In November 2000, Julie Wainwright thought she had hit rock bottom. Her husband asked her for a divorce the same day she decided she needed to shut down her tech company—at the time she was CEO of Pets.com.
For a long time, the only things Wainwright felt like doing were painting or running. She wasn’t inspired by the job she took in venture capital or by any of the CEO job offers she received. But then she realized something: nothing was going to change unless she changed it.
“Man, this could be a really bad second half of my life. Or I have to figure something out,” CNBC reports Wainwright, now 60, said to a girlfriend of hers at the time. “I had never created my own business before. I had always been the gun to hire. … But I had to finally say, nobody is going to give me my dream job, so I better figure it out myself.”
Now, Wainwright runs a $500 million company called The RealReal. How did she get there? She had the idea after watching a friend buy clothes from a secondhand rack in a fancy boutique. Her friend didn’t trust just any store to sell secondhand clothes.
Wainwright knew from experience that Amazon would not try to sell secondhand luxury goods because it required too much labor and expertise. She did some research and saw that the market for personal luxury items in the United States was $50 billion a year. And finally, she went to her own closet and realized she had 60 items she could resell.
So in March 2011, Wainwright, at the time in her mid-50s, launched the first version of a secondhand luxury marketplace website, The RealReal. In June, she shipped the first purchases. You can find all the major designers on the site, such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton, or Rolex. Consignors earn as much as 70 percent of the items they sell and The RealReal does free in-home pickup, authentication, and shipping.
According to Wainwright, The RealReal did $10 million in sales in the first year.
Wainwright’s late-in-life turn to entrepreneurism is not unique. A recent CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey found that almost 30 percent of the respondents had launched a small business between the ages of 55 and 64. And 22 percent were 65 and older.
It did take Wainwright a while to find a venture capitalist willing to back her, but in 2017, The RealReal will do more than $500 million in revenue and has 950 employees. She believes taking it public is the next move.
On top of wealth, Wainwright said failure taught her that she had more than she ever knew: “more inner strength, more tenacity, more grit, more courage, more kindness, more compassion than you ever thought was possible.”
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