The RealReal, Inc. Common Stock 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator. Joining me today to discuss our results for the period ended September 30, 2026, are Chief Executive Officer and President, Rati Levesque, and Chief Financial Officer, Ajay Gopal. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those suggested in such statements. You can find more information about these risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could affect our operating results in the company's most recent Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Today's presentation will also include certain non-GAAP financial measures, both historical and forward-looking. We have provided reconciliations for historical non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our investor relations website.

I would like to turn the call over now to Rati Levesque, Chief Executive Officer of The RealReal.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Q3 was another record quarter for The RealReal, with all-time quarterly highs across GMV, revenue, and orders, reflecting the strength of our business and our continued focus on disciplined execution and profitable growth. We delivered GMV growth of 23% with adjusted EBITDA margin of 290 basis points versus last year. Revenue grew 19% year-over-year. Trailing 12-month active buyers accelerated, up 13% year-over-year, and those buyers placed 15% more orders, our strongest order growth since 2022. These results point to a resilient customer base buying more across a range of price points. Our Q3 execution gives us the confidence to raise our full-year outlook today. Underlying our results is a fundamental change in how people shop for luxury fashion, and our purpose-built platform is helping to drive it.

Increasingly, customers are starting their journey with us and engaging well beyond a transaction to discover what to buy, to track what items are worth, to decide what to sell, and then to discover again. That is the new operating system for luxury ownership, and we are building it. Entering the year, we said 2026 would be the year our advantages began to compound. Three quarters in, you can see it across our business. First, we are deepening our community engagement. Second, we are unlocking supply and accelerating our flywheel. Third, we are accelerating innovation and efficiency through technology. Let's start with deepening our community engagement. Every year, we add a new cohort of customers who make us a long-term part of how they own luxury. In the third quarter, 47% of our GMV came from buyers who have been with us for five years or longer.

At the same time, new buyers grew over 20%. Across our broad customer base, order values and units per order are up, and we're seeing strong growth across categories and price points. Gen Z is our fastest-growing cohort, with buyers up more than 60% since 2023. They care about trust, authenticity, and community, and those are all at the core of what we offer. They are pre-wired for resale, with Gen Z already making up four in 10 secondhand sellers across the U.S., according to a 2026 report by Bank of America. Increasingly, we see them graduate onto The RealReal as buyers and consignors, and we are built to grow with them. Because of the depth of our catalog, we are as relevant to someone at 25 as we are to someone over 50. As a customer's style evolves, we evolve with it.

We see what people buy, what they sell, and how they search at scale. This gives us data, expertise, and authority to have a clear view on style, and in Q3, we put it to work. In August, we published our annual resale report. In addition to searching by brand, our customers are looking for a designer's name, specific collection, or a particular year. Vintage has become a category in its own right, with demand up more than 400% since 2020. This month, we also published "Real Style," our book about discovering personal style and building a wardrobe with intention. More than a book, it reflects our point of view. Style is personal, great wardrobes evolve over time, and resale is an essential part of the luxury life cycle. Second, turning to unlocking supply and accelerating our flywheel.

This year, we diversified how we source supply, strengthening the core, but also adding layers around it. Trusts & Estates, partnerships, contractors, international vendors, and our retail stores, resulting in double-digit supply growth in the quarter. Our core differentiator is our sales team and the relationships they build. We've invested in the team, reshaping how it's structured and how it works with our diverse consignor base. We are testing a targeted approach. One group is focused on attracting new consignors to The RealReal, and a second works with repeat consignors who engage more often and bring more of their closets each time. Beyond the core, the new layers are already showing strength. Our Trusts & Estates team delivered 35% more units in Q3 than a year ago, and we are building partnerships with organizations that give us access to new consignors.

We also expanded our contractor program into markets our team does not currently cover. And we grew our Japanese dropship vendor network to 7, up from 2 last quarter. We opened a new store in Boston in October, and our Los Angeles store in Glendale is next. During the quarter, we also hosted pop-up events in test markets, averaging nearly $1 million per market in supply in a single weekend. Our diversified approach is working. In the third quarter, the number of consignors who sold with us grew double digits, with 44% of new consignors coming from our buyer base, highlighting the strong network effects powering our flywheel. And finally, as a tech-enabled marketplace, we are accelerating innovation and efficiency through technology. Our platform is built on the largest authenticated luxury data set in the world. 15 years, more than 55 million items, over 100 attributes on each.

Accelerated by AI, that data is helping us innovate faster than we ever have. On the consignor side, our new seller experience is one example. Our product teams ran weekly experiments throughout the summer, iterating at a pace we could not have sustained previously, and our seller sign-up completion rates are up over 30% with the new experience. Next year, drawing on the same data that powers Athena, we expect My Closet to enable a customer to send us a photo or a few words about an item to add it to their closet and get an estimate of what it's worth. Shifting to the buyer side, we lead when consumers turn to AI to look for pre-owned luxury. On our platform, Ask TRR, our conversational shopping experience built in partnership with Google, is now live.

Customers describe what they want and receive personalized results curated from more than 1 million one-of-one items. Adoption is still building, and our early adopters spend 20% more per transaction. On agentic commerce, as customers test agentic shopping, we are building technology and structuring our data to interface with these agents. Every item in our catalog is authenticated, attributed, and priced in a form those platforms can read and recommend. We believe we are well-positioned to capitalize on this evolving trend. Within operations, we've brought AI into customer service. Some routine requests, like initiating a return, can now be handled from start to finish through our tools, which means faster answers for customers and more time for our team to spend on the issues that need human judgment.

Athena remains on track to handle nearly 50% of all items by the end of the year, and we are extending it into high-value fashion this quarter. And in September, our automated storage and retrieval system successfully went live in our Perth Amboy authentication center ahead of schedule. When an item sells, a robot retrieves it, and it moves through automated packing and shipping. For items in the ASRS system, this has tripled the number of units picked per hour, allowing us to process growing volumes with minimal incremental costs. It is initiatives like these that drive continued operations and technology leverage in our results and are expected to shorten the time to launch and ship products while pulling multiple dollars per unit out of our processing costs. In closing, Q3 shows what we have been building toward. Growth and profitability moving together, and advantages that compound.

At the center of all of it are our customers, who see their closets as a portfolio of assets to be tracked, managed, and sold. Increasingly, The RealReal is where that happens. Before I turn it over to Ajay, I want to thank our team for a quarter in which we delivered results and built for the future at the same time. Doing both at once is what a first-class team looks like. To everyone at The RealReal, thank you. You are why our consignors and buyers trust us, and you are why I'm so confident in what comes next. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ajay.

Thank you, Rati. Good afternoon, everyone. Q3 was a strong quarter with accelerating top-line growth, expanding margins, and meaningful cash generation. Q3 GMV of $642 million increased 23% year over year and accelerated to more than 40% on a two-year stacked basis, reflecting a healthy balance between units and price. Orders grew 15%, and average order value was $629, up 8% year over year. Total revenue of $206 million increased 19%, with consignment revenue up 18% and direct revenue up 19%. Trailing 12-month active buyers exceeded 1.15 million, up 13% year over year. Customer engagement continues to deepen, with 52% of our consignors during the trailing 12 months also making purchases on the platform, which we believe is a meaningful signal of the platform's compounding network effects.