FORBES: Kristen Naiman Takes The RealReal’s Temperature—It’s Hot

The RealReal's Chief Brand Officer, Kristen Naiman (L), has a career history of brand storytelling and believes dynamic, long-format content is key to a company's success. She's pictured here with Oscar nominated casting director Jennifer Venditti, the first guest on The RealReal's new podcast, Real Talk, an exploration of long form content for the brand. The RealReal Part of managing a brand, Kristen Naiman says, is learning how to take its temperature. You know–to understand where it fits in…the moment. So when asked where The RealReal sits right now, the company’s Chief Brand Officer answers without hesitation: “Hot.” That heat is felt in real numbers. In 2025, The RealReal (TRR) surpassed the $2B mark in sales, and its fourth-quarter gross merchandise value grew 22% to $616 million. Now, consider the landscape. Hermès did 15B sales in ‘25, and H&M did 22B in the same year. Take into greater account that Hermès is nearly 190 years old and H&M is 79, and yet, TRR has achieved a competitive pace among giants after only 15 years in business. And they only operate within the US. While the scale difference between these brands runs into the multiple billions (and the product offerings are worlds apart, to be fair), the speed of The RealReal’s growth compared to established brands is hard to unsee, especially since its market barely existed a decade ago. It speaks to two things happening in tandem. First, TRR’s influence over the secondary luxury market, and, more importantly, the growing consumer demand for luxury resale. But for Naiman, it’s all about conversation. She has a career history of leading brand stories in the world–she was the Creative Director of Isaac Mizrahi and SVP of Concept, Strategy, and Creative at Kate Spade–and has led The RealReal with some incredibly viral tactics to get people talking. Most memorably, the Canal Street store-not-store stocked entirely with counterfeit handbags but merchandised as a luxury boutique. It was a message about the importance of authentication, the core of The RealReal’s power. Naiman launched a pop-up for The RealReal on Canal Street filled with knockoffs to spur dialogue and conversation around the designer dupe market and how important authentication is to the luxury market. Matteo Prandoni/BFA.com MORE FOR YOU The clear challenge for Naiman then becomes: how to keep the trail ablaze for a company that has already forged a powerful path. Her answer? Dialogue–and substantial amounts of it. Long-format, preferably. A book (the coming attraction). A Substack. Now, a podcast. “No matter what the delivery format is, long-format has to be done in a way that’s additive, dynamic, and is of relevance to the community you’re in,” Naiman says during an interview before the launch of Real Talk, the brand’s venture into podcast land. “There are a million podcasts in the world, but it’s a delivery method for conversation with your community, and the reason for Real Talk is to get people talking about how what they wear, and what their active current elements are in their closet, is a reflection of where they're at in their lives.” Indeed, there are a million podcasts, but Real Talk isn’t just another brand podcast. It’s a call-in show. Inspired by the radio shows of the 90s, in particular, the nationally syndicated Delilah show that ran at night across the US. The host, Delilah, took sentimental song requests on-air, which the caller would dedicate to a special someone, along with the relationship story–all shared live. “Those call-ins were never truly about the relationship problems, they were about people’s lives. So we wondered, ‘How do we do Delilah for the closet?’” Naiman laughs. “And what lights me, and the guests, up is how often what they're asking is a deeper question about inflection points in their lives. And we get into it by talking about the closet.” Resale therapy, anyone? Possibly. But what Real Talk clearly is, is an example of a brand’s potential for dynamism via content, the crux of Naiman’s philosophy. Naiman was the former Creative Director of Isaac Mizrahi and SVP of Concept, Strategy, and Creative at Kate Spade prior to her position at The RealReal. The RealReal The first guest on Real Talk is Hollywood casting director, Jennifer Venditti. Dubbed a whiz of her business, Venditti’s most recent career success is the smash Marty Supreme starring Timothée Chalamet, which earned her an Oscar nomination for her work on the film. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RETURN So where does ROI fit into all these activations? How does one begin to measure the success of a fake store that doesn’t even open let alone sell product? “The RealReal is a tech and fashion hybrid,” she answers. “Data is rigorous and hardcore. With Canal Street, for example, we saw a massive lift that lasted for nearly a year,” Naiman says. While data, like click-throughs, are one way to measure, for Naiman and her team, it’s more about the qualitative element of engagement. “How much chatter or heat are we getting from the activation?” she says. “Those are incredibly important elements of building a brand. They’re more elusive than data-centric markers.” “But it was also about the conversation we created—the reverberation it had, the amount of sharing and engagement we saw, and ultimately the shift that was seen in sentiment on social,” she continues. “For something like Real Talk, or even the book, success is very much about engagement—but also this change in sentiment.” Each activation, from the Canal Street storefront to the Substack, the podcast, and the forthcoming book, seems to extend the same idea: the closet is no longer simply a place of storage, it’s a place of narrative. Which brings us back to Naiman’s original temperature check. In a market where luxury resale is still defining itself, heat isn’t just a metaphor. It’s become the business model.