Inside The RealReal’s 2025 Resale Report With the Brand’s Chief Brand Officer Kristen Naiman

Kristen Naiman, earlier this year at a party celebrating the launch of The RealReal’s Substack.

Photo: Courtesy of The RealReal

It’s the eve of the spring 2026 season, which is stacked with 15 designer debuts, and all of us have questions. Conveniently, The RealReal’s eighth annual report is out today and studying it is a little like reading the fashion tea leaves. The day Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe departure was announced, searches for the brand on The RealReal skyrocketed 488%, and Demna’s Balenciaga-for-Gucci swap sent searches on his name up 310% in a single day. On the heels of yesterday morning’s announcement naming Rachel Scott as the new creative director of Proenza Schouler, searches for her own brand Diotima rose by approximately 350% by midday. In contrast, when Donatella Versace’s exit was announced it prompted a 13% lift, and Glenn Martens’s appointment at Maison Margiela produced only a 7% increase in searches.

Meanwhile, brands with no recent or upcoming creative changes are making their own impressive numbers: Coach searches are up 160%, Ferragamo has risen 129%, and Pucci is tracking 110% higher than last year.

But there’s more to the report than which brands are winning, and which are losing. The RealReal’s Chief Brand Officer Kristen Naiman sees a resale inflection point: “It’s gone from being a sort of alternate way to shop, or a secondary way, to more of a primary way that people shop and relate to fashion, learn about fashion, and discover things,” she says. A traditional retailer is moving, for example, 200,000 SKUs (or stock-keeping units) through their system a year. The RealReal moves 1 million SKUs through its system a month. The scale of one-to-one connection on the site, from one seller to one buyer is fairly mind-blowing, she acknowledges. “It allows people to look at fashion in a way that’s less linear, less bound by seasons. What that does culturally is it upends the sense that something is good for the time that it’s good.”

Consider Naiman’s own fixation on a particular pair of Phoebe Philo-era Chloé sandals—shoes that are now about 20 years old, but still look right to her. Naiman has set up an alert and scoops up fresh pairs in her size when they become available. “Those sandals have always worked for me. They’re always going to work for me. And so I have this relationship now to buying those sandals that are very specific to a certain era of Chloé. I’m no longer beholden to the same rhythms of the market. And I think that that’s a tiny, singular, personal example of what’s happened at scale.” Read on for specifics on The RealReal’s 2025 trends and how they may indeed impact the season to come—at the very least, they seem to suggest that nobody wants innocuous, anonymous fashion anymore, though noisy logos are most certainly for the moment passé.