An open lawsuit alleges fraud while customer complaints flood social media
Courtesy of TheWreckList.com
Like all good gumshoeing adventures, this one started when seeing a complaint about The RealReal in a friend’s Instagram stories.
If you’re looking for Aly’s class action form— it’s here.
I reached out to some folks also complaining on Twitter but there wasn’t a particularly big angle. The RealReal eventually found my friend’s skirt— 16 weeks later. She’s still waiting to get the jacket back.
Then earlier this week I was contacted by a woman suing The RealReal for over $5M for allegedly selling $232,000 worth of her items without permission (her full story is below). A quick new search of social media showed that there were suddenly A LOT more upset customers taking to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with their complaints.
I connected with a breadth of consignors and buyers from The RealReal while sorting through the lawsuit documents. Through each of these conversations, it became apparent that The RealReal is definitely navigating some very strange service issues. Below are a series of customer stories detailing an extensive array of problems.
After reaching out to The RealReal via email asking to speak to someone for this story, the team replied saying, “We’re unable to offer you a comment or an interview at this time.”
This article is long but I promise it is SO, SO, SO WORTH THE READ. It has (alleged) fraud, (alleged) lying, (alleged) stealing, and more.
Without further ado, The RealReal has really done some customers dirty… and these are their stories *Law & Order sound*.
A Multitude of Problems
The RealReal has struggled with selling counterfeits, was sued by Chanel and settled an $11 million dollar class action– which had been led by one of their own investors.
More recently, the issues appear to be coming from a disgruntled userbase, massive amounts of unhappy tweets, and comments on The RealReal’s Instagram, they’re certainly having widespread difficulties across their customer base.
Selling consignors’ products for pennies on the dollar– oftentimes despite requests to have them returned
While Vestiaire launched a free calculator to calculate the average resale value of designer items, The RealReal makes no guarantee about the price at which pieces will sell– even if they sell at a 90% discount.
We first connected with a photographer (let’s call him Snap) based in Florida who had had a good experience selling a Gucci coat (~$4k new) through the platform in November of 2021. When dropping the coat off in the New York store he was told that he’d have the opportunity to approve the listing price before it was posted for sale. Unsurprisingly, about two months later,he got a notification that the coat had sold for $3,300.
Quickly thereafter, Snap was informed that the coat had actually been sold at a 20% discount, for a $2,600 sale. Having collected a 60% commission ($1,584) and the experience having gone relatively well, he sent a variety of clothing which included a couple pairs of Louis Vuitton sneakers, a Hermès agenda, and two Philipp Plein bomber jackets. While some items were returned, he received notification that some of his items were sold. From this new batch of consigned items– the first two sales (both jackets) were sold at a 20% discount and the commission rate remained at 60%. The Hermès agenda was the third item to sell from the batch, but this one sold at a 50% discount and Snap’s commission was 50%. The last item to sell was the $1,700 Marc By Marc Jacobs bomber jacket which sold for $70 and Snap’s commission was 30%. Another piece, a limited edition $5,500 Plein Jacket, was sold for $260.00. He reflected, “How do those things happen? They [The RealReal] don’t send it to me for approval, they put it online for sale somewhere and it sells immediately and it’s like oh, we sold it for $70. It’s like, fuck you. For $70, why would I even take the trouble? I think I got $21 for that jacket.”
