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Ever since luxury resale site The RealReal launched in 2011, authenticity has been at the center of its sales pitch — it’s like eBay, but with a laser focus on vetting its secondhand bags, shoes, jewelry, and clothing to ensure that they’re 100 percent real. With a promise like that, reports of fakes appearing on the site are sure to catch people’s attention, and recently, a few such claims have cropped up.
Last week, the popular Instagram account @Diet_Prada (known for its thorough, unvarnished documentation of designers ripping off each another’s ideas) turned its attention to a floral dress that had been marked as a Prada item and sold on The RealReal. The dress had a (damaged) Prada tag, but it bore a strong resemblance to a Tibi dress with a similar silhouette and identical fabrics. “We’re guessing it was a clever hack from someone who had access to a Tibi prototype (and a spare Prada label),” wrote Diet Prada, which was founded by two fashion industry professionals.
To drive home its argument, Diet Prada added side-by-side photos of the care instruction labels on a real Prada garment and the dress from The RealReal, highlighting the differences between the two. It also pointed out that the size tag was a different color than the Prada label, though the two were stitched together.
The interaction ended with The RealReal offering a second authentication and a refund to the buyer of the dress.
“Authenticity is the cornerstone of our business so we respond to and take concerns like this very seriously,” a rep for The RealReal said in an email to Racked. “We staff 60+ in-house experts including gemologists, horologists, art appraisers, and apparel experts that ensure every item accepted for consignment and listed on our site is authentic and in good to excellent condition.
“Even after we have determined an item is authentic, when we receive additional information or questions about the item, we will always have it re-examined by our experts,” the rep continued.
The RealReal’s rep says that items are “very rarely” sent back for a second round of authentication — about one to five items per month. Still, Diet Prada’s post brought out a number of commenters who made similar claims against the resale site, and you can find discussions of fakes on The RealReal dating back to 2012 on the Purseblog forum. Last year, a Michigan shopper named Gaby Basmadjian filed a $5 million-plus lawsuit against The RealReal for inflating the stated number of carats in a diamond ring by 75 percent.
The RealReal briefly joined the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition in 2016, after the organization created a new membership category (General Member) for retail intermediaries, most notably Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. A number of brands protested Alibaba’s entry to the IACC on the basis of its poor track record with preventing the sale of knockoffs, however, and a month later the entire General Member category was suspended — including The RealReal and Wish.com.
The RealReal has expanded significantly over the last seven years, raising roughly $173 million from investors and opening a brick-and-mortar store in New York last November. The company estimates that it will process between 250,000 and 300,000 items this month, a significant volume to authenticate each day.
Correction: A previous version of this post included information from an employee of The RealReal saying that the company processes 50,000 items per day. A rep for the company says the number is between 250,000 and 300,000 per month. The current version of the story also includes a new statistic: that The RealReal re-authenticates about one to five items per month.
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