Julie Wainwright: Author of Time To Get Real

Episode 699

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Julie Wainwright, entrepreneur, e-commerce pioneer, and author of the powerful upcoming book TIME TO GET REAL: How I Built a Billion-Dollar Business that Rocked the Fashion Industry. Julie is the founder of The RealReal, the billion-dollar luxury resale company she took public, and she’s currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Ahara, a precision nutrition company redefining wellness through personalization.
In our conversation, Julie gets real about what it truly takes to build and scale a mission-driven company, the emotional and financial toll of going public, and the often-ignored power moves founders—especially women—need to master. We talk about bouncing back from failure, fundraising in a male-dominated venture world, the media scrutiny she faced at The RealReal, and why building generational wealth requires owning more than just a big vision.
Julie also shares how her new company Ahara is harnessing science to personalize nutrition, what she’s doing differently this time around, and why her book is a must-read survival guide for founders who want to win without losing themselves.
Whether you’re launching your next big thing, navigating your first exit, or just want the unfiltered truth from someone who’s been there—this episode is not to be missed. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. I am so excited to have our next guest with us here today. She is a returning guest, and you may recognize her. Her name is Julie Wainwright. She is the founder and previous CEO of the real real. And today, the co founder and CEO of a company called Ahara, but today we’re here to talk about her brand new book, which is just awesome. It is just coming out today, called Time to get real. And if you want to not only be inspired, but also get the real skinny of what it’s like to build multiple businesses, as Julie has. This is definitely the book for you. So entrepreneur e commerce pioneer and now author of the powerful. I’m sure it will be a best seller, upcoming book of time to get real how I built a billion dollar business that rocked the fashion industry incredible, incredible story of taking a company from nothing to a billion dollar. IPO, her story is anything but ordinary and high profile situations, including pets.com to rebuilding her career later in life. So, so much to talk about. So without further ado, welcome Julie. So excited to see you and to have you here. Hi, Kara. I’m happy to be back. Very, very excited. So okay, so I have the book right here. Thank you for the pre copy. I was able to really dive into this before actually getting a chance to to talk to you about this, which I was so excited to do. So time to get real. Give us like a snapshot of the why behind why you decided to actually write this book.

Julie Wainwright 2:42
Well, originally, I’m sure you wrote yours too, by the way, I ended up anyway. I wrote it myself. I started with a ghost writer that wasn’t going to work, and I wrote it because I really wanted entrepreneurs to actually understand, really what it’s like, so sort of year by year, going through it and the key lessons woven in, because all the business books I look like are here. Are the five things I know are here. Are the five things you need to do, which is fine, that shortcut is fine. But the truth is, the journey is more than five things. And on my journey of starting the real world from my house to taking it public, you know, going from an idea in my head to over a billion dollars, a lot of key lessons learned and a lot of excitement. So I also wanted people to sort of feel the excitement and the fun that happened it. So I and then I wrote it for really other entrepreneurs to be honest, and right when I was at that turning point where I was like, do I need to publish this? Someone approached me and said, a young, a young guy in England, and they said, I know who you are, just randomly, which was a little creepy, but not that creepy. And he said, I really hope that you write a book someday, because your story is great. And I and it was really at that point where I’m like, Why do the book? Because, you know, you don’t, if you publish it, you’re gonna, it’s gonna be out there, and you have to mark, you know, it’s a lot of work to get a book out. It just doesn’t happen. But I’m really happy. I’m happy with the book. I’m happy I wrote it. It’s not a PR piece, it’s not a puff piece. It really is as authentic and as honest as I could be without stepping into legal issues. And actually, and even when I’m about to step into legal issues, I say, I say, I can’t go too much further because of this reason.

Kara Goldin 4:36
I love, love the everything that you just said. So the book is really the messy, unpolished stuff, right? Which I think it is, it is, which is so needed, right? And I think it’s those stories you and I were talking briefly before we even hit record, that, you know, it’s the founder stories, and we’re sort of Lucky being founders, to be able to. Be in that circle where we know a lot of the back stories, but a lot of people don’t know, right? They see the billion dollar IPO, they see, you know, the beautiful clothes and brand that you’ve built with the with the real, real but they don’t really understand how hard it is to go from setting up and doing home parties where you’re selling clothing, which, you know, I knew you back back then in the beginning to building this incredible, incredible brand, what was the highlight when you finally thought, Okay, this is actually going to be a real business.

Julie Wainwright 5:38
I started the business. Well, I got the idea in November of 2010 so a long time ago, and then we launched June of 2011 and the first sale we put up, we didn’t have a lot of product. We had enough to run three sales. It sold out by the end of the day. And I’m like, Okay, this is going to be big and and we did, I think it was something like $35,000 or 30,000 plus dollars the first day. And if you do that on an annual run rate, you’re at 10 million a year, you know, if you but in fact, we didn’t have the product to do that. We couldn’t get that revenue. So it was all about supply. So I knew that very first sale. Now, we weren’t in a position to then take that big first sale out to raise capital, because, first of all, oh gosh, that’s all another story. But the venture capital world was in no hurry to fund something they thought eBay was doing well, and also from the founder of pets.com who had had a failure. So I waited till I got to the real ten million in sale before I actually did my first venture capital round. I raised money along the way, but I knew right away. And I knew it so I knew it in my bones. And I remember talking to someone about, you know, they asked me what my cohorts were. I was like three months into it, and I said, it’s irrelevant. I don’t have enough product. And they said, Well, you should know, blah, blah. And I said, No, all I know is my repeat rate 80% incredible, which isn’t you know bit. How do you know it was such a nascent business so but yeah, I never wavered. By the way, you know how people are like, Oh, I never wavered. I knew it was great. I knew it was going to be hard, and I never thought it. I always thought it would succeed. I almost said the negative, the double negatives, but I always knew it would succeed.

Kara Goldin 7:35
So when you were getting to that 10 million point, I mean, you mentioned pets.com for those who might not remember that era, I mean, you came off of a really challenging time. I mean, you may have been able to surface from that, but a lot of people can’t, right? A lot of people just go hide in a hole, right? And well,

Julie Wainwright 7:58
I did for, oh no, I did for a long time. I mean, I really did. I took it very personally, the failure personally, and I would say it was a lot to shake for me, the failure of pets, because I also got a divorce at the exact same time. So the double whammy was hard, and I say it at the beginning of the book, which is true, I really let it define me, until one day, I’m just like, I have to stop this. I have to stop it, because this isn’t the life I want to live. So it’s almost like a, you know, my finally all myself talking to try to get myself out of it. It like snapped. And I’m like, Okay, I’m done. I’m done living in the past and carrying that burden. But it took more than it probably took four years, a lot. I mean, too long, it was still there in the back of my head. I was still like, oh, yeah, I’m a plus. I mean, it didn’t help. Everyone was telling me I was a failure, you know. And I’m like, Oh, they’re right. But can you imagine letting others define you that way, when, in fact, pets.com really was the failure. Was really about timing. And up until then, I’d had multiple successes. So, you know, you have one failure. It just goes to show you, you know, Silicon Valley’s like, oh, we embrace failure. No one embraces failure. They do. Maybe they do if it’s not public, but they really don’t embrace failure,

Kara Goldin 9:24
I think especially if it really is out of your control too, right? Yet you’re still, you know, you were running it, right? So I was running it, yeah, and it’s completely explainable for people who saw you going through it, but, but it’s nonetheless, it, it, I can only imagine how hard it hit. But so you decide to start the real, real in your 50s. So many people, early 50s, early, early 50s, right? And which was incredible, and, and how did you. Flip that narrative that, you know, what are you doing? Julie, you’re gonna go start another company and use it to your advantage.

Julie Wainwright 10:08
You know, Kara, that I don’t really think I had any choice. I mean, I was either gonna get, like, the job offers coming my way were sort of soul so, sucking them bad, and a recruiter had told me that I was pretty much unhireable for any good opportunity, they were so bad. And because of the divorce, even more than that, because of my own self worth, I needed to work, and I love working, and I love creating things. But also the divorce had left me sort of financially, in not a great situation, because I had been the prime earner. My ex husband was a social worker. So, but yet, you know, you get 5050 when you divorce, so 50% went away. And so I was facing a potentially very sad next, what 20 years of my life, and I thought, This is ridiculous. I love working. I feel great. I’m not going to get it took me a while to really digest no good opportunities are going to come my way that I have to create it. And I gave myself two years to have a big success. So that was really, really important, and it could have gone the other way. Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a haphazard thing I did either. I mean, I researched. I knew I wanted to get back into E commerce. I knew I wanted to do something Amazon couldn’t do. I had a list, a short list of things they couldn’t do. Luxury was on it, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t going to create a luxury brand, and that’s where Sarah, alright, so I had this in my head, and that’s where serendipity came in. And that, to me, is, I think this is what founders do anyway, like you saw, you put a you put a construct in your head, and then you’re just waiting to, like I needed it to. I was still doing work to try to figure out what I was going to do, but I needed, I needed to know the right way. And everything I had looked gone down and researched had fallen by the wayside. So then I was shopping with a girlfriend who bought consignment in a full price, beautiful boutique in the back. She went to the back of the store, and I’d never seen her do that before. And as soon as I saw that, I went, Oh my God, that’s it. I mean, I questioned her a lot. You know, it was a different time. I’m like, you’ve ever bought shopped on eBay? Now, I wouldn’t do it too many fakes. I said, Have you ever walked into a consignment store? She goes, No, why would I don’t like them? They’re not great. And I’m like, you bought consignment? She goes, who cares? I got a great deal, you know. And by the way, this is, was a self made multi millionaire, so we’re not talking about someone. She goes, I got a great deal. I got Louis Vuitton. I got, I think she bought Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada that day, and she’s like this. This is amazing that you can, you know, and I trust the owner that they’re they’re genuine, so you put that together. I knew it at that moment. It all crystallized, but it was also the work I’d done before to try to eliminate other opportunities. And even though I knew I wasn’t going to create a luxury brand here I was looking at luxury product being sold in a brick and mortar store. And given the fact I’d been in technology for a long time, immediately I went to the power of actually bringing this together in a way, and leveraging the internet to actually have the best selection of luxury goods in the world

Kara Goldin 13:40
well, and I remember when it was taking off, I was an early, I know, early, fan and consumer of the real, real and just cheering you on as you went. But the same people that were your doubters were, you know, whether that’s media, whether that’s investors, whoever were also the people who love the comeback story, right? So I think it was brilliant how you used that. And in many ways,

Julie Wainwright 14:17
I wasn’t that savvy about myself. I mean, I have to say, though it was, it gave the real, real a lot of press the fact that I had failed so [email protected] but I’m not that good of a marketer myself, to say I’m going to use this to tell my comeback story. The Press wrote their own story, and luckily, that was the story, my favorite headline, although at the time it wasn’t. And I used a picture of myself from that publication. I bought it from the photographer, and it says, From dog house to penthouse, and I was in still, we were still pretty small. I think we’re probably 100 million then in top line revenue, and I’m in my opposite. There with my hands up in a victory in this messy, messy warehouse, because it was still, it was in Oakdale, so it was in a it was still small. It was about 30,000 square feet. Now I think there’s about 1.2 million square feet of op center.

Kara Goldin 15:14
That’s incredible. So you, you know, really brick by brick, literally. So built that built the real real into a company that eventually went public. A lot of your story is kind of taking people up to that point, and then ultimately, when you do go public, What’s the mistake? If you had to name one mistake that maybe cost you time, money, that you regret along the way that was really like, I won’t do that again, or I’ll do it differently the next time. Oh,

Julie Wainwright 15:53
I’ll tell you exactly what it is. So I would say, operationally, we really didn’t make mistakes. It really was. The whole thing was fully formed. I would say that all my mistakes which do relate to operational issues were on hiring the wrong people, maybe not firing them fast enough. Certainly, this is going to sound naive, but I’m going to say it anyway, when, when my original investors exited the board, who were Gunter capitalists, except one guy who was the last money and was a PE guy, didn’t exit the board. But everyone else, you know, they in this. This is normal. They put money in company, went public. They had to exit the board to get their liquidity. But they venture capitalists are a special breed, and they really do understand startups. They understand founders. They understand the messiness that happens with that. I recommended other board members for the board, and they had deep expertise in their area of expertise, but the values weren’t aligned, and this new, the new board members very I bet I would say, almost on the majority, they’d never seen a startup growth like this. They didn’t understand high growth companies. They i They didn’t understand a collaborative environment. They were hierarchical. Their model was old, and that’s where the tension came in, to be honest, and so and then I sort of like had to beat myself up that I used one values were really important when hiring an employee, because you want to make sure someone’s there. They’re all in they have curiosity. They’re going to work hard. They know how to play well with others. I didn’t apply the same criteria to the board members and and that was a big mistake. And I would say, if you you know when you’re a venture, when you’re a company that’s venture backed, you don’t always get to pick your board members. And if you only have one term sheet, which the real, real never had competing term sheets, they always got one investor, and that investor was all in. So that person then was on the board, and we had, if they weren’t on the board, like Dana settle was on the board. She was a from gray cross. He was a big help. But then replacing those board members, I made a lot of mistakes. And the other thing I would say, and you’re probably the same now, I know I don’t want to speak for you, but you know, I haven’t been in corporate America for a long time, and I’ve been doing founder work or startup work, and been in tech, the tech world, at least for a long time, until you get into bigger tech companies. It really is about what you do. It really is, especially if you’re a founder. It really is a meritocracy, because there’s no place to hide in small companies at all, and corporations, especially the people they attract are not necessarily the most progressive thinkers they like, they like more certainty there. And if the company’s a low growth, company is more about the politics to get ahead than the merit based. And maybe companies are too convoluted in their structure to have merit based. And so I put people on the board that came from an environment that was foreign to me, and actually, to be honest, it’s not an environment I would ever want to be involved with, where it’s more politically driven than merit based. So, so that was my biggest mistake, or I recommended people I didn’t really get to put them on because the company was public. But you know, that was my biggest mistake, and I’m sad to say, you know, anyway, it’s, we’ll just leave it at that. That was the biggest mistake during it. I would say, some people, I just didn’t let go fast enough. And and, you know, the company went from 10 million to 20 to 50 to 100 to 250 80 to 500 to 750 and some of those people at the beginning just couldn’t scale. And the people that could scale, though, are gold. They are gold. And so luckily, I had a few of those people, including Roth back, who’s running the company now. She She just the more, the more I gave her, the more she took on, and she really understood the business, and she was the first employee, and that really, did you ever come to our really, sort of gross, probably not. I wouldn’t let people in the

Kara Goldin 20:33
early days. Yeah, I came to, I came over to the

Julie Wainwright 20:36
canal district, yeah? Sam Rochelle, exactly. Or the ICB building that was at least prettier in Sausalito, but on the canal, because we did do sales where we opened it up on a like a Saturday, opened up the warehouse, and tried a few warehouse sales, which was a nightmare. It was, that was a nightmare.

Kara Goldin 20:57
It’s so it’s so funny to listen so in so looking back at the trade offs of IPO life, I mean, what would you say to founders today, what you’ve learned about taking company public?

Julie Wainwright 21:10
Well, I’d say overall, if you take money in, you have to get people a path to liquidity. It’s sort of as simple as that. And the real, real wasn’t a company that was going to be sold to another company. There are, there were no natural buyers, where if you put the real, real with a company, they would accelerate their sales or their profitability. So I don’t think we had another path. Now, the day to day running of the real world didn’t really change. COVID changed everything but, but but we had all these antics right around the first quarterly report that were really suspicious. And to this day, I don’t know if they were caused by short sellers or by a brand or a series of brands or or, you know, that hated us, but it was a circus in this when, and it was really something, and to be honest, that that was still when I had my VC board along with that one PE guy. And it was they were shocked. So let me give you an example. The company had luxury consignment offices, which only were staffed with gemologists. This all happened. Think of this all happening at the same time. All right, so staff with gemologists in many cities, depending on the jurisdiction, that could be considered a pawn shop. The real, real could be considered a pawn shop. There are old rules, so you have to get Pawn Shop licenses. Well, we had them, but we had them centralized. They weren’t shown, they weren’t in a they weren’t, you know, hanging up on the wall. So every one of the luxury consignment offices had a police raid within two weeks, and with the goal of shutting it down. So our lawyer was always going, I mean, at some point we figured it out and had all the paperwork there on site, but it was just like policemen coming in guns, you know, we have to shut you down. You’re operating without a license. All right. So someone did that little scheme. We had a fake reporter show up at the Melrose store, trying to interview people, shoving a microphone in people’s faces. What, you know? What do you think of the real rail? And so the store, the guy running all the stores, walked out because he’s calling us and our lawyers, like, we’ll do this. And he actually totally called their bluff. He goes, I’ve called the police. You need to, you actually need a license to do this on the street. They’ve given me the permission to confiscate all your equipment, which I’m going to do. And we had big people that you know, big, strong guys, and the reporters packed up and got out of town. So you’ve got these fake reporters showing up. You’ve got the luxury consignment offices happening. Then you have this guy jumping out of the bushes in our warehouse, in our ops center in Secaucus, and he was a cmdc investigator reporter, and handing out cards. Oh, you want to, you know, if you ever want to talk about the real world literally jumping out of the bush, so, hijacking employees. So then they did a big Expo. Say that hit two days before our earnings report. These were, which was sort of a, if you it’s still out there, it was absolutely they interviewed an employee who who was not an employee in good standing, who said, I have a quota, and it’s really too high, and I never authenticate all things. It’s like, well, that’s why you’re not anyway. So and she, and we knew it was her before she went on there, because she was posting her limo, writer, makeup, her hair and makeup and all that online. So so she was talking about, she doesn’t really do this. Then there was a woman who got the wrong item shipped to her and was mad at me and said she wanted to give me a piece of her mind. And I like, Well, I would have just taken care of you. It’s like, sometimes you get the wrong item shipped and in the same section. But they flashed up this lawsuit of this woman who was an ex luxury manager who we did sue because she removed our database, but they flashed it up like you know, and she said, I never authenticated things. I never saw it happen. Well, she’d never been to her op centers, and it didn’t happen at that manager. So it was this total takedown of the company, how we sell fake things. And it was, it was unprecedented. This all happened at the same time. Until you think about it, it’s like, I don’t really think that was a coincidence. So you know, and I’m always this is maybe a little too raunchy for people, but it’s either sex or money, or maybe it’s sex and money, but money’s always in there, and sex may be in there. So it was clearly benefiting someone. It could have been the short sellers. It could have been a brand had orchestrated this, but it felt like an orchestrated hit team on the company. And it was, it was a little shocking, actually. So that’s that was one of those moments where you’re like, what is happening. And I even called the head of CNBC on it, and he was just, which I recap in the book. I’ll just let the book speak for itself. I recap it and but, and I got a couple calls from CNBC reporters saying we’ve never seen anything like this. This is not fair, but the damage was done. I appreciated their call, but the damage was done, you know, because the stock fell and all then and then all kinds of weird stuff happened, like a couple big events that we were having, oh, you sell fakes, you know, it’s like, you know, then they canceled even, you know, the guy that does how you build it, his producer called and said, We don’t want you in the show. You’re clearly not reputable company. I’m like, Are you kidding me? So all that negative and but I have say it did not stop demand. Never stopped demand, and it didn’t stop supply. It just deployed deflated the retail price. Now, the cool thing that happened after that retail, I’m sorry, the stock price quite a bit. The cool thing that happened that we were in the process of doing anyway, is we were already, at that time, using, starting to use machine learning and AI to help us authenticate. So that’s actually now a huge part of the business. So, I mean, you know, depending on humans for accuracy, rate does have some inaccuracies. That’s why you QC things, and you and you have to do random QC. But when you start using a combination of AI machine learning, which is AI and human oversight, it becomes much cleaner and much better. But yeah, it was just it was a shit show after we went public. But every employee that’s all the bad side, every employee in the company had stock, if they’d been there for a year, it was vested on some level, every employee, which means that employees life changed measurably once the company went public, for they had some money. And some people bought condos. Some people, you know, things were going, you know, after the holding period, but their life got better, and everything was going well again. We got past that till COVID hit, and then that was a drama for everyone in the world. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 28:31
definitely. I remember when we had you on, I think you were just moving to Arizona, your some of your plants, because California was shut down, and,

Julie Wainwright 28:39
oh, you know what? That’s another thing we should have done that earlier, by the way. So when I look back and I write about it, because, you know, there was, there were very good reasons to keep the employees, because we had all that institutional knowledge in California to have that op Center in South San Francisco. But California is not an employee friendly state. I mean, an employer friendly state. It’s just not and it’s hard. You know, the taxes are hard. Arizona wanted us. They gave us some incentives to go there, and we needed a much bigger facility. So that was, I wish we would have done that. I wish we would have ripped the band aid off earlier and just committed instead of doing the interim step in South San Francisco, because it made it gave us expansion space. We did get incentives. We looked at Texas and Arizona. Texas had some archaic Pawn Shop laws there, still even having an ops center that may or may not have affected us, and we were worried about their power grid because they had already had a power grid problem, you know, they don’t, and Arizona didn’t have those issues. Really wanted us, and it’s worked out really well for the company. I wish we would have done that earlier and just been a little more because honestly. A lot of employees reload there. Some of the top employees reload there. And they could buy a house there, yeah. And they love it. They love the Phoenix area. Phoenix Scottsdale area.

Kara Goldin 30:11
Well, I’m from there, so I remember when you were, when you were moving there, that are moving the facility there, that you were doing that. So that was, I remember that well, so you leave the real, real and probably emotional to some extent, because you, of course, nothing, right, yes. How did you feel about really leaving it? You left it in the hands of somebody that it sounds like had grown up?

Julie Wainwright 30:41
Well, it wasn’t my choice. I got fired by the board, and I got fired. I would say that one, there was at least one board member who didn’t sell his shares and had an opportunity. My theory, because you never know, is that he staged a battle against me. I’ve said I didn’t really help myself. I was two heads down and didn’t realize what was going on, and then when I did realize, sort of in the board meeting that there was a big lie, and I never I had stopped trusting this person anyway. I just lost my shit on him, so and then the women got mad at me and told me, that’s not the way you talk to board members. And it was ugly. It was all ugly. And then eventually, I mean, let’s just say this way, some someone had it out for me. I didn’t help myself. I always say someone hung a noose. I put my neck in it. And, you know, people don’t like to see women lose their stuff, and men in particular, don’t like to be called on their lies, or what I can what I perceived as a lie in front of other people and and they were shocked I would do that, and yet. So yeah, I got fired. So yes, it was very emotional, and it was left in CO CEO hands, and then they hired one of the board members, old proteges from Neiman Marcus. He was subsequently fired, which, to be honest, made me happy, because now racialeve is running the company. She understands the company. She was the president. She had all the direct reports at the time I left. In fact, this is sort of the irony I had just with board approval, moved all my direct reports under her, except the CFO, the head of HR, and then it was brought to you, all right, and so. And the reason being, I needed, we were just coming out of COVID, and the board members were too new, and I needed to spend time with them, to spend more time outward facing. And she was operationally, she’s like a rock star. So I had just moved I had had marketing and sales, I think, and technology reporting to me until January of 2022, so at that point, I just moved it and consolidated under one president, so I could spend more time outward facing, instead of heads down, trying to make sure we made it through the worst period in the company’s history. You know, the real, real picked up product from people’s homes. So when COVID happened, as you recall, we couldn’t pick up product. It was in the self posting site. So we ended up really digging ourselves out of a hole. And I had a new CFO, which I was very excited about, and he ended up getting fired by the board and or by the new CEO who wanted to bring in his own guy. And then the new CEO got fired, which made sense to me and rod to get the job. So anyway, it worked out. It was a rough little bounce around there. But, you know, I always say like it was a really bad ending, but on the grand scheme of the time, that’s such a small thing that happened versus the whole thing. And the it was, you know, we did amazing work, and I’m very proud of the real rail and it did change the way people shop, and it’s great for the planet. But, yeah, so, so it was, it was shocking. I remember

Kara Goldin 34:12
when you, you were one of the first people in the industry that was talking about resale in the luxury market, but also around sustainability. Stella,

Julie Wainwright 34:25
yes, yeah. Now we, we actually, and honestly, Stella McCartney’s company support, and her support was another pivotal turning point for us as a company, because she embraced, she embraces sustainability. Her brand’s about sustainable fashion, and she understood the circular economy, and getting that relationship was so important. I can tell you the CEO Gucci, I was at an event with him shortly after we announced, he goes, You really shook up the industry. And I’m like, and then he scared it off. I was about to raise. But we can do a deal with you too. But yeah, Stella really got it, and we brought that home. And as you know, people don’t buy because something’s sustainable. They buy for other reasons, but letting them know what they were doing was also good for the planet. Was a great supporting proposition, and it was real. We quantified it. We’re working with some scientists that Stella’s team introduced us to. That’s

Kara Goldin 35:26
amazing. Well, I think you just proved that thinking differently and taking an industry, not only your your industry around the real, real, but also the luxury industry as a whole, and bringing in new ideas and new partnerships. And I mean that was that was really another game changing you’ve had so many game changing moments and so many stories along the way. Before we go, I want to talk about the company that you co founded. Oh, great. Oh Hara, and new industry, not the fashion industry at all. But what’s the play here?

Julie Wainwright 36:07
So I mean, Nutrition has always been important, and I know it is to you, too, and what you eat, you know, can actually impact your health almost more than any other thing you do. Exercise is important, but not as important as diet and communities, important, spirituality, all those things add to your overall health, but diet’s really important. And I kept thinking I was working with the doctor. I kept thinking, what I need in my body now as a woman in her 60s is not the same as what I need in my 20s, and my nutrients have to be different. And is there an algorithm that we can develop that’ll actually be personalized to me, that will tell me I need more of X, Y and Z? Because I kept thinking, especially after I left the real rail, you know, was tired. I was at least, probably 10 to 12 pounds heavier than I am now. And, you know, it was just, it’s a lot starting a company and running, running it hard is a lot. And so I thought, you know, there’s got to be a way to do it. And she was doing all this triangulation by looking, doing testing, genetic testing, this that having people answer a question, and I’m like, this is an algorithm. So we put together an Alber algorithm that it gives its data. It’s user driven, so if you put in bad data at the beginning, or you’re not honest, you’re not going to get a good answer. But then it gives you your optimal foods, what your key nutrients may be lacking from your diet. Why that is important to incorporate it, and then it maps it to recipes and takes it all the way to Instacart. If you cook, I don’t cook, but it did in it. But it literally by balancing my diet and getting my omegas right, which they were out of whack, getting adding more seeds to my diet, because I’m not was in the seed either. Can I say it changed my life, I don’t know, because I’m not looking at the insides. I can tell you that I lost weight. I can tell you that, you know, I always had a lot of energy, but I can tell you that I’ve I feel better eating, you know, and I always thought I was healthy, but part of me kept thinking, but I’m still eating like I did, because I always say it’s easier to eat, I think healthy in California. And so I was always careful about what I ate, but, but I kept thinking, but what if I’m not doing it right? And I needed to change some things now. And so it’s an algorithm. It’s $20 for the foundational plan. We added dietitian consulting, we found that if people, and it’s mostly backed by insurance, I think every major insurance company has actually underwritten and approved, as for the dietician consulting free. So if you do that with the app, it’s illuminating, and yeah, it’s to me, it’s so important diet. Now that was a the real, real. I love fashion, you know, I do, but this is more of like a passion thing that I think is really important for people to get the right information, versus going to Tiktok and figuring out how to eat, right? No,

Kara Goldin 39:15
absolutely. Well, Julie, you are just a force, and I adore you, and time to get real is so so good. Everyone needs to pick up a copy. We’ll have all the info in the show notes. But thank you so much for being here, also for writing this. It’s so inspiring. I can’t wait to see what else you’re doing with with your life, I know you’re not finished, so you’ve got plenty, plenty of and you know good things going on and disruption ahead. So really, really appreciate you and all of your honesty as well. So everyone, thank you for listening, and goodbye for now. Kara, thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you, too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now you.

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