Gucci garments, according to a report issued this week by the RealReal, the online luxury consignment giant, is selling, selling, selling.
Based in San Francisco, with bricks-and-mortar shops in New York and Los Angeles The RealReal has authenticators and experts who accept consignments of luxury items (fashion, accessories, jewelry, home goods and art) and then offer them on its well-stocked website and in its stores.
The company authenticates consignments, sets prices and handles photography and shipping; consignors receive a percentage of the sale.
The RealReal has moved millions of products, so it has sizable data on what customers are searching and shopping for.
Its top brands are not what you would call attainable for large swaths of the shopping population (even at secondhand discounts), but in the hush-hush world of luxury goods, tracking changes in search and spending habits is as reliable an indicator as any of fluctuations of heat and buzz.
The top 10 fashion brands being searched so far this year, according to the RealReal’s State of Luxury Resale report for midyear 2018, are many of the ones you would guess.
But even the mighty can fall. The most searched brand on the site is now Gucci, ousting Chanel from its top spot last year. (Louis Vuitton is the second-most searched; Christian Louboutin and Hermès round out the top five.)
Chanel can say this, at least: In terms of sales and consignments, it retains its top spot as the No. 1 brand for users identified as millennial women, a sought-after audience. But Gucci sales increased the most, up 62 percent across all age groups.
For millennial men, Rolex was the most purchased brand, followed by Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Hermès.
Supreme, the New York skate brand whose weekly product “drops” can occasion lines and immediate sellouts, and feed a flourishing resale market, appears to be moving more in one direction than the other. It is the No. 6 brand consigned by millennial men but did not crack the top 10 brands bought by millennial men.
Those millennial male eyes may be trained on loftier pursuits: Searches are up across the board for Hawaiian shirts (up 84 percent); “dad hats,” in which, to be fair, Supreme traffics (67 percent); and fanny packs (614 percent).