Rati Sahi Levesque says she never wants to forget the “really tough” times she went through while working at The RealReal. After all, they taught her how to lead a company worth more than $1 billion.
Mr. Levesque, 45, started as one of the luxury resale market’s first employees in 2011 and remembers struggling to get established fashion houses to understand his company’s online business model. Then, as chief operating officer of The RealReal during the coronavirus pandemic, she said she was acutely aware that the company had lost “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
She is currently CEO of The RealReal and is credited with overseeing one of retail’s most successful turnaround stories post-COVID-19. Since taking over in October 2024, Levesque has helped increase The RealReal’s market value by nearly $1 billion, with a market value of nearly $1.3 billion as of Thursday afternoon. According to its annual report, the company generated more than $692 million in revenue in 2025. In September, Levesque was named to the 2026 Time 100 list of the world’s most influential rising stars.
Levesque’s rise from founding employee to chief executive officer gave her first-hand experience in many roles at the company and gave her empathy for the more than 3,000 employees who fill those jobs, she said. She says the best lessons she’s learned from her 15 years at the company are to never lose a “growth mindset,” to be open to reevaluating preconceptions, and to be willing to accept when strategies don’t work.
“One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is not to get too attached to being right,” says Levesque, 45. “Over the years, we’ve made a lot of decisions that we thought were right at the time, but ended up finding out there was a better way. You have to be able to laugh at yourself, admit what’s not working, and move on.”
CEO advice: Practice being wrong.
Levesque said The RealReal’s post-COVID-19 success revolves around realizing that they were wrong.
Like many venture-backed startups, The RealReal’s management spent much of its first decade focused on growth at all costs, absorbing annual losses and prioritizing new customer acquisition. Lévesque was part of the team behind that strategy. But as sales plummeted due to the pandemic, company executives realized they had to “cut back” from less profitable categories, such as housewares and children’s clothing, that they had previously added to in the name of boosting profits, then-CEO John Korir told The New York Times in August 2023.
The RealReal’s pandemic lows forced the company to experiment and grow in other ways, Levesque said. At the time, The RealReal operated several large, expensive brick-and-mortar stores, including a 6,000-square-foot store in New York City and a 12,000-square-foot store in Los Angeles, designed to give shoppers a chance to interact with luxury goods and staff before making a purchase. Levesque said the decline in consumer foot traffic led the company’s management to take a “big bet” by closing large-format stores in favor of a more efficient and economical approach.
The RealReal currently manages a large number of small stores aimed at efficiency rather than spectacle, the company told The Wall Street Journal in 2024.
Analysts credit The RealReal’s recent growth to Levesque and Korir’s strategy, which includes cost-cutting measures such as job cuts and the introduction of artificial intelligence-powered tools to help efficiently authenticate large volumes of luxury goods. The move puts The RealReal on the “best turnaround” in the retail industry, Wells Fargo senior analyst Ike Borshaw said in an October 2025 research note.
Of course, the pandemic has given many business leaders reason to change their strategic direction. Recognizing when you’re wrong and responding with humility isn’t always easy in normal daily life, Levesque says.
As a CEO, she observes how employees react to setbacks to get a sense of their growth mindset: “Are they trying to avoid responsibility or are they trying to turn a loss into a win?” Do they demonstrate accountability and a desire to learn things to be more effective in the future?
Levesque also recommends practicing being wrong. So I understand the feeling of knowing when an original idea is still worth pursuing and when you need to change direction. She says she gained a lot of practice working in a variety of environments during her first 15 years at The RealReal.
“You’re going to fail. Just like that, it’s going to happen,” she says. “You’re going to get things wrong sometimes, but it really helps to take responsibility for it.”
