When Rati Sahi Levesque was seven years old, she began helping out at her parents' popular Indian-American restaurant in San Francisco. She worked the cash register without a calculator, and she was detail-oriented. "My dad loves to joke that I would chase people for, like, two cents," she told the Wall Street Journal.
Today, she is CEO of The RealReal, an online luxury fashion reseller whose fastest growing customer demographic is Gen Z. But she wants people to know that reselling is not a trend. It is "cemented into the fashion ecosystem," she said over lunch in New York.
Founder Julie Wainwright took a version of the designer secondhand market online in 2011, around the time that the circular economy movement was going mainstream. That timing helped establish the company as a pioneer in a market that has since grown well beyond its early niche.
Levesque's path to the top job reflects that longer arc. The skills she built early on, including precision with money and a close eye on details, have carried through to the way she runs a fast-growing business. Her view is that resale has moved from the margins to the core of how people shop for fashion, and that the companies serving this market are now expected to operate with the discipline of established retailers.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing