Upleveling luxury: How The RealReal personalizes customer journeys

Challenge

In order to build deeper relationships, drive more repeat purchases, and increase consignments, The RealReal needed to personalize every customer journey—quickly, intelligently, and at scale. But limited visibility into their high-volume of data and slow analytics made it hard to test, learn, and evolve with their vast and diverse customers.

Solution

With sharper customer insights and real-time data, The RealReal was able to personalize every step of the buyer and consignor journey—unlocking faster decisions, better experiences, and more conversions. Powered by Twilio Segment and Amplitude, teams could finally unify their customer data, uncover behaviors in real time, and act with confidence.

In the luxury consignment space, personalized shopping experiences are about as hard to come by as a hot new Hermes Birkin handbag, and not just because they’re so rare. With constantly shifting inventory, high customer expectations, and a mix of both buyers and consignors to engage, marketplaces must operate with the speed of e-commerce and the nuance of a high-touch concierge. Add to that the complexity of omnichannel interactions—mobile apps, desktop platforms, physical stores, and in-home services—and the promise of true personalization begins to come apart at the seams.

Making luxury resale experiences feel more relevant starts with a unified, real-time understanding of customer behavior, and begins to shine when those insights can be turned into action. But for many in the luxury resale space, legacy systems, siloed data, and slow time-to-insight make that level of precision unrealistic.

Not for The RealReal. As a leader in tech-enabled luxury consignment, The RealReal serves a vast and varied customer base ranging from vintage handbag collectors to first-time consignors through both digital platforms and white-glove services.

Their mission to enable more people to own and appreciate luxury in a sustainable way has been a masterclass in resale marketplace success. But with 40 million members and counting, and over a million live SKUs for luxury goods looking for a new home (if only for a little while), The RealReal realized dealing with fragmented and disparate data would require more than a quick alteration. Luckily, a recent partnership turned out to be the perfect fit. 

With the combined power of Twilio Segment and Amplitude, The RealReal transformed its fragmented data into a runway for real-time insights, improved onboarding, and more informed feature decisions. Now the company delivers smarter targeting, more personalized journeys, and seamless experiences that feel cut like a dream—at scale.

The RealReal had no shortage of customer data, but making sense of it all and applying it effectively was another story. With over 40 million members engaging across digital platforms, retail stores, and high-touch services, the team often found themselves buried in dashboards, waiting on manual data pulls, and lacking visibility into the end-to-end buyer journey.

“With all of that data, it was really hard for us to find relevant insights to personalize the experience,” says Paige Wagner Slaboski, VP of Product at The RealReal. “How do we understand different behaviors with these customers and improve their experience for what they want to see?”

For a business that drops over 10,000 unique SKUs daily from $100 dresses to $300,000 handbags, speed and personalization are critical. But slow analytics and limited data visibility made it difficult for The RealReal—and ultimately, their customers—to act fast. “Our customers are incredibly engaged with us and they love the hunt,” Slaboski explains. “But we still need to help them find what they are looking for.”  

Beyond product discovery, The RealReal’s flywheel customers—those who both buy and consign—were especially valuable, yet under-optimized. The company knew that doubling down on these users could create a powerful feedback loop, but lacked the behavioral clarity to tailor experiences across channels and at scale.

The RealReal turned to Twilio to help bring cohesion to its growing data ecosystem. The first step was to implement Segment for digital tagging, identity resolution, and behavioral tracking across all touchpoints—both online and in-person. That data was then unified and pushed into Amplitude, which delivered analytics and insights on customer journeys, session behavior, and feature engagement.

This connected infrastructure gave The RealReal the ability to move beyond transactional metrics and into behavioral segmentation.

“There's only so much you can understand if you're primarily looking at conversion,” Slaboski says. "Segment and Amplitude let us really focus on customer journeys and understand behavior as they move through their flow, empowering our teams to rapidly iterate on features.”

This deeper insight led to product enhancements on Obsessions—an exciting way for customers to save and track their favorite items. Once the team realized how heavily their most loyal customers were engaging with this feature, they prioritized it in the UI, added social sharing capabilities, and created personalized carousels based on user behavior.

With a unified data foundation powered by Segment and Amplitude, The RealReal has fundamentally transformed how it understands and engages with customers. By connecting behavioral data across mobile, desktop, and in-store experiences, the team can now deliver consistent, cross-channel personalization that feels uniquely tailored—regardless of where a customer interacts.

One of the biggest wins has been in onboarding optimization. By analyzing customer behavior through Segment, The RealReal introduced targeted nudges that adapt to each customer’s needs. This approach ensures that every user receives the right level of guidance, improving both satisfaction and conversion.

The company has also been able to draw clear correlations between feature usage and customer engagement, enabling them to double down on what works. The Obsessions feature not only drove longer session times but also contributed to a measurable increase in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). Enhanced features like sort-by-popularity and price-drop alerts gave users new ways to navigate the massive catalog—turning what was once an endless scroll into a curated, joyful hunt.

“The Obsession features have been a huge win for us,” says Slaboski. “We've been able to deliver substantial incremental GMV to the business and we continue to see value there.”

Similarly, The RealReal’s Reconsign functionality helped boost supply from high-value flywheel customers and created a more seamless experience for returning sellers. “Reconsign isn’t just a business win—it’s a sustainability win,” Slaboski explains. “It’s about extending the life of luxury items.”

Just like the latest luxury fashion trend, these product and experience improvements are happening faster than ever. What once took weeks of manual data pulls and dashboard analysis can now be done in minutes. This accelerated decision-making loop lets The RealReal respond in real time to shifting customer behaviors, industry trends, and product performance.

Perhaps most significantly, The RealReal shifted from a reactive to a proactive product development mindset. With real-time data flows and accessible behavioral insights, teams could now identify high-value moments, test ideas faster, and roll out features with confidence.

In a marketplace as dynamic as luxury resale, TheRealReal proved that personalization at scale isn’t just about fancy tech—it’s about vision, precision, and partnership. With Twilio Segment and Amplitude, The RealReal could finally fashion sharp insights and build meaningful end-to-end buyer journeys at scale.

Looking ahead, the company plans to deepen its use of AI and behavioral segmentation to build even more adaptive experiences—especially for onboarding, re-engagement, and omnichannel journeys. 

“We want to make sure we know who our customers are across the entire funnel and leverage new AI technologies to drive personalization at scale across their entire journey,” Slaboski concludes.

With the combined power of Twilio Segment and Amplitude, The RealReal is making the luxury fashion world more accessible and sustainable—one rare Rolex, collectible Kaws, or vintage Vuitton at a time.