Ever wondered what your closet would be worth if you tallied it up? The RealReal wants to make that an easy calculation — one that factors into your consignment habits.
Today, The RealReal is officially launching MyCloset, an AI-enabled feature that helps users not only understand the value of their wardrobe inventory but also track how that value changes — serving as a sort of portfolio management tool for fashion collectors. Users can upload their inventory, track an item’s price and popularity, and see when the item is expected to trend up or down, to inform when (or if) to sell it, giving customers access to the same data the company has. Users can also look up items when deciding whether or not — or when — to make a purchase. The feature will continue to roll out throughout 2026.
“This tool educates people on what to sell, what to upgrade, what to keep,” CEO Rati Sahi Levesque says. “It tells you, based on the market, what you will get for it. “[Our users] are asking for more information,” Levesque says. “They want to be educated on what holds its resale value and what doesn’t.”
The hope is that it keeps users in The RealReal’s resale ecosystem, rather than competitors’. The company has returned to growth for five consecutive quarters after a rocky period following its 2019 IPO, when The RealReal’s revenues took a pandemic hit. To turn things around, The RealReal began investing in improving its backend operations, focusing on luxury and higher-ticket items; returning to a consignment-based model; and increasing AI integration. The RealReal became profitable in 2023 and has continued to improve its operational efficiency, ending fiscal 2025 up 15% year-on-year, concluding what Levesque called “a year of transformation”.
The RealReal’s first-quarter revenues, announced today, were up 19% year-on-year to $190 million, reflecting this continued progress. Given this, The RealReal is increasing its full-year guidance, and now expects to generate between $769 and $783 million in fiscal 2026.
The MyCloset process.
Photo: The RealReal
“We were losing a bunch of money,” Levesque says. “And luckily that’s behind us. That was a hard time in the company.” After making the necessary operational changes, the company is now in a better position to grow, Levesque says.
MyCloset is available to all users, but will be most useful to those with higher-ticket items to sell, given that this is the category The RealReal best caters to. “Are you going to earn the most with us if you sell something under $100? Probably not. Peer-to-peer, right? We’re not the outlet for that,” Levesque says. “But if you’ve got a mid-value to high-end item, you’re going to earn the most with us. The reason why is that the consumer is willing to spend $20,000 on a bag in seconds.”
Levesque expects The RealReal loyalists to be the early adopters. MyCloset will live in The RealReal app, which already caters to that loyalist. “Right now, our core customer, the people downloading the app, they’re quite sticky,” she says. “They’re already consigning, and they’re already calling us. They’re already asking their luxury manager how much something is worth and what they should consign it for. What should they hold onto? Now, we’re just putting that information all in one place.”
Right time
The RealReal says it has over 50 million users and has sold over 50 million items, which amounts to billions of signals indicating which items are going up or down at any given time. That amount of data is what will make MyCloset work, Levesque says.
“We can real-time detect what’s on its way out and what’s coming in just based on purchases and what people are consigning, what people are giving us, what click-throughs things have,” she says. The RealReal uses that data to determine what gets discounted more, versus what goes up in price. “Now, 15 years of building this business and having that infrastructure, that data is really powerful.”
The RealReal CEO Rati Sahi Levesque.
Photo: Chloe Horseman
Levesque anticipates that users with access to this data will change their shopping habits, as they can make more informed decisions, especially regarding what to purchase in the primary versus secondary market. But she flags that the resale market is still nascent. Levesque hopes that this new tool will drive adoption, given its clearer value proposition. “Fifty percent of our consignors are new to consignment,” she says. “Now, the buyers are becoming consignors, and I think we’re going to see that behavior accelerate,” she says.
This tool, Levesque is keen to emphasize, is just one notch in the company’s wider growth strategy. Part of this is about continuing to improve the company’s operational efficiencies, with the help of AI tech. “It still takes a couple of weeks to process an item. How do you cut that in half?” the CEO says.
Another focus for the next phase is to go deeper into international. Right now, The RealReal primarily caters to the US, though it does have overseas users. These efforts will begin to roll out this year and accelerate over the next couple of years. “We wanted to make sure we got to profitability. We wanted to make sure that we had a sustainable business in the US and clean up some of the things that we saw around the customer and the service levels,” Levesque says. “As we’ve done that, we do believe we’ve earned the right to now expand and localize in other markets.”
Clarification: The article was updated to reflect that the MyCloset feature will continue to roll out throughout the year, when users will get the button on their app.
More from this author:
Why Big Tech Wore Indie Designers to the Met Gala
