'How do you know if it's real?' Luxury reseller faces Chanel lawsuit

UNITED STATES: How do you know if a secondhand luxury good bought online is real? That's at the heart of a lawsuit filed by Chanel against the luxury reseller, The RealReal.

The market for secondhand luxury goods has grown over the past decade. A used Chanel bag, it used to be hard to find, is now sold by lots of online stores, which leads to a question. How do you know if it's real? That question is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by Chanel against the luxury reseller The RealReal. Planet Money's Amanda Aronczyk has the real story.

AMANDA ARONCZYK, BYLINE: This question of detecting real versus fake has been key to the secondhand market since the beginning because the information is asymmetric. The seller knows where the Chanel bag came from, but how's the buyer to know? You can't run a business where consumers can't trust what they're buying.

How core to The RealReal's business model is authentication?

ARONCZYK: Graham Wetzbarger started at The RealReal back in 2013 and was their first chief authenticator. He discovered as a teenager that he had a knack for detecting the real thing. He grabbed a bag that he had brought to show me his technique.

WETZBARGER: I mean, you got to pick it up and you got to touch it, right? I can feel that this is lambskin. It does not have a synthetic feel to me. I can always smell it to see if it smells like plastic. Mm.

ARONCZYK: Smells authentic. Graham left The RealReal several years ago, but he helped develop the company's criteria for sorting real luxury items from the fake ones.

This Bay News report is based on originating coverage from NPR.