Is Online Fashion an Essential business?

Is Online Fashion an Essential business?

Have you been seeing the gorgeous adds for a new online Luxury store called "The RealReal"? The RealReal is a LA-based Authenticated Luxury Consignment store that got smart and started advertising on my Hulu and Youtube feeds.

While you might think that TheRealReal is new, it's not, Julie Wainwright has been selling luxury items since 2011, when she started The RealReal out of her home, working at her kitchen table and visiting consignors at their homes with a U-Haul. What began as a scrappy startup has transformed the business of authenticated luxury consignment into a dynamic, global movement that champions not only quality and craftsmanship, but also sustainability and community.  

Now, The RealReal is a company with millions of shoppers and consignors, four retail stores in NYC, LA & SF and 10 Luxury Consignment Offices across the country, four of which are in our stores.

However, at the RealReal warehouses in Secaucus and Perth Amboy, in New Jersey, there’s a backlog. Used designer clothes, purses and all method of equipment are ready to be inspected for authenticity, photographed, then packaged and shipped once they’re ultimately bought on-line.

That is what the RealReal does: It provides one other probability at life to secondhand Chanel flats, Prada backpacks, Burberry trenches. When it went public final 12 months, the luxurious consignment firm was valued at greater than $1 billion.

Final week, like each different vogue retailer attempting to sluggish the unfold of the brand new coronavirus, the RealReal closed its 4 shops, that are in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with its consignment workplaces and Bay Space headquarters. However, in New Jersey, its e-commerce operations are nonetheless operating. And there, some employees are feeling fearful and annoyed.

4 warehouse workers, who all requested to be nameless out of concern of retaliation at work, mentioned that protecting measures haven’t been constant on the warehouses. They need the amenities to shut, even when it means dropping their jobs.

“We’re scared to go to work,” one worker mentioned.

 

Different companies have been advised to let workers earn a living from home if attainable. If employees couldn’t do their jobs at the house — in the event that they have been lab researchers or janitors or warehouse employees, for instance — their firms have been requested to chop workers to the “minimal number necessary to ensure that essential operations can continue,” 

 

 

On Tuesday, the RealReal administration supplied employees $100, on prime of their common salaries, for every extra shift they picked up. Workers who reside in New York Metropolis, the nation’s coronavirus epicenter, have been ultimately advised to not are available into work, although sooner or later earlier they have been advised they may report back to work on a “volunteer basis.” The corporate mentioned it’s approving all time-off requests and has continued to pay and supply advantages to all workers.

“I don’t care how much you pay me at this point,” an authenticator mentioned. (Authenticators and photographers usually make $14 to $18 an hour, workers mentioned.) “You’re not protecting me.”


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