Julie Wainwright, the founder of luxury consignment shop The RealReal, recently published a memoir chronicling her rocky road as an entrepreneur. Wainwright started The RealReal in 2010, growing it into the leading online luxury consignment marketplace. Today, their company ships out hundreds of thousands of pieces each month. Her path to entrepreneurial success hasn’t been an easy one, riddled with personal and professional adversities.
The RealReal, a former unicorn now publicly traded, takes up more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space. Its mission is to sell new luxury products in 90 days or less after acquisition. Wainwright began her career in the e-commerce industry by taking Pets.com public in 2000. She shuttered it just a few months later in 2000 as the dot-com bubble burst. Her journey with Pets.com gave her some hard-won lessons that she took with her into her next ventures.
A year later, Wainwright experienced a sudden and shocking collapse. She had just been blindsided from her position at jeweler The RealReal by board members she had handpicked. This sudden, brazen action had Wainwright reeling with a sense of betrayal and disorientation. She called the incident a “power play.” One long-suffering and entitled investor attempted a coup after he did not see any returns on his investment in the company.
Wainwright’s challenges did not end there. The day she told staff members of The RealReal that their execs were shutting down, her spouse filed for divorce. It was the combination of these events that really caused her to look back and take stock of her life and career. Being 42, this made her feel like her whole world just fell apart.
“My work is gone, I’m getting a divorce, and I don’t have children,” Wainwright stated in her memoir, capturing the gravity of her situation.
Though that struggle was profound, Wainwright has come out of it more determined than ever to take back control of her career. She founded Ahara, a nutritional startup that uses genetics and holistic metabolic research to create personalized dietary recommendations. This latest endeavor is a testament to her tenacity, grit, and commitment to continue moving forward in the entrepreneurial space.
In her memoir, Wainwright aims to provide a realistic view of entrepreneurship while inspiring others to avoid the mistakes she made. She remarked, “I personally wrote it for entrepreneurs to give them a realistic view and hopefully inspire them and, you know, maybe they’ll think twice and not make the mistakes I made.” More than anything, Wainwright’s reflections illuminate the highs and lows — the elations and frustrations — of entrepreneurship. We ask her to speak about why it’s so important to understand these intricacies.
In her reflections on the past few years, Wainwright paints a stark picture of how power operating at almost every level in the entrepreneurial ecosystem shapes the realities of entrepreneurship. “There are those who need to bully and coerce and to be on top supersede their abilities,” she reflected. This understanding stresses the uphill battle that not just any entrepreneur faces. Secondly, they usually find it difficult to handle the deep-set relationships with their investors and board members.
Wainwright’s choice to tell her story through the lens of her memoir not only gives readers a glimpse of her evolution, but offers Wainwright personal catharsis. It’s a cautionary tale for future entrepreneurs. She underscores that no founder is above scrutiny or challenges, stating, “No founder is ever going to say they need to be shot and removed.”
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