By Jennifer Williams
PERTH AMBOY, N. J. -- -- On a visit to a sprawling warehouse in northeast New Jersey, employees of luxury resale platform The RealReal buzzed around with racks of clothing and accessories like they have for years, getting sellers' submissions ready to list.
But lately they have been accompanied by an AI-infused program that executives hope will speed up the time to sell items and reduce their need to add as many workers over time.
Called Athena, the technology proposes item descriptions, suggests pricing and, crucially for a company that receives millions of goods a year to sell on consignment, helps discern authentic products from fakes.
Twenty-seven percent of the items sent in to The RealReal were processed by Athena in late September, a proportion that executives expected to be as high as 40% by the end of December. (The company declined to disclose the actual year-end figure, saying it was observing a quiet period before its February earnings report.)
Athena's focus so far is designers and brands such as Jimmy Choo and Alice + Olivia, ones that are less challenging to authenticate. But with a year's worth of learning, Athena's reach is expanding this year into midtier and high-end luxury items and with that, executives say it could save the company millions of dollars. For one, the AI assistance means the company doesn't have to hire as many people as it grows, said Chief Financial Officer Ajay Gopal. It will also cut the timeline to list an item for sale by as much as 50%, which executives see as critical to keeping sellers happy and moving through inventory at a faster clip.
"So much of our lifetime value in a customer is tied to them thinking about this as a habit," Gopal said. "Athena helps us incentivize them to consign again and we can move things quicker and do it more accurately."
Frame vs. Birkin
On a Tuesday in December, the New Jersey warehouse bustles with workers preparing to list clothes, bags and accessories for sale.
One uses a bluetooth-connected measuring tape to automatically capture dimensions of Frame pants. Another wields a roughly 5-pound device that looks similar to a speed gun to determine whether the hardware on an Hermès Birkin handbag suggests it's real. Elsewhere in the warehouse, an authenticator uses a device smaller than a stapler to scan a Louis Vuitton tote to help determine whether the leather, stitching and branding are authentic.
Anyone can send items in and get a cut if The RealReal sells them. When items such as a pair of Frame pants and a Birkin bag arrive at the warehouse, they are added to The RealReal's inventory of millions of items. Clothing and accessories are measured and their condition assessed, meanwhile photos capture the garment's tags to feed to Athena, which is working in the background to help automatically authenticate and populate listing details such as size and the fabric used. The tech also assigns a counterfeiting risk score based on the company's years of collecting information on real and fake items.
The pants and handbag then go for photos that consumers will eventually see before making a purchase. Athena may add the untouched images to its assessment of the products.
From there, the items are scanned further and, thanks to Athena, the pants and luxe bag go their separate ways. Using the photos of each item, as well as The RealReal's image database, the technology routes the item either to manual authentication or sends it to be listed for sale. The Frame pants are level one, the lowest risk, and are ready to go up for sale, bypassing a human-touch step that every item used to go through. The Birkin is level five, meaning it will be inspected by one of The RealReal's top authenticators.
"Pre Athena, everything went through manual authentication," Rachel Vaisman, The RealReal's vice president of merchandising operations, said in early December.
A Louboutin crossbody bag, Isabel Marant goods and Chanel handbags are flagged for manual authentication. So too is a Louis Vuitton Neverfull bag, which lands at the workstation of high-value authenticator Tetiana Byndiu. She's using The RealReal's microimaging AI tool called Vision, which takes snaps of various parts of the bag and compares them with the millions of images in The RealReal's repository, to make comparisons.
Athena also tells Byndiu that the bag meets expectations for the real thing, including the metal closure, the lack of card slots and the presence of coated canvas.
Byndiu, who has been with the company for more than three years, assesses the bag to determine that she agrees. The bag is ready for purchase where it would previously also be reviewed by a more senior authenticator.
At some point, it may not need an authenticator at all. "We've seen thousands of that bag," said Vaisman of the Neverfull. With the advances of Athena, it may be listed for sale without the manual authentication step "in the near future," she said.
The Birkin is another story.
Birkin bags, which retail for five figures or more with one listed on The RealReal for $400,000, and other high-value items are funneled to a corner of the warehouse where senses are as important as the technology. Workers use tools to assess the metal components in the bag's hardware and may use an X-ray machine to suss out a fake. Justin Ferretti, a top-level authenticator, also smells the leather and removes the gloves that workers in this area of the warehouse tend to wear to feel the leather. He also uses a dental tool with a light to look at various components inside an Hermès bag and pulls on the bag's metal feet (they may twist but shouldn't unscrew).
In the high-end section, tech is used to validate hypotheses. "If it has a specific shade to it or a certain shine, or if it's a little blue or too reflective, that's going to give me pause," said Ferretti, referring to a Birkin. "But I truly don't know what the alloys in this hardware are unless that's tested."
What's to come
Executives expect Athena to cut the time it takes for an item to go from a loading dock to posted for sale to seven days on average from 14 now, saving a couple of dollars on every sale.
The tech also helps with head count, which at the end of 2024 was just over 3,000. "For a business like ours that is growing...we're going to need more people just to keep up with the additional volume," Gopal, the CFO, said in November. Athena means not hiring as many workers, he said.
The RealReal has yet to disclose current cost savings from Athena, but analysts see the potential as significant.
Every order The RealReal handles creates roughly $78 in operations and technology costs, said Matt Koranda, a senior research analyst at Roth Capital Partners. He estimates about $53 of that comes from variable costs such as the labor involved in listing an item for sale. Athena stands to cut down on those expenses, Koranda said, noting he hasn't yet put a figure to the possible cost savings.
"It could take literally days out of the amount of time that things just kind of sit fallow," he said. "Which means, in theory, you unlock more capacity in the existing warehouses and once you turn inventory faster, that's a better return on capital."
Write to Jennifer Williams at jennifer.williams@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 21, 2026 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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