The RealReal & Stella McCartney Announce Retail Partnership on National Consignment Day

The race to become the best, biggest, most legit­i­mate fash­ion resale site on the inter­net rages on with anoth­er major announce­ment by The Real­Re­al. Well, two, actu­al­ly. First, the lux­u­ry con­sign­ment site has signed on Stel­la McCart­ney as its first offi­cial brand part­ner. And sec­ond, the news comes on the first-ever Nation­al Con­sign­ment Day — a hol­i­day that The Real­Re­al’s PR team made a real­i­ty. (It was approved by the Nation­al Day Cal­en­dar, so it’s real.)

Both bits of news cen­ter around the sus­tain­abil­i­ty-relat­ed ben­e­fits of con­sign­ing in a way that The Real­Re­al has­n’t real­ly empha­sized in its mar­ket­ing to this degree before now. Per a press release, more than 80 bil­lion pieces of cloth­ing are pro­duced world­wide each year, 75 per­cent of which will end up in land­fills. Con­sign­ing obvi­ous­ly length­ens the life­cy­cle of cloth­ing, reduc­ing the amount that gets dis­card­ed. And for McCart­ney, sus­tain­abil­i­ty and social respon­si­bil­i­ty have always been an inte­gral part of her busi­ness; so it makes sense that, of all lux­u­ry brands, she would be the first to come out as an offi­cial pro­po­nent of “recom­merce” with The RealReal.

The part­ner­ship will involve pro­gram­ming, the details of which are still being ironed out, in Stel­la McCart­ney’s U.S. stores, as well as The Real­Re­al’s NYC con­cept store and web­site. “We’re real­ly work­ing on a com­bi­na­tion of edu­ca­tion and refer­ral and incen­tives for some­one to con­sign,” explains The Real­Re­al CEO Julie Wain­wright over a recent phone call. The real sig­nif­i­cance of this announce­ment is that of a lux­u­ry brand com­ing out in sup­port of its cus­tomers reselling its goods. “It’s a bold state­ment [for a brand] to say, ‘Con­sign­ing is a real­ly good thing, and you guys should con­sign because when you buy our prod­ucts and you’re ready to move on, you should con­sign those goods,’ ” adds Wainwright.

Read the rest of the sto­ry at: Fash​ion​ista​.com