After overseeing one of the biggest blow-ups in Internet history, Julie Wainwright was a Silicon Valley pariah. Now at 64, she’s the founder of The Real Real, and has learned that failure can bring the freedom to pursue a second act without fear.
On November 8, 2000, Julie Wainwright awoke at 4:00am to a declaration from her then-husband: he wanted a divorce. Later that day, Wainwright—who, at the time, was the CEO of Pets.com—drove into work to begin laying off staff and shutting the company down.
In the months that followed, Wainwright was focused on the details of the fallout of both events, securing employee exit packages and going through each step of the divorce process. She did so under intense public scrutiny, with reporters following her every move and bloggers calling her the “dumbest” person in Silicon Valley. And after about a year, when the dust had finally begun to settle, the reality of what had happened really hit her: “This could be a really bad second-half of my life,” she remembers thinking. “I gotta figure something out.”
Figure something out she did: today, at 64, Wainwright is the founder and CEO of online luxury consignment shop The RealReal, the world’s largest marketplace for authenticated luxury resale items. She’s also a member of the inaugural Forbes 50 Over 50—our list, with Know Your Value, of women who are stepping into their power and making their greatest impact after the age of 50.
“The beauty of a public failure is it took away fear.”
Wainwright spoke to Forbes about her journey as an entrepreneur, how failure freed her from fear, and the moment she knew she had to create her own dream job rather than depend on someone else to give it to her:
The seeds for The RealReal were planted early on in Wainwright’s life: both of her parents were artists who believed in “upcycling” and rescuing clothes and household decor from the trash bin.
“They really loved beautiful things. And that didn’t necessarily mean beautiful new things,” Wainwright says. “My mother would go to people’s homes and, if for example they had a nice rug, she’d say, ‘when you’re ready to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.’”
This background, paired with time spent in boutiques around San Francisco and watching customers beeline for the “consignment” section in these posh stores, gave Wainwright the idea for the company. She started The RealReal in 2011, working from her home in Marin county. Two years later, she’d expanded operations into a warehouse in Sausalito; by 2015, Forbes estimated The Real Real was worth $300 million, more than Pets.com ever was. In 2019, Wainwright took the company public, and today, its market cap is well over $1 billion.
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he coronavirus pandemic presented a fresh wave of entrepreneurial challenges for Wainwright: after government stay-at-home orders in March 2020 shut businesses down, she had to furlough more than 1,000 employees and watch as goods from consigners stayed stuck in the company’s Brisbane, Ca. warehouse. Meanwhile, sales plunged.
“Our business was growing 40% prior to the pandemic,” she says, referring to the company’s gross merchandise volume, which grew 42% to $1 billion in 2019. “We went from 40% up to 45% down, an 85% swing in the business overnight, with actually no indication when it was going to come back.”
The comeback is still a work in progress: In May, The RealReal reported a $56 million net loss in its first quarter earnings report this year, though revenue clocked in a little under $100 million, up 27% over the year-ago period.
Wainwright’s goal is to get her company back to growth, but she’s also taking everything one day at a time. “This year,” she says, “is a year of transition.”
And if there’s one thing Wainwright has learned in her career, it’s that sometimes the biggest success can happen in the time after a setback.
