had the dot com bust and the pets

(15:33):
dot Com became the poster child for that.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
And what was for people that don't know what was
the dot com bust? Because I'm not familiar.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
With sure, I know that's a the whole generation forgot
about it. So think of the year two thousand, which
were you born. I was born in nineteen ninety seven, okay,
so you were three. But during that time, the Internet
was still really fresh, meaning people Amazon was probably I
think by then, probably four years old, but people were

(16:02):
just getting comfortable with shopping online. Medical information was just
showing up online. It was just the beginning of personal
use of the Internet. I think at that time there
was Netscape as your browser. Yahoo was hiring people to
hand curate things because that was the only way they

(16:23):
could do it. They would hand curate listings. It was
just the beginning of everything. Because Amazon shot up was
such a big success selling books at the time, and
then they added music next and video movies, actually selling movies,

(16:43):
but so they were slowly getting They went up to
like a billion dollars past they were also losing a
lot of money, but anyway, it was proof that consumers
would transact on the Internet. So it was really the
beginning of change of everything. And when there's that kind
of change, which we're in another one with AI, money
flows in to create opportunities one and a lot of

(17:06):
money was flowing in from the venture capital world to
actually take advantage of this new platform. That needed technology
and needed people that knew how to work in a
technology environment, but also you know, face the consumer. So
it was a good time for people who have consumer
experience and technology, and I was one of them. Pets

(17:27):
dot Com was one of ready for this. I think
eleven pet sites funded. This just shows you how that
limiting effect is sort of like, Okay, the pets category
at that time, I think it was fifty billion dollars
in the US. We're all going to win in the
pets category, and obviously eleven funded companies can't win.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
It's a great url, pets dot Com.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
It was. That's what the young the guy that started
its name was Greg and La. He had bought He
turned out to be a URL guy. He made his
money because he jumped on a bunch of yours. So
pets dot Com sold pet supplies online. I got a
lot of hype because we had a little puppet, says

(18:10):
pets dot Com puppet, which I had one of the
original ones that was kind of adorable. We ran television
ads for the for the first time, and I took
the company public right around the time Amazon was announcing
their earnings and instead of killing it on the earnings.

(18:31):
They lost almost a billion dollars that year, and they
had a huge loss in the quarter and the money
started drying up. Everyone's like, well, if they can't make
it work at their scale, how is anyone going to
make it work. It's too early, and the money dried up.
And so that's what There was too much money rushing

(18:51):
toward opportunities and then it all pulled out. So I
had to shut down pets dot Com. I didn't have to.
I thought I wouldn't be able to get funding, and
I thought it would be better to return money to
shareholders rather than run it to bankruptcy. I think within
a six month period, about eleven hundred companies went out

(19:12):
of business, including ones. Look, pets dot Com was a
precursor to chewy dot Com. There isn't anything chewy dot
com doesn't does that pets dot Com didn't do earlier,
but things like door dash and Instacart. There was a
company called Webvan that actually burned through about a billion
dollars a capital even then. Back then, but they were

(19:32):
doing grocery delivery. They were doing at home grocery delivery
and actually bypassing the groceries, they actually had their own
warehouses full of food. So if you think about what
and there's a lot of these stories, but those are
the two that you know, pets and webban and come
to mind because we're experiencing it now. So the question
is were we too earlier? Was the money too timid?

(19:55):
And I would say clearly the.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Combination of books, it probably was both. Yes, it seems
like you know and you know, I think that's also
funny where it's like everybody thinks some of these ideas
that happened for the last like five to ten years
are so new, but it's so cool knowing that in
the early two thousands, you guys were thinking about all
these ideas at the beginning of kind of online e commerce.
But the infrastructure just also seems like it wasn't there.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Well, if you go back and I've studied this and
you look at like I think in two thousand and
there were maybe two hundred million people online, and they
were cautious about actually transacting online. We had to have
a little symbol. A lot of people wanted to call
and place the order or the phone like that was
more safe. So people were very cautious. Now I think,

(20:42):
what there's four billion people online. So when you talk
the whole idea was it was a land grab back then.
If you get your if you're first, you're going to
have a really hard time being dislodged in five to
ten years. And where it worked out for who worked
out for was Netflix. So they were a company that

(21:03):
started and I think the late nineties, it could have
been ninety seven or ninety eight, and they made it
through the you know, the Valley of death there and
they were just shipping DVDs. They were you know, it
was a rental company and they're shipping DVDs to people's homes,
and they kept saying, no, we're going to be there
when streaming happened. Of course, streaming didn't happen for twenty years,

(21:26):
but they were they were able to raise enough capital
and move forward in a way that they're look, they're
a juggernaut. So they did start there and kept going.
I'm trying to think there's probably a few more, but
that one is probably one of the largest examples that
weathered the dot com bust.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
When you think about what happened during the dot com
bust and you think about now, you know, twenty five
plus years later, about what's about to happen with AI,
and what's currently happening with AI? What synergies are you
seeing and how do you think companies can set themselves
up for success.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Well, I'm actually speaking on this Monday. So when the
e commerce world sort of exploded or and people were
leveraging the Internet for that, a lot of companies would
come to me and say should I get into it?
And they were all existing businesses, and I'd say, you
can wait because we're working things out. And you had
to build all these pieces that you had to write

(22:18):
code for everything. I said, no, no, no, you can wait.
It's a huge investment. I would recommend you wait till
the platforms get solidified because there was no platform. Then
everything was hand rolled and it was hard and it
was expensive, and you had to keep servers in a
warehouse and they had to be climate controlled and you
had to keep one warm in case your server went down.

(22:39):
So it was just everything, the infrastructure. The cost of
getting started could be two to five million dollars before
you open your door. So no, no wait, wait, your
time will come, you'll be you won't be left out
if you wait. That's not true with AI and let's
just talk about you know, the markets are crazy, valuations

(22:59):
are high, et cetera, et cetera. But AI is going
to pose risks, but in terms of the same kind,
and there will be busts. We're definitely in a boom.
There's going to be bust, but the majority of the
money is being actually spent by large tech companies. So
you've got established companies which huge amounts of profit building

(23:24):
this new future. So the risk factor is the lower
the but there will be it's still crazy, so there
will be companies that spent out and there'll be a
minor I would say a minor bust. What is probably
going to happen and happened originally when the software When

(23:44):
when the software industry picked up, is corporate started first
because that's where the money was, and then consumer we're
in terms of people being able to monetize came second.
So right now there's huge amount of money being spent
at corporation. What I think is going to be good.
People are already taking costs out through AI and they're

(24:05):
redefined their processes. That won't reinvent their business though, and
it's going to be helpful. But I do think especially
people that run business to consumer companies need to think
about how AI will reinvent what the consumer sees, how
you interact with the consumer, not just your cost structure.
Because someone's going to figure it out in a competitive

(24:27):
category and they're going to win.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
How do you foresee a company like the Real Real
integrating AI in a successful way.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Well, I can't speak to what they're going to do. Now,
I can give some advice and solicited advice, but let
me tell you what we did a long time ago.
One of the key things that was a detriment to
the business was bad consigners who gave fake goods. Now
the company is processing thousands of products every day, and

(25:05):
guess what. Bad consigners tend to look like each other.
They have the same attributes. So when things come into
the op center, if they can be flagged as a
potential high risk consigner, they go through a different swim
lane than someone else who's been consigning regularly. That doesn't
mean things are authenticate, aren't authenticated, it's just one gets

(25:28):
a lot more scrutiny. So that's number one. Number two.
Most of the copy now, and when I was there,
most of the copy is written by going photo first.
Now that still requires consumer oversight. Now giving an excit,
I just bought a skirt on the real rail and

(25:48):
I just wanted a very specific pencil skirt and a
very specific material, and I found what I wanted and
I found my size, but it was leather and they
called it wool. Those type of things still needs human oversight.
There needs to be quality control, But to have a
machine write all the copy off a photo is phenomenal.

(26:12):
And then the other thing we were doing is, you know,
think about you have a lot of authentic goods, you
also have fake goods and running handbags through first pass
with machine learning and kicking off anything that looks treacherous
based on where counterfeiters kind of work. So it makes
the job, It makes everyone's job smarter and more efficient.

(26:34):
So we start doing that in twenty nineteen. Oh wow,
it's a long time.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Ago now, right, So you guys were kind of early
adopters to it, and it makes so much sense because
a huge part of your business is you guys are
managing a massive amount of massive inventory and you have
to go through it and make sure it's authenticated. And
also I love how the website will rank it good, excellent,
whatever kind of condition. But yeah, when you think about it,
like it takes a while to sort through those products

(26:58):
on by hand, right, So if you can have AI
step in and help, and obviously there's kinks at first,
but if that can become really efficient, then that, oh
it's really excer process.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
So think about a normal retailer, maybe a small let's
take a smaller retailer. Maybe they have twenty five thousand
skews in the store all year, and that's still a lot,
a lot to manage. So medium size someone like a
drug store, you may have one hundred thousand SKUs, maybe
one hundred and ten thousand. The real real when I

(27:31):
was there was getting in over ten thousand items a day.
So this creates all kinds of technology challenges. So anything
you can do to streamline that process. Because the other
thing that's really frustrating as a consigner is, Okay, I
sent it to you, you've told me it's arrived in
the warehouse. Why is it taking two weeks to get

(27:53):
it on the website. Anything you can do to make
the consigner happier and ensure the consumer has safety and guarantees.
I think those things are great.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, and also make sure internally your business is moving
as efficiently as possible, because you.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Know, right and economics actually work more favorably that way.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Absolutely, And you know, when I think about the real real, like,
there are so many things that if you're manually doing
everything that needs to be done for the real real
it's like you get the product, you have to authenticate it.
That takes time. Then you have to go through take
the photos, get them up on the website. Then you're
tagging the product, right, you're putting the condition in, the material, the.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
Color, the disise, all of that's in. All of that's
in the database. But so the copywriters would do all
of that. So the database was sent up there. But
at the beginning, oh, it took a long time. So
and then the other thing we used to do is
you'd have to color because we get so many products.
Even you know, even when you're doing five hundred million

(28:50):
a year, which was about year four for us, it's
still so many products coming in and they all have
to be light balanced. The photos because you're taking if
you walked into the app center, it's just row and
row and row of photography stations. But so you get
white light pollution. You really can't escape it, and so
everything had to be light balanced, which meant we were

(29:12):
sending them off in batches to India, to the Philippines
to light balance them because you want you don't want
all that uneven look on the website, which gave Sometimes
their internet would go down, you know, things would happen,
you know, the transmission would drop a packet and then

(29:32):
you'd have to go through. And so that's all been
taken care of. Now it doesn't have to be offshore.
And that was three days and incremental expense. It wasn't
a lot of money, but it was also a time lag.
So all of that was covered by the AI and
I just in the early days, so I have to
tell you like, is it back from Thailand. Yeah, they're like, no,
we have to get a new vendor there. Who was

(29:54):
that one of them had way too many holidays, I
think where they were like, oh, we have to balance
our holidays, you know, because people would all around the
world take different holidays. They'd be gone for three days,
so like we need our photos.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
Anytime there's more cooks in the kitchen, it's just going
to take more time. So yeah, it's kind of one
of those things. And it's awesome that you're able to
automize that. Now, you know, this kind of came up
when you were talking about your work history. You pretty
quickly became a CEO.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Well it didn't feel like it, but you know, all right,
So here's the funny story. I wasn't jacking for it.
I didn't want the company to fail. So I came
up with a plan and they promoted me to run
the company. It wasn't that big. It was about forty million,
so it wasn't that small either, but it wasn't that big.
And I remember the board member and when Bled called

(30:41):
me to her office and said, look, you know, we
the founder of Grades. We really want you to be
the CEO. We think you can do it. Done a
great job as president, and she says, I'm really excited
about this. I was sort of I mean, I wasn't
going to say no, but I was sort of shocked.
I and when I was driving home, the company Berkeley Systems,

(31:04):
no surprise, was in Berkeley. I lived in Moren County
across the bridge. I just I almost drove to Sacramento.
And this is before sell cell phone. So I'm just
like and I'm married, I'm not coming home, and I'm like,
because you know, in my head, I'm like, okay, now
I'm CEO. What does that mean? What am I going
to do? How am I going to do this? What
about this? What did this? And I had I was
playing out all the scenarios, probably working through a little

(31:27):
bit of fear and anxiety, and I just kept going up.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
North every at home, so late right, just on a
long car ride collecting your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, I was, which is you know, it's a great
thing to do.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Some people love long car rides like that for that exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Well, I was so in my thoughts, I missed my
exits and I'm like and I finally had to stop
and at a pay phone and come and say sorry,
I'm almost in Sacramento. But I got promoted.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah that's I mean, what kind of skills did you, like,
as a young employee kind of have that you think
set you up for success to be considered to be
promoted into a position like that, because coming in for
a founder led business and being you know, nominated as
a CEO, that's a big deal and it requires a
lot of trust from that founder in you. So, like,
what were some of the qualities you think you had.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
So one of the beauties of going into package goods
marketing is you run p and ls, so you work.
You really have to understand the financial underpinning of the
brand incredibly strongly. You have to understand the positioning of
the brand. You have to understand how to market the brand,
you have to understand what packaging works. It really is
one of the best experiences for creating an entrepreneur when

(32:36):
you're truly a brand manager, or in my case, I didn't.
I left before I hit brand, but I was a brand.
Now they bring people in as brand managers, but when
I started, it was assistant brand manager. When you learned
all about promotions and you did tons of analysis, and
then the assistant brand manager you learned all about advertising
and media and they sent you out in the field

(32:56):
to sell all right, so you.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Kind of understood all the piece of the pie.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
When all the pieces the pie. So when I moved
into tech, I also spent a lot of time I
was in product management. I spent a lot of time
with the salesforce because I wanted to know how are
they And this is when you had to sell. You
bought software in a store. How would they position it,
where were they putting it, what did it look like
on the shelf, what were they saying to the consumers.

(33:21):
Because we also had a business division, how were they
positioning the products? Who's making the decisions? So you didn't
stop at your job. You made sure that sale was
completed and how and really learning all the time. So
then when I did international for software publishing, I had
to run a little business. I had set up partnerships
and figure out what products to localize and what countries

(33:43):
to focus on. So you just keep honing your skill set.
But I would say understanding finance, understanding marketing, and understanding selling,
which is really a part of marketing in any case,
those three things are probably my strengths and they serve
you well in life. So I would say the more

(34:03):
if you get, you know, giving advice to someone starting
their career, learn other people's jobs, see what they do,
understand because no one works in isolation. Not really. You
may think you are, but if you want in advance,
learn what other people do and how that impacts the
overall success of the company, and then and then work

(34:24):
with them. Figure out how your job interacts with them
and how you can collectively make a better success with
the company and yourself.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
But it is so true. You really have to holistically
kind of understand everything in order to get to a
position like a CEO.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Oh, I think so, it's and I actually I think so.
My dad loved his own business, you know, he had
his own art and design business. He loved what he
did and it was fun. And I think by just
having that environment in your household, whenever I did any job,
I'm like, okay, this is interesting. In college, which I
write about in my book, I dropped out of college

(35:01):
for a semester because I was going to get married
very young. I didn't, but I was going to. And
the man I was marrying, his father was a general
manager at a delco Remi plant, which is a general
motors plant. I actually was a riveter on the line
in in Anderson, Indiana for six months, riveting Bonnie Carlo

(35:24):
rear bumpers.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
And what is riveting mean?

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Like you were literally putting rivets in bumpers. Oh, building,
we were making well with a gun, okay, with a gun.
So I was literally on the assembly line making car bumpers.
But it was a new but it was a new
technique it was using the first time a soft bumper arrived.
They were one of the first to introduce. It was
the first time in the painting thing it was automatic painting,

(35:49):
not humans saying they're painting the bumpers. It was the
first time they had automated a factory, so the parts
came to you, so you weren't pushing and pulling and
walking all over. And since the man I was dating's
father was the GM things were going wrong and so
I would work the line. Then we'd have discussions about
what was working, what wasn't. And it was fascinating. It

(36:12):
was I know, it doesn't sound like a glamorous job,
how things worked now it was really a fascinating job
and understanding how people progress, even as an employee there,
because you know, working the line riveting bumpers wasn't exactly
enhancing your brain, but it was when you ask questions,

(36:33):
it's like, why did we do this, why did you
switch this? Why are we having problems here? What are
you going to do with it? And he was just
so open. He was like I was getting a masterclass
and operations and they and every new thing they were
trying had never been done before, so that was also
exciting to see new technologies employed and see that it

(36:55):
doesn't go right. You know, it went mostly right because
the cars didn't have bruise at the end of the year,
but it took a lot of effort to get it right.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yeah, and stuff happens, and you got to be able
to think on the fly and figure it out during that.
We kind of talked about this on the run, but
I really want to dig into resilience a little bit
more before we get to starting the reeal reel, because
after what happened with pets dot Com, I read online
a little bit about it, and I heard you talk
about it in interviews, and I know you talk about
it in your book. But that was a hard time
for you, right when pets dot Com failed.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
It was hard on so many levels because you know,
I was in my forties and early forties and forty
one forty two, and I got a divorce, which is
a hard time to get a divorce, and then as
a woman, you have to also figure out about kids.
And it felt like, oh, I missed that one and

(37:45):
figure out did I want to be a single mom?
And then I don't think I put it in the book.
But during that time, my mother also died, which actually,
on mini levels was a blessing because she had multiple
sclerosis and she was not in good shape. Oddly enough,
even when someone's really ill, and she was mentally she
had sort of lost her mind also, so she had

(38:07):
advanced dementia and her body was a mess. And she
was only sixty two. She was only twenty years older
than me. So when she died, it sort of like
hope died, but there was no hope, you know, But
it was still this I don't know her mom well,
but I mean, she wasn't my mom. That was another
being there that was at one point my mom. But

(38:30):
that happened, which also calls out how short life is
and how lucky you are to have your health. So
you know, you're like, okay. What I didn't know was
that pets dot Com would be sitting like looming large
behind my back for the next X amount of years.
And then I explained that to us, Well, it cast
a big shadow because it was such a popular brand,

(38:53):
and when it failed, the media was all over me.
And honestly, recently I was thinking, I'm so glad it
didn't happen. Well, it might have been easier now because
there's some new disaster every fifteen seconds, I think, and
maybe it would have floated away, But then it pressed
all over the world focused on it. And it's partly
because it was a new industry. So when things went well,

(39:16):
they would talk about it, and then when things blew up,
it was like, you know, it was a field day
for them, and it was everywhere all over the world.
So it was a huge stigma and a negative one,
and it was negative socially, it was negative professionally, like
I'd go out and I didn't want to talk about it,
and people would say, aren't you And then someone would
say something really horrific to me on a regular basis.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Like what's the most terrific things?

Speaker 2 (39:42):
Oh my god, this person just she said, oh, you
are a joke, and she just laughed in my face.
I thought, yeah, this is someone who, by the way,
never did anything and never took a risk.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
You know what he really came to mind. It's so funny.
I was interviewing Gabby Thomas, who's an Olympic runner gold
medalist right she and I interviewed her right after she
had one gold in Paris, and she said to me
I'm currently in a Twitter war with someone, and it's
with somebody kind of mocking her for X, Y and
Z reason and I'm thinking to her and I said
to her, I'm like, you know, it's so crazy that somebody,

(40:14):
random person, anonymous user name on Twitter is in a
fight with you and you're having to defend yourself. Gabby Thomas,
an Olympic gold medalist. This person's never going to achieve
anything close to what you've achieved and put your body through.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
And they have no idea, they have no idea. Well
that's sort of where the random mud slinging time right now.
I mean I just look at it. It's like, what stop,
And it's you know what, So where does this come from?
It has to come from inadequacy, and and you know,
it's pretty easy to punch down, you know, if you're

(40:47):
not feeling good about yourself, it's pretty easy to punch down.
So you know, these people, I don't know. Anyway, it
was bad. So that was bad. And I had to
get back to things that really brought me joy, which
tended to be being around creative people. So that was helpful.
Hiking I did a lot of outdoor hiking. I did

(41:10):
take some different jobs that weren't great. In fact, they
weren't great, but I had to pay the bills because
when you're the divorce, if you have money, you get
usually half the money then, So that wasn't great. And
I had to deep really understand what I want to
do with my life and if I was going to
drive it or if I was going to let people's
opinion of me drive it. And that's what switched it.

(41:32):
I said in the book, I let it really bother
me until I didn't, And it really was. Once once
it all came together, I'm like, I'm done with this.
I am not going to spend time worrying about what
other people think. I'm going to I know what I'm
made of and I know what I can do, and
I'll figure it out. But it really was it was
sort of like beat myself up. I got tired of

(41:54):
beating myself up, to be honest, and reading negative things
about what happened that weren't true, and not being able
to defend myself. I mean, even people were writing books
about it, and I'm like, oh my god, it's not
even true.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
There's a lot that you can read on a line, right,
there's comments, there's articles, there's books, but it's a whole
another level when people are coming up to you in
person and saying things to your face. So how did
you deal with that?

Speaker 2 (42:27):
I'm pretty sure I just walked away, and I wanted
to say something, but she was a really good friend
of a really good friend, and what I ended up
doing is just it was her, it was my friend's party.
I just went home. I even had reporters showing up
at my door, my home door, and I was divorced
and I still was living in the same house, so

(42:47):
I had a male friend of my move in just
to answer the door, you know, because the other thing
is and I ended up changing the door. I had
one of those stories. I had some glass panels in it,
so so I ended up getting the door with like
no windows except like a little bit at the top,
because I'm like, I don't need these randoms showing up
at my house.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
It's scary also being alone in your house and having
people show up.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
I mean it is scary. I got scary, right. I
don't want to go back to the book. But it
happened with like one of the counterfeiters sent thugs to
my door because I wouldn't return the Real Real wouldn't
return the goods. He literally to deliver me a lawsuit.
But I mean, we have lawyers for any lawsuit that
every single counterfeitter the Real Real dealt with had some

(43:33):
lawyer brother in Florida that delivered that actually would sue
the company. And then those you know, those lawsuits di
centegrate because guess what their counterfeiters.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
But okay, truly, what do you do when you have
thugs showing up to your door.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
I called the police.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah, I'd be having a panic attack.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Well, I mean, plus, at that time, I had three dogs.
The dogs are going nuts and they're like beating on
the door. It's like ten thirty at night.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Like straight out of a movie.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
It was so scary. It was scary, and that was
the intent, right, like to send these big guys and
I could see them, which meant probably they could see me.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
You're like, here, I am running this multimillion dollar business.
It's so successful. We resell luxury goods, and I have
thugs showing up at my door.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
So I called the police. By the time the police
got there, all that was less was the lawsuit shoved
under my door. They go, we think they want to
deliver this. I go, that's what my lawyers are from.
There was something else going on there, so that was unnerving.
But I mean I got death threats too, so you know,
it's a weird thing. But when people physically come towards you,

(44:41):
it is different, and then you have a choice. First
of all, I was still beating myself up. Secondly, I
couldn't believe someone that who knows that we have mutual
friends would be that vicious. And then I was very kind.
I didn't want to upset my friend, but I I
do think about a year later, I said, you know,

(45:04):
her name was Susie. Susie is do you know Susie?
She goes, oh, she would never say that. I'm like, yeah,
she did.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
So you know you kind of kept it tears.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
I did because it just felt like, why why make
it worse? But you know, you just for me. It
made me pull in more, which, to be honest, I
don't mind being an introvert, but it was a sad.
It was a sad I had to go in to
come out again.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
I guess anyway, did the haters put a chip on
your shoulder and make you want to be successful even more.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
No, But I well a couple of things. One is
I think being a woman in tech you had to
be a fighter anyway. So I remember someone say you
have a chip on your shoulder, and I'm like, no,
I'm just not going to take I'm not going to
be second when I can be first. You know, I
just wasn't going to do it. So I had that
fight and spirit in me anyway. But I'll tell you

(45:54):
what did, which is when I got the first year
or the rare, we got it to ten million dollars
and I was out. Then I was out to raise
venture capital and I met with a well known venture
capitalist in San Francisco. I found that women understood the
product men didn't female investor and she was really interested

(46:17):
in the business. Asked for the financials we were, you know,
like I said, we had ten million in sales, went
through all the data, spent a lot of time with her,
and then probably when I sent her the latest deck
two days later, she announced an investment in a company
called Threadflip that was pretty much doing what the real

(46:38):
real was doing, but not offering complete consigner support and
would only authenticate goods upon request, so they weren't. They
were sort of a hybrid, so she really was planning.
She was just using my business to invest to get
data for another company that she clearly was going to
invest in, which isn't illegal. It's it's smarmy, it's pretty

(47:03):
it's pretty bad behavior, but it's not illegal. So then
you fast forward and I'm presenting at a fashion tech
event in New York and I figured I'm going to
be out raising my and by the way, and I
got my round, didn't close with Canaan, with with Maha
Ibram and Dana Settle of gray Croft, and we had

(47:24):
one European Matias Shilling, who was great, so we got
a nice round. It was great and Matia Shedding Shilling
of headline, so all right, we got the round. But
I figured I'm going to I got to start promoting
the brand. So I'm in this fashion tech event in
New York City and it's Arena Styuth of seating and
they have judges and god, who's the who's the damon

(47:47):
with the earring? Is that the guy with the earring?
The guy that was on Shark tann exactly?

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Anyway? So he was the EMC so had a little
razzle dazzle going. So I walk out and I haven't
talked to anyone in a large public arena since PETS,
so I was already on. I didn't realize how much
PTSD I still had. My body. I was getting ready.
I was starting to have a panic attack. Actually I
stopped myself from going out because I started hyperventilating.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
This is where we need a beta blocker, because your
body goes into fighting, fighter, fight.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
But I'd never experienced that before and I didn't really
know what was happening. So I sat down. I said,
breathe them with that. I'm gonna faint. And then I'm like, no,
I got to go out there because they're like waiting
for me. And I see that person who, in my opinion,
did a slimy thing as one of the judges. I
didn't know who the judges were, and I was so mad.

(48:40):
It cleared my head and cleared my panic and I
killed it. So that's where that whole anger really did work.
And I thought, and you know, I don't. You don't
forget people that betray you.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
Nope, you don't. And you use it as fuel, and
you use it as fuel if you're a pro, you
can use it as right or you can let it
get to you and it can affect your business.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
And I don't believe in well, I might believe in
retribution at some point, but I wouldn't for that because
it's not worth the energy. It's like, you know what.
And by the way that company shut down, I'm like, no,
that's the wrong model. You picked the wrong horse, and
you'll find out. Yeah, anyway, So that's what I did.
But I would say anyone who creates a business automatically

(49:29):
has to have a little chip on their shoulder because
you have so many people telling you what can't be
done and everyone telling you why it won't work. As
opposed to figuring out you're figuring out how to make
it work. So if you don't have that energy, you
aren't a good entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
You know, especially as a woman.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Oh it's harder as a woman because there's a couple
of things that people don't like. Women don't like it
and men don't like it. When women get mad, they're like,
oh they're mad. It's like yeah, you know, So it's
a weird We have a weird dynamic always and it's
always it's going to be there. I mean I was
hoping it would die before I died, but it won't.

(50:11):
It's just there. It's unfortunate, but you can't let other
people stop you and their opinions. So they may think that,
but then what do you think of people like that? Well,
I think they actually aren't very evolved, So let them
do what they're going to do, and I'm going to
do what I'm going to do. But it's still hard
every time, you know, especially when you think you know
someone and then they drop a bomb on you and

(50:31):
you're like, oh, well, you know, sometimes you see what
you want to see.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
But like, what do you think is the learning there?
It's kind of like you need to have a close
inner circle, especially when you get to the point that.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Well, you do, but then you don't want to cut
yourself off. So I think the learning is you're stronger
than a person's negative thoughts and feelings, and that people
reveal themselves over time. And then on the more generous
thing is we're all human trying to figure it out,
and you know, something obviously went wrong in their childhood

(51:02):
or went wrong, and they're trying to figure it out,
and you're not in the same wavelength, and so you
just give them compassion. So that's like once you move
past the ego thing and you can move into compassion.
Because I mean, there are some pretty scary people out
there that have medical conditions. I think narcissm is one
of them that's really scary, But most people don't aren't narcissists,

(51:25):
and most people aren't trying to hurt someone else. They're
just hurt and they haven't got the skills yet.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
Yeah, and a lot of people are out for themselves,
especially when they're young and in their career.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
And well, I understand that because, look, you have energy,
you have optimism. Hopefully you come out thinking I can
do this or I'm going to figure it out. And
also you just have when you're young, you have like
racing hormones too, so you've got a lot to think about.
That's all good fuel, you know. And I think people

(52:01):
that really want to build a business and want to
figure it out when they're young it's the best time.
It's also great when you're older, but it's great because
the cost. Even when I left Clorax, the guy says,
you'll never work with anyone as smart as you have
the people at Clorax, which turned out not to be true,
although the people at Clarax were smart and you know,
you know this company may fail. It's like, and I

(52:23):
said to him, I'm young, and you know, I even
told him I took half my salary. And I'm like,
I'm too young to be like worried about those things.
And I think youth, that's the beauty of youth. You've
got latitude and time to figure out everything. At some
point you don't, so your point, you don't.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
But what I like, really respect about you is I
think like as people get over, they get older, right,
they always say like they take less risk. But you
weren't somebody that was afraid to take risk and get scrappy, right,
And at fifty two you start the.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Real real Let's be real here. Tell me I lost
half my money and my my ex husband was a
social worker, so I think it's fair to say that
I made the money all right, So I lost half
the money in the divorce. I'm no one in tech
likes a failure, even though they say, oh we're we're
you know, we embrace failure. They don't embrace failure. And

(53:17):
when being a woman is really hard in tech anyway,
And so I had to figure something out because I
was running out of money. So yes, of course I
got scrappy. What is that? What are we going to do?
Sit there and cry for another ten years and then
collect so so security.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
I mean it to hit rock bottom and you had
to lift yourself out of it.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
I don't know if it was it was rock bottom
for me. I mean when you hear other people's stories
that they really hit rock bottom, an unimaginable rock bottom.
I mean, I didn't drown myself in alcohol and drugs,
but I did drown myself in letting other people's opinion
affect me. And I'm so glad, the real real I'm
so thankful it worked out. I knew it was going

(53:59):
to work out, and you had to get scrappy. No
one else was going to clean the toilets, take out
the trash, you the product, negotiate with ups, you know,
find a photographer that didn't mind stepping into a bathroom,
you know, to take a photo. When we first got started,
though most of them didn't want to do that, by
the way, right, that was so hard.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
And when you guys first got started, consignment wasn't as
big of a thing, right, And then I noticed there
were vintage stores on the Upper East Side that for
years women were going to, right and they would I remember,
like my Jeremy's mom, my, my husband's mom always talks
about the consignment stores that she would go into uptown
and she'd be able to find good pieces. Right. So
there was that element of like vintage shopping.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
But no one had brought the internet and harnessed the
power of the internet, and no one had provided the
service on a national level that we did, and no
one had authenticated the goods.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
So when did the idea spark for you? Oh?

Speaker 2 (54:50):
When I was shopping with my girlfriend and that's where
she spent her money. And we used to shop together
all the time, because you know women, we used to
buy suit all the time. You buy the they weren't
sold as separates, like you'd have to buy the suit.
And I was like a four on the top and
a two on the bottom. She was a two on
the top and a four in the bottom. So we'd
go shopping and switch outfits. We'd like, here, we're buyings.

(55:13):
I love that, so you have like a complete suit
that fit you as opposed to getting altered. But I mean,
she's a lot of this is an so she's a
lot of fun and we love shopping together. I had
never seen her walk into a consignment store, so it
was an apparent behavior. But I had already said moving

(55:34):
into luxury is something Amazon will never do. And I
knew I wasn't going to start a luxury bring but
I had that nugget rating, you know, just resting somewhere
in my head. And then I saw luxury opportunity in
a place that had never been done research. I didn't
even realize how large the luxury market was. Researched, what

(55:55):
I could understand in terms of, you know how much
builds up over time, you know how much closet, how
much comes out. What's the average time for the product
to stay in someone's closet. How do people get through
the PI bridge? Well, now I think it's about two years,
two to three years, but people hold onto a bag
bags a little longer, and it depends on the bags,

(56:17):
but I would say two to three years. On the clothes,
bags can be five to seven. But some people, you know,
flip fast if it's trendy.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Well, there's a lot of people too that like to
justify buying something new, They'll have to get they have
like a theory, but they get rid of, you know,
certain things, right, And I try to do that sometimes.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
Well that's what's the real real enable right now. I
do that all the time. I'm like, okay, I'm going
to sell this and then I'm going to buy.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
This, right, especially in New York when we have limited clausets, right,
like we have to be sappy with our clothes and
how we keep ourselves organized and almost slightly minimalized, but
not really right right now.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
I mean, honestly, I'm always rotating things, and the real
world allows me to do it. But half, I would say,
I just had to pick up this week, and half
of it was things I can signed, which is also
an amazing value.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
Then, okay, so I want to ask you about the
fact because you came from the tech world, right right,
But were you always fashionable?

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Sadly? Yes, I always like fashion?

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Okay, all right, so you always liked brands?

Speaker 2 (57:15):
I did, And I've always spent two much twenty in clothes,
which doesn't mean I understand merchandising, and it certainly meant
I mean I certainly wasn't cool, so it wasn't cool,
but I understood. I mean look I loved Look, this
comes back, I'm sure for my mother being wanting to
be a fashion illustrator, and she loved good designed. She

(57:36):
loved good fabrics. Like I said, if she saw something
in somebody's house like the rug, she would say, when
you're ready to sell it? Because she thought it was
beautiful and beautifully made. So I think all of those
things built into it. My mother was pretty fashionable in
the sixties. I mean, she had the whole thing going.
So I do love it. I've always loved it. I've

(57:59):
always honored I always thought they were artists, and I
always spent way too much money on clothes, so this
helped to offset my need. But that wasn't that. It
was also a good business. I wouldn't have done it
just done that. Like I said, I never bought resale
till I started the real rail and now I shop
reseale regularly.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
And it took time, I'm sure to get people, the
consumer to adapt to consignment and trust it. Right.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
I just think we did such a good job. I
mean there were always some there's always people that are
like you know that didn't trust us, or it was
weirded out by it or something. But we made such
an effort to make it look hip and modern. Our
challenge in the company's challenge is still probably this was
getting product in, not selling it. And most people were

(58:51):
so comfortable with giving us letting us try using the
internet to help sell their goods because it was just
sitting there. And then once people got there for check,
they're like, oh, I'm going to do this again. So
the repeat rate from the very beginning was very, very high,
and any issues, I mean, let's just put it this way,

(59:12):
and this is sort of the way the world works.
When things happen that are new, the coast tend to
adopt faster, and specifically New York is a fast adopter,
fast trier. San Francisco fits technology. Obviously, is LA a
little later but not much later, but anyone up and
down the coast, Florida medium, but New York, LA, San

(59:35):
Francisco early adopters. Well, just with those cities alone, you've
got almost twenty million people. Not quite, but if you
do the broader Bay area, you've got twenty million people
to run some good tests on and then when you
start moving in it was a key city plan. Chicago's
a little later, but not much later. Like two years later,
and Texas was like, for you, we had someone in

(59:58):
Texas right away, but it was so slow. So Texas, Texas.
People like what they like and you have to convince
them to move off what they like, and it takes.
It's hard, it's hard to do it. It's worth it,
but it's hard to do it. So I would say
that we won in the Bay Area and New York
faster than I thought, and the other markets came as

(01:00:21):
they came. But if we didn't win in New York
and we didn't win in the Bay Area, it wouldn't
have worked.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
It definitely makes sense. Also, New York is like the
mecca of like fashion is I mean, the people here,
it's it's crazy. Like I was rewatching Sex in the
city this year.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
It's so good for the original right Regal alone, Oh my.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
Gosh, and just to see the bags and everything that
they were wearing. It's just it's really cool. How did
you get people to adapt? Like when you guys did
your first couple of drops, right, like, who were you
sourcing from?

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Who was Oh, you know what we did and from
the beginning we said we're going to come pick it
up and we were giving people seventy percent off, so
if they dropped off from a brick and mortar store,
they'd get fifty five maybe percent. Had no visibility in
the sales. It's like, now we'll give you. At the beginning,
everything was seventy percent to the consigner because we had
to have a way in. And then over time we

(01:01:11):
changed that and did it. You know, some products you
can still get eighty five points on, but we had
to change it based on the product and sell ability
of the product. The other thing was we always had
to price it to move, so we weren't looking for
the best price. My fear was I'd be warehousing product

(01:01:33):
and nothing would sell. So what I was looking for
was the optimal price within a ninety day window, which
meant that this was all made up, But it was
based on good knowledge of just mechanics of not wanting
to get a bigger warehouse and understanding how people think.
I want a ninety percent of all product to sell
in ninety days, which meant that if it didn't sell

(01:01:54):
in the first couple weeks, that the price had to
come down. We were wrong in the price. Now quite
a bit of that spent automated to some degree, but
it really is finding that sweet spot and price point
because if you're if you give us your goods and
you don't know where they are, you don't see them anymore,
which did freak out some early consigners. They're just disappeared
and then you see it on the website but they're

(01:02:15):
not selling. Then you're like, okay, well what am I do?
I want my goods back? You know what's happening. They're
not selling, so you needed to hit the right price
that made the consumer happy. But at the end of
the day, it's a marketplace, so if people weren't biting
at that price point, then your price was too high.
It had to come down, and then you try to

(01:02:37):
go five percent ten percent down. And the thing is,
the Real Rold never made a flat fee, so they
owe it. We made more money if the consigner made money,
so it always made sense because we took a percent
of the sale to get the highest price, but not
have product building up in the warehouse that wasn't going
to sell. Hence focusing on only key products. The Real

(01:02:57):
Rold didn't never took all products, select group of products
that we knew had high consumer traction and sell throughability.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Right, Like, what were the brands that you guys prioritized
in the early.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Days of the top ones which are still there like Chanel,
Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Armez Rolex. Those are really a
cartier all right, some of the best brands, and then
ones that we didn't believe it or not. We did
not take in Diando on Furstenberg dress that's at the

(01:03:31):
beginning because we said it's not luxury. We added them
later and they sell so fast they do so we
as we built the brand, we started expanding into mid
tier luxury.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
Iro Yes, and Iro is one of the first jackets
I bought for myself on the reil.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
Which was probably great because we got some amazing their
leather jackets. Did you buy a leather I.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Bought a Oh gosh, what are they called. It's not leather,
it's cheerlying. Oh, that's fabulous, And it was like I remember,
I bought and it was like the most expensive jacket
I'd ever for myself, and I just loved it. And
then my mom left it in one of our closets
that had too much light in the summer. I got
the house and it just got I don't like sunburnt. Honestly,

(01:04:13):
I don't even know how to explain it, but you know,
when you it literally bleached it. But I got so
much good wear out of that jacket.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Now I love that. Yeah. So we did expand brands,
expanded categories, and I then went down to mid tier luxury,
which I think is where the innovation is. It's so
much fun mid tier, especially now, I think it's fun.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
When you first started out. Obviously, it's like you kind
of know the mainstream brands, right the Gucci, theremaz the
brands that you just listed, But there still is like
a lot to learn about that luxury category. So, like,
what were some of the things that you even though
you were somebody that loved brands and loved fashion and
grew up around it with a mom that loved it, Like,
what were some of the things that you had to
learn quickly that you maybe didn't know going into the
fashion space.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
Well, let me tell you what our process was. Because
every problem has a solution, So I don't think we
didn't know it, It's just we had to figure out things.
So here's what we did. We copied, We crawled all
of Nieman Marcus's sacks. At that time, there was a
Barney's Norse from site filtered it for the highest priced items,
all right, So we knew exactly what their boys were,

(01:05:26):
all right, and we would watch and watch the prices
over time. So our first pickup was a super set
of all the brands combined that those stores carried, all right.
So that's number one number. So that was important because
we knew because I always say, they know where the
bodies are they buried, you know, they know where the

(01:05:47):
goods are because they were the prime sellers at the time.
The boutiques weren't as successful as they are now and
weren't as widespread, so they know where the bodies are.
So that was really important to understand that we wanted
to covered the brands that they cover because they also
have the highest value in the highest credibility. And then

(01:06:07):
we had to figure out where we're going to put people.
And again we didn't just look at population size. We
also looked at where do these retailers have a bigger
store and what was their square because they're not going
to put a bigger store in a low value area.
So we sort of mapped our plan and where we're
going to put people outside of New York based on

(01:06:29):
the square footage of where they So all you did
we look for precedents that showed us that we're strategic
precedents because the data wasn't available. And then after that
everything we did around I would say we've always been
data driven, but by year five we had phenomenal tools
on our own business and it just kept getting better.

(01:06:51):
We had a phenomenal dashboard every group did to understand
where the business was at all times, and it's gotten
better since I've left. They can now tell you what
the value that's come into the warehouse when it ships,
which is not something that you could do before.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
I know that you read about this in your book
because on our walk you kind of referenced some of
the mistakes that you guys made along the way during
the business in some of the hiccups. What were some
of those big hiccups that became like pivotal turning points
for the real Really.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
We didn't have turning points, but I'll tell you what
we learned a lot. So the first time we the
very first sale, we had cart hoarders and we're like,
no one's buying everything. People just like one person put everything,
everything in their cart and then we're like, we need
a cart timer. Yeah, otherwise this business is going to die.
So that hence the cart timer. When we opened our

(01:07:38):
first pop up, well, first store was a pop up
in Soho. When I say this, you're going to be like,
you didn't think of this, So it's so obvious, but
we didn't think of it. We had no idea people
were going to come in with consignment and want to
consign the spot. We're like, oh, I guess yeah, we're
a consignment store. That's what people do in a consignment store.

(01:07:59):
We had no idea. We had no space for them
to work. We had in our little pop up eight
weeks we generated so much consignment.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
Like they would come and bring them bring their things.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
But that's what people do right before the real rail
right never occurred to us because we weren't brick and
mortar people that that's what people would do.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
So how did you adopt quickly to that?

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
When we launched the store, we made consignment offices and
made that whole area downstairs and we're like, well, we
got to We've got to make we had this has
to be comfortable. You can't just do it on the
floor and go through things. So we had to switch
our thinking. Just to give you an idea, that Soho store,
which is still there on Wooster, was our first store

(01:08:41):
ever in the US, and all the learning from the
pop up we applied. But when this is before COVID hit,
that store was doing eighty million dollars a year, of
which half of it was consignment coming in. So we
looked at total GMV value you of that store, so
forty million in sales and forty million of incremental consignment

(01:09:06):
coming in. I mean, it was always so hard to
prove incremental versus pickup, but some of it was clearly incremental.
But that's one of those things like when you sit
back and you're like, of course people wanted to do that.
So it's things I would say, it's more about taking
a trial and thinking, oh, we were really smart, and
then you feel like you're not that smart. You missed

(01:09:27):
the basic thing to do.

Speaker 1 (01:09:30):
Yeah, you're just learning things along the way. And I
think something about like dropping off consignment at a consignment store, Like,
you're right, that is a thing that at thrift stores,
even in New York invinted shops, like in any city.
That's the big thing is you go and you drop
off your bags of clothes and they take it and
they give you a you know, a price for it whatever.
So it's kind of fun that it turned into that
being a part of your business.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Well it had to be.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
So the other thing, which I thought was really funny,
we weren't prepared in the pop up to take cash.
I'm like cash, because you're a online business, like people
buy things on cash.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
I know that sounds funny, not even then, like you
guys didn't think about.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
Yeah, no, we didn't think about cash. Then all of
a sudden we had to like get a secure cash
register bring cash in, Like and of course we're going
to say yes. But I remember taking this person one
to pay cash for an expensive handbag and I needed
like one hundred dollars back or something. And I remember
going and asking employees, like, do you have any money
so we can give this? Because we weren't set up

(01:10:27):
for that. We weren't going to miss the sale, so
we yeah, we just like cleaned out our own wallets
to make sure this guy got his return on his Like,
isn't that funny? It's so stupid. It's like we weren't retailers.
We were online retailers, but we weren't brick and mortar
retailers at that time. And those two things I'll never forget.

(01:10:49):
Because the cash thing, it's like, of course people paying cash.
I pay in cash, right, not so much anymore, but
I did.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
Then. What was the first product that you bought from
the real reall?

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Remember, yes I do. I even know the consigner's name.
It was a Marshalli sweater and it was so cool
and it had like this cute it really was, no,
this is crazy. It was a gray cashmere sweater and
it had arms, no sweater, but it also had arms
that came around like you've tied another sweater around it

(01:11:19):
and you just tie it around. And it was just
so chic and so, you know, silly on some level,
so playful that and I loved it. So that was first.
My favorite things have always been the jewelry. The fine
jewelry is really nice. I don't have any on today
because I thought we were doing a workout, but you know,
Cartier is really fabulous. I've bought different watches and sold

(01:11:43):
different watches there. Rolex is still one of my favorite
watch brands because the introductory price points high, but it's
still you can get one for like five K, and
the resell values always strong with the brand because they're
so well made. So I would say the jewelry something
I've kept. But I do remember the first purchase, and

(01:12:05):
that was that consigner that I said when I opened
a box the for you do everything and I'm like,
this person is my style, and then you're like, oh,
this person's my size. Right. She was remarkable. And then
one of us lost their gain weight. I don't know,
we fell out of rhythm, but but then I was like, oh,
I can't wear things anymore. So that was disappointing, but

(01:12:28):
we had a good run together. She didn't even know.
I was like, because like I said, we had a
delay before week, employees could shop at the site and
every time I'm like, I'm going to get that right.
It would fit.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
There was a funny story that you told on a
recent interview, and I'm curious if it's in the book
to the story, but the woman was it in with
the woman in California that was having her.

Speaker 2 (01:12:47):
Oh my gosh channel. Yes, So she had a seamstress
and she was making fake chanel outfits and she was
she's quite she was quite the socialite, and she was
always photographed in these products and they were good replicas.
But they were replicas. The resell value would have been
way over one hundred thousand dollars. She wasn't doing handbags,

(01:13:11):
just clothing and right off the runway clothing. And we
we did not put her in jail, which we should have,
but we did blacklister and keep the items and said
we know these are fakes, but we said, if you
do this again, we will actually take legal action against you.

(01:13:31):
And sure enough she came back with you know, her
husband's like, oh, she doesn't do that anymore, Like, no,
we're done with you. I'm sorry. But in most cases
we would, especially with companies that made up well, she
was trying to make a business out of it, but
there are low level counterfeitters everywhere in the US.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
And isn't that crazy somebody that's like a socialite that
has money. That's the funniest part about it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
The whole thing, the luxury. And then they were going
to fool us, and they're going to fool us. That
was the other thing. They're like, oh, they don't know
what they're doing, Like these aren't real.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):
So for context this this woman had a seamstress that
was really good at making Chanell counterfeit products, and she
would buy the Chanel, bring it to her and return
it right. Her Chanelle sales rep was probably like, what
is going on?

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Well, at some point, I'm sure they're cut it off, right. Yeah,
So it was Yeah, people are wild. I mean that
we had people are wild.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
It's a crazy industry.

Speaker 2 (01:14:25):
Well, resale is because yes, there's always something, there's always
some drama around it. So can I tell one more story?
I know we've talked a long time, but you know,
you hire people and they have skill sets and then
there's some skill sets that don't map to someone being
that when you're in a startup, you're a generalist, so
you have to do a little bit of this. You
have to do everything otherwise you can't make the company work.

(01:14:47):
And we hired a banker I'm not going to give
your name, and she was doing strategic partnerships looking out
because like I said before, we always needed you always
needed more watches, like were there partners? Are there any
partners we can work with? So she was always on
the lookout for that. One day she answered the customer

(01:15:08):
service line, and this person and our employee I'm just
going to call her Samantha, but that wasn't her name.
Samantha was very logical, right, and she was all about
doing deals. She answers the customer service line, and the
person is really upset that her shoes sold at a
certain price that she had paid I don't know, probably

(01:15:29):
twelve hundred dollars for a pair of shoes and we
had sold them for four hundred. She was and then
she got seventy percent of that. So she was I
couldn't believe it that that was all she got for
the shoes, and was like almost hysterical, and Samantha is
like saying, you do know you're talking about you shoes right,

(01:15:50):
that you're all this and I'm like, oh no, I
mean she was trying to logic her out of it,
and she had this woman had an emotional response. And
so I ended up taking a piece of white paper
with marker and wrote queue cards, no, apologize now and
say I'm really sorry, and then I'd write I understand,

(01:16:10):
And so she ended up I was like writing real
time cue cards for her to get this walk this
person off the cliff.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
And how do you walk somebody off the cliff in
that situation, because I would respond like Samantha, and I
would be logical because you would think that's the thing
to do, right, But I understand that that was one
of the big things that you guys had to deal without.

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
The real rule all the time, constant, constant, And also, yes,
I think you're empathetic. You try to do something, you
try to explain, you try to make your policies really transparent,
so you know, but people are busy, so they miss things.
To give them the benefit of doubt, you may take
care of them once, but then if they do it again,
then you get a problem, and then you have a problem.

(01:16:51):
All right, But I think the key is more transparency
with the consumer the consigner before they consigned, so they
know what they're doing, they know the percent, so there
shouldn't be any surprises. But then we're assuming they read
what we give them, or we're assuming that the luxury
manager that comes to your house tells them what we
expect them to tell them. So then you put surveys

(01:17:13):
in place and monitor and iterates, especially when you get
to big scale, it has to be information and monitoring
through surveys, and then also checking customer service stats and
what's going on their c STAT. So there's lots of
tools to know on a macro level, but when you
have a really upset customer on the phone, you don't
logic with them. I mean because they're upset and maybe

(01:17:35):
something terrible happened in their house, maybe that you don't
even know about. You know, they could be like the
shoes are a metaphor for something. Yeah, so true, and
so there's some drama going on there. Maybe they really
need them, I mean really needed the money. So you
just have to like give them the benefit of the
doubt and then look for repeat offenders, which is what

(01:17:56):
the algorithm can do, right, Yeah, and you can find them.

Speaker 1 (01:17:58):
Yeah. When The Real Real iPod in twenty nineteen, right, Yes,
what was that feeling like for you?

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
It was exhilarating. So I was only the twenty third
woman to take a company public, which is shocking because
I think over nine thousand companies have gone public. So
that was a milestone. Was a sad one. But when
you take money and you have to figure out a
way to get money out. I knew The Real was
a public company. It wasn't going to be sold it's

(01:18:27):
too weird of a company to be sold, and at
least at the time it was, and to know that
any employee and their family that had been there five
years or more was invited put up in a hotel room,
invited to the party, invited to the event, and you
look around the room and you're like, there are multiple

(01:18:48):
millionaires in this room at today's stock price. Now that changed,
and most of them were women, by the way, not
that that's important, but it sort of is important. And
it felt great. It was really a high. It was wonderful,
and then all kinds of craziness erupted. So after that,

(01:19:12):
before first quarterly meeting, quarterly results were reported, but that
one day, at that moment, people were saying, this is
the best day of my life besides having kids. And
I'm like, what about when you got married. They're like,
it's tired maybe, you know, so, I mean, people were
coming up just exhilarating. It was a great party. It

(01:19:34):
was Gay Pride week, so we had the village people
who didn't do a great job, to be honest, they
sort of dialed it in. But we did have Sister
Sledge who really brought it and so we had thrown.
It was sort of a throatback because I'm old. But
it was fun. It was fun, it was camp, the

(01:19:54):
party was great. The stock shop way up. At one
time the market cap was over two billion, and I'm like, yeah,
this is what we worked hard for.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
It's just like, after all that work and kind of
the redemption arc, it's just to have that moment. It's
just surreal. What has it been like? When did you
step away from the company?

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
Oh? I didn't step away?

Speaker 1 (01:20:12):
He did that?

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
Fired?

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
You did?

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
Yes? No, this is why I want you to read
the book. You have to read the book. I don't
want to hold on about it. No, I had a
major following. All right, So let me give you the
premise because I don't really know what happened, But here's
what I think happened. I'm pretty sure there was one
guy the last money and a pe guy who wasn't
really anyway. When the stock really fell during COVID, he lost.

(01:20:39):
He never sold. Every other board member that the original
investors tend to be board members, and they got off
the board to sell stock. That so you weren't restricted
by SEC rules because they're smart. This guy never sold
a stock. He probably had tremendous pressure. I had new
board members who I would question a lot of things

(01:21:01):
about them in retrospect, Like I said, values and integrity matter,
and honesty matters. And he was working against me while
I was trying to pull the company out of COVID,
and I don't I mean they basically he was who
knows what stories he told him. But then I didn't
help myself. I told him to fuck off in a
board meeting, and then the women jumped down my throat.

(01:21:24):
You can't talk to a man like that, And I mean,
you can't talk to a board member. I'm like, he's lying,
you know. So he was out to get me. Didn't
help myself. It got worse after that. And yeah, and
then they brought in a man to replace me who
had was unemployed at the time, had never been a
CEO before, had never obviously run a public company as

(01:21:46):
a CEO because he hadn't been one knew one of
the board members. And he was fired about fifteen months later.
And then for interesting reasons. And then Rotti Levec, who's
runding the company now, was the first employee and she
got promoted to CEO. But the board's still the same

(01:22:08):
I think there's one new board member, so she still
has the same challenges I have. The difference is I'm
not good around people lying in my face, and I'm
not good when people go behind my back, and there's
very few things that make me And I'm really mad
that I gave away my power to that person. I
was also really tired after COVID and everything we went through.

(01:22:30):
But like I said, somebody put it. Somebody was out
to get me, and I walked and I gave them
reason and walked into the trap.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
What was it like leaving your path?

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
It was horrible. So we don't want to end on this,
but it was horrible. It was really horrible. But let's
just say.

Speaker 1 (01:22:48):
I'm happy that that chapter is kind of closing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
I don't know, it's such a good chapter. I mean,
I've got other things I'm doing now. It's true, way
back when the tabloids used to have pictures when I
was a kid, people that spontaneously combusted. They were just
walking and then they just blew up and all you
saw were they're smoldering shoes and their ankles that were charred,
but they were gone. So I used to think of

(01:23:12):
all the board members just spontaneously combusting, and it gave
me great joy. I would be like, there they are,
their little chart feed or are still there, but nothing
else is left to them.

Speaker 1 (01:23:25):
Well, you know, at Glass half fle it's amazing to build.
To have built something with your idea that became bigger
than yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:23:32):
Oh my god, it's great. I mean honestly, it's great
and a changed fashion and it got We didn't even
talk about the importance of recirculating goods and how it
actually was the first The Real World was the first
company to talk about sustainability and the importance of recirculating
goods versus buying new. All of these things are fabulous.

(01:23:53):
People are greedy, people lie when it comes to money.
People will do whatever. And I'm not one to play politics,
so let's just say it happened. I wish it didn't happen.
I consult with a lot of entrepreneurs now I'm speaking.
I started a nutrition company called Ohira, which is either

(01:24:13):
going to be shut down or sold this month. So
I don't know. I feel good.

Speaker 1 (01:24:18):
I feel good the entrepreneur you lives on it does.

Speaker 2 (01:24:21):
But I have to tell you this is so when
I look at my mother's life and by the time
she was when she was twenty eight, she had her
first episode of multiple scrosis. She had four kids by
she had She had MS when but it was misdiagnosed.
By the time she was thirty six, it was properly

(01:24:41):
diagnosed and her whole and she went on started on
a rapid decline and by the time she and then
she sort of knew her life was over. Drugs are different.
This is a long time only friend that has it. Yeah,
it's still a hard disease, but the drugs are better now.
But there were no drugs then. There were experiments. It's
like being an oxygen container, you know, have your feeling

(01:25:04):
to remove because mercury's poisoning your anyway, a lot of
crazy stuff was tried, but she knew her life was
sort of over. And by her forties she was mentally
incapacitated and couldn't feed her so, you know, in a wheelchair.
So and then I look at my life and I'm like,
come on, you know, it's not what I thought it

(01:25:26):
would be. In many ways, it's better and it's had
some interesting turns.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Life is a roller coaster.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
Yeah, we're just riding those highs and lows and it's
always interesting, you know, it's always interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
Yeah, you know, Julie. That's the thing that I really
appreciate you after getting to know you today, is you
have lived such an interesting life. Like seriously, you're curious,
you're smart, you're so creative, you're so capable. It's just
so like inspiring to sit across from a woman like you.

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
Oh, thank you. Yeah, And you know what, it's been hard,
but it's been worth it. I mean it's and I
look at it, it's like, it is hard. It's hard
when you're not following a norm, but then what else
are you going to do if you can't?

Speaker 1 (01:26:08):
You know? It's Yeah. I saw this quote the other
day that somebody said, and it's that the universe favors
the bold.

Speaker 2 (01:26:14):
Oh don't you love that?

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
I do?

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
Don't you wish it were always true? I don't think
it's so it's true. I always love those axioms. And
you're like, just like someone's like, you know, karma, it's
how karma? I'm like, really is it? Because in my
lifetime sometimes it seems like karmen. Sometimes it seems like
karma doesn't exist. But I don't think it hurts to
think it exists. And I don't hurt. I don't think
it's hard to think that that's true, but I do.

(01:26:37):
I'll tell you what I do know. If you don't
take a risk, you're never going to know anything about
yourself or about life. And every single day is whether
you're in a relationship that's a risk, whether you take
a job that's a risk. Every you know, when you
step out of your comfort zone is where you grow.
And to me, that's what life's all about, and it

(01:26:57):
makes it really challenging and fun.

Speaker 1 (01:26:59):
All right, Well, your new book, Time to Get Real
is currently sitting behind me, guys, So if you loved
Julie's story today, you can read all about it in
her new book. And I'm just so happy again I've
said this a couple times, but I'm so happy that
you put your story down on paper. You know, it's
a hard thing to do. I know it took you
a lot of time to do it, but it's nice
to know that it's finally all in there. You know,

(01:27:20):
a lot of it is, at least a.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Lot of it. There's some good stories.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
Yeah, we're in a new chapter now, but maybe I'll
read another book about it. Some day.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do,
but that's fun. This is the first time in my
life I don't know what I'm going to do, but
whatever it is, it's going to be fun.

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
If you could go back and give your younger self
one piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 2 (01:27:39):
Do you know? I think you just need to learn
to love yourself more fast sooner. That's where it all.
That's where everything starts. And once you master that, everything
else gets easier because then you're more accepting of other
people's issues. But if you don't love yourself, everything falls apart.
And that means accepting when you're good and bad and
fail and succeeds it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
Well, thank you so much. Jolie.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
Wait wait what as a woman, if you're pretty and
I just love yourself, that's it. That's all you got, babe,
Like you know, no matter how you look, what you do,
just you have to accept yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:28:14):
It's so true, literally, and you have to accept yourself
through the darkest of moments and just everything in between.
It's just it's so true. Well, this has been so fun.
Thank you so much. Thank you guys so much for
listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation with Julie,
please be sure to follow our show. Your support helps

(01:28:35):
us continue bringing you inspiring conversations. And if you enjoyed
our conversation, do not be shy share the episode with
a friend that you also think can gain something from it.
I will see you guys next week on post run
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Julie Wainwright: How She Built The RealReal After Losing Everything