The RealReal has raised $14 million to grow its luxury online resale marketplace, which it claims is “second only to eBay.” The startup’s team of professional stylists and fashion experts hand-select and authenticate pre-owned designer goods from brands like Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier. The goods are sold in 72 hour flash sales for prices at up to 90% off the original cost.

For style mavens who can’t afford to shell out thousands of dollars for a Dior dress or Gucci blazer, The RealReal makes high fashion more accessible. Women also have the opportunity to sell their own stockpile of luxury items, to then (of course) buy different ones.

“We’re changing the way people view their designer wardrobe and luxury items,” said The RealReal founder and CEO Julie Wainwright. “We offer consignors a way to get a return on what they originally paid for their designer items, effortlessly and lucratively.”

When trying to build a marketplace for luxury goods, trustworthiness is key. No one want to pay $400 for a Hermès scarf. The RealReal tackles the uncertainty of buying luxury goods online with its team of “tastemakers” who are responsible for hunting items that “embody timeless luxury” and carefully examining each for authenticity. The stylists also work directly with people who want to resell their designer clothing, shoes, handbags, accessories, and jewelry to assess whether their goods are eligible for sale. Shipping is free and consignors receive between 60 and 70 percent of all sales.

In two years, The RealReal has grown its member base to 750,000 and attracted 1.5 million unique visits in January alone. The startup ships over 15,000 luxury items a month and claims to have a 75 percent sell-through rate for its flash sales. Its revenue has grown tenfold in the past year. The company will use this second round of funding to expand its infrastructure to support this impressive growth.

InterWest Partners led this round, with participation from existing investors Canaan Partners, e.ventures, and Greycroft Partners. Novel TMT Ventures, Panarea Capital, author Suzy Welch, and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy also made strategic investments.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The Vertu Ti  may be tacky and absurdly expensive, but at least it’s running Android.

For roughly $10,000, wealthy and self-aggrandizing egotists will get all the luxury the Vertu brand is known for — a titanium, diamond-encrusted exterior, a sapphire display, exotic leathers — along with the comfort of  knowing they’re running the latest version of Android.

The Vertu Ti is a bit of a comeback for Vertu, which was dumped by Nokia last year for a reported $250 million. But while this phone might have something to prove, I’m not entirely sure what that is.

Just consider the device’s specifications, which aren’t any better than what you would find in your average Samsung phone. The Vertu Ti comes with a supposedly impervious 3.7-inch display, a 1.7 GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera, and 64GB of storage.

This is one case where you don’t quite get what you pay for.

And then there’s the Android factor. Vertu says it chose Android over competitors like Windows Phone because Android comes with an established ecosystem. And every smartphone owner wants to be a part of an ecosystem.

That might seem like an obvious statement, but keep in mind that, up until last year, Vertu’s phones were still running Symbian, which Nokia more or less abandoned in 2011. Staying up-to-date isn’t something that Vertu goes out of its way to do. And it’s proud of that.

“Vertu will never be at the bleeding edge of technology. It has to be about relevant technology and craftsmanship — it’s not a disposable product,” Vertu CEO Perry Oosting told the BBC.

Just think about that the next time you complain about the state of Android updates. Vertu owners have it so much worse.

Online travel site Luxury Retreats welcomed $5 million into its sumptuous, landscaped, columned, decorated home (with a pool) today, from iNovia Capital.

Those looking for a getaway of the utmost comfort and style can peruse rental options around the world on Luxury Retreats. Each villa is “handpicked” by a global team, scouring the globe for opulent rental options. It has over 2,000 villas in the system, and the personal touch ensures an added layer of quality assurance. With homes at thousands of dollars a night (some are cheaper), quality assurance is rather important.

The site offers a complementary concierge service as well that can assist with other elements of planning a trip, like booking a private wine tour or going on a scuba adventure.

While researching the company for the article, I created myself a nice little wish list of vacations.

Someday when I dig up a box of gold or receive a massive inheritance from an estranged billionaire aunt, I will book a palatial Tuscan villa where I can throw elegant affairs in the ballroom and surrounding cedar garden;  Thai mansions overlooking the Andaman Sea, where I can bask under coconut trees and order massages on the hour; and a mountaintop chalet at Whistler, where I can ski all day, lounge in a hot tub, and sip hot cocoa on a majestic sleigh ride through the forest.

Back to reality.

The website clearly targets the affluent traveler and with this funding, plans to add at least 50 new destinations in the next year. Luxury Retreats was founded in 1999 by CEO Joe Poulin, who was 17 years old at the time. This is the company’s first round of institutional funding, which has existed thus far on its own profits.

It is based in Montreal, with offices in Barbados, St. Martin, and Buenos Aires.

Fashion and beauty-focused media company StyleCaster has launched a new web destination called The Vivant, a site dedicated to young people obsessed with travel, luxury, and “the good life.”

The Vivant becomes the third property in the StyleCaster family after StyleCaster News and Beauty High. StyleCaster News focuses on fashion while Beauty High covers makeup and hair. The Vivant tells all those fashionable StyleCaster readers places to go, tips to get in to the best parties, and ways to live big even if you’re not a millionaire.

“Departures is great if you’re 50,” StyleCaster CEO and cofounder Ari Goldberg told me. “Condé Nast Traveler is great if you have a third house in Italy. What about people who younger and still want to enjoy luxury?”

Goldberg said the target demographic of The Vivant is young urban professionals “between the ages of 24 and 34,” with some folks outside that range. “We want to fulfill the needs of the StyleCaster girl,” Goldberg said.

The Vivant’s site, which went live today, features content including an article about New York Fashion Week party crashing tips, a list of luxury hybrid cars, and a profile of Graydon Carter’s new Beatrice Inn restaurant in New York’s West Village. Ideally, the site will be updated every day with more content like this.

New York City-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and redesigned its site recently with heavy influence from Pinterest and Tumblr. The company has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding to date. Its last funding round in November 2011 came from folks including Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO and Zynga exec Owen Van Natta.

Top photo: The Vivant
Homepage photo: Holly Owens/Instagram

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Troubled phone-maker Nokia is attempting to unload its luxury mobile-phone brand, Vertu, for a reported $265 million (€200 million), the Financial Times is reporting. Nokia is being advised by Goldman Sachs on the deal and is currently in talks to sell the brand to private equity group Permira.

For the baller who has everything but an iPhone, the bespoke Vertu phones are handmade in England and are rumored to smell like Italian leather, 50-year-old whiskey, and freshly showered butlers. The phones are made from the finest materials such as stainless steel, carbon fiber, and titanium. They are tricked out with exotic leathers (calf, ostrich, and alligator), precious metals (gold, platinum), and of course, rubies and diamonds. The London Symphony Orchestra makes all the Vertu ringtones, and it takes 15 days for the company to make a single sapphire-crystal display.

Most of the brand’s handsets are woefully outdated, mimicking top-of-the-line feature phone and Blackberry design from five-years ago. Vertu’s most expensive phone was the tacky $310,000 Signature Cobra, released in 2006. The dated tech would seem to show a brand that has been largely ignored in recent years, however in 2011 it released a touchscreen phone, the $5,000 Constellation, and earlier this year it launched a series of dragon-themed phones to celebrate the Year of the Dragon.

Unsurprisingly, the technology is not what makes Vertu valuable, according to the Financial Times citing a source close to the sale. Rather, the brand’s name has cachet among the rich and fabulous, and could be used to market to the coveted group internationally. That would make the brand a good fit for Permia, which currently has high-end companies such as Hugo Boss and Valentino in its portfolio. The Financial Times estimates Vertu’s annual revenue between €200 million and €300 million.

The sale is a logical move for struggling Nokia, which posted a $1.7 billion loss in the first quarter. Last week, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Nokia’s rating to “junk.” The one potentially bright spot for the Finnish company is decent sales for its Lumia smartphones — it sold 2 million in the first quarter of 2012.

In letting go of Vertu, Nokia is selling more than just overpriced, blinged-out handsets. The company also offers luxury services such as a 24/7 concierge service, city guidebooks for the jetsetters, and extra-special technical support that includes automatic data backups, and two (two!) complimentary repairs a year. The company has been around since 1998 and has approximately 600 employees.

Check out some of the stunning phones created by Vertu:

Right now, as a Pursuitist spokesperson noted in a chat with VentureBeat, “There is not a Trip Advisor or Yelp for the luxury category.” So Pursuitist aims to become the Yelp for the upper class.

Pursuitist began as a blog about luxury goods and services. The second phase of the site will include user-generated reviews and rankings, social user profiles with Facebook and Twitter integration, brand pages, an iOS application for iPhone and iPad and an HTML5 interface for other tablets and smartphones.

All the new Pursuitist features will launch on November 1, 2011.

“Affluent consumers have a difficult time cutting through the clutter,” Pursuitist CEO Christopher Parr told VentureBeat in an email. “When I’m visiting a new city and searching for a great hotel or recommended restaurant, it’s frustrating to browse through Yelp and Trip Advisor.”

Call it sociologically crass, but the idea of a luxo online community is also economically smart. It has the same pedestrian purposes as does a network for moms, music fiends or any other easily identified consumer segment: divide and conquer. By handily getting users to self-idenity as highly qualified leads in specific niches, these networks are able to pitch their audiences to brands all the better.

“As we’re able to serve up a targeted audience, luxury brands love our platform,” said Parr. “Pursuitist is truly a targeted online destination for luxury advertisers to connect and engage with affluent consumers.” Parr rattled off a dizzying list of labels Pursuitist has worked with so far, including Burberry, Coach, BMW, Gucci, Hermes, Chanel and many, many others.

“As we only focus on premier brands and destinations, we are selective of the brands we feature,” he concluded.

Niche social networks for the rich (or the posing-as-rich-on-the-Internet) are nothing new. aSmallWorld has had its invite-only “community of internationally minded people” since 2004. Decayenne was a similar invite-only site for rich Europeans and Americans; founded in 2001, it shut its digital doors in 2010 due to the changing climate of social networking. And every few months, we hear about a new Facebook-for-wealthy-people. For example, there was the subtly named Affluence.org and the luxury-focused Squa.re.

So when Pursuitist launched in the beginning of 2009 as luxury blog, it was already coming into a crowded space, if not into direct competition with this slew of ham-fisted attempts to capture the fat cat market (and the high-end advertisers that want to zero in on the aforementioned fat cat market).

But perhaps by focusing on those willing and able to buy and review luxury goods, Pursuitist may have dodged the bane of earlier invite-only social networks: the social-climbing hanger-on with whom the affluent don’t want to associate and to whom the high-end brands don’t need to advertise. By focusing on purchasing power rather than social demarcation, Pursuitist dodges some of the snobbery accusations aimed at its predecessors.

Each luxury brand on Pursuitist will get its own page, but while the brands will be able to comment on the content there, they won’t control it. Pursuitist’s social users will be able to follow brands, write reviews, give luxury rankings, upload images of places or things and share links or videos about the brand and its goods or services.

“That’s how we’re disrupting the luxury industry,” said Parr. “The brands are used to being in control — with our platform, affluent consumers are in control.”

And of course, interaction with brands has been gamified; the user with the most interactions with any given brand will get the brand’s logo as a profile badge. It’s similar to what GetGlue does for non-rich consumers and non-luxury brands and topics and what Foursquare famously did for branded and non-branded location-based actions.

As for Pursuitist users, each person has their own profile page. The profiles can be linked to websites, Facebook and Twitter. Profiles will show a user’s activity on Pursuitist, including any reviews they have written or photos they have uploaded. Friends on the network and brands they follow will also be listed on the profiles.

“I’ve spent the last 10 years around affluent consumers, and they love to share their favorite luxuries,” said Parr.

“They like to recommended products… They’re big luxury brand advocates and can’t wait to share with their friends.”