About fifteen years ago, the word “secondhand” held a sacrilegious meaning in the trend-chasing epoch of fashion. “People thought that it was a dirty word,” said Rati Sahi Levesque, over the phone from California. “It was like, ‘I don’t want to wear other people’s clothes’ or ‘I don’t want to tell people it was used’ and we learned early on that people were keeping it a secret. They wouldn’t share that they were buying secondhand.”

But Levesque underscored the value of shopping secondhand from the get-go. After getting laid off from her corporate job at Wells Fargo, Levesque ventured into retail, working for a local shop and later opening her own store, Anica Boutique. Half of her inventory consisted of the latest from then-emerging designers such as Alexander Wang and Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and the other half were racks of vintage pieces from Dior and Gucci. “I noticed people were buying more on the secondhand rack than they were at the front of the store, which had most of the new designers,” she says. “And some of these pieces were actually priced higher because they were one of a kind.”

Levesque, through a mutual friend, would later meet Julie Wainwright, who had led several companies, including Bellamax and Pets.com. With Levesque’s expertise in fashion retail and Wainwright’s e-commerce and tech-savvy, they launched their e-tailer start-up The RealReal in 2011. “It was a true start-up story. Working in someone’s garage, moving into a small warehouse in a strip mall, just two girls trying to get people on Craigslist to help process items,” Levesque recounted, chuckling over the site’s early days. Today, The RealReal is the world’s largest luxury consignment marketplace, with Levesque at the helm as the company’s president and chief operating officer.

Within the last few years, our collective fashion consciousness has undergone a remarkable transformation, driven in no small part by our growing awareness of climate change. With consumers wanting to shop more responsibly, Levesque’s vision for The RealReal comes as a pioneering force in line with these changing values.

When dressing for work, Levesque highlights the importance of dressing authentically for oneself, much like the company’s name, while striking a balance between personal style and maintaining professionalism. “We encourage everyone to just be authentic, hence the name. That’s a big pillar for us culturally in the company,” she said.