I have spent my career learning what real looks like, and teaching others to see it.

I am a luxury authentication expert, educator, speaker, and resale consultant based in New York City. Businesses bring me in for my judgment, my time, and my ability to develop the people and processes that make quality repeatable.

The RealReal

As Senior Manager of Fashion Authentication at The RealReal, I pioneered work across authentication standards, training, quality assurance, complex escalations, risk mitigation, and cross-functional operations. The role was broad by necessity. I joined during a period of rapid growth and built through the company's IPO, and every new category, new location, and new hire tested whether our standards could hold. I built and developed teams of authenticators, and I designed the training, quality, and compliance frameworks they worked within, from onboarding, certification, and recertification to refresher training, audit routines, calibration, and corrective action plans across sites. And I owned the difficult calls when an item, a client, or a situation did not fit the playbook.

A large share of that work was the quality and compliance side of authentication. I wrote and maintained standards, process documentation, and reference guides, ran audit routines and calibration sessions across locations, and designed brand and category audits to surface risk areas and knowledge gaps before they became recurring defects. When an authentication decision went wrong, I diagnosed the root cause and translated it into updated training, clearer documentation, targeted coaching, or a corrective action plan, and then measured whether it actually improved. I partnered closely with operations, quality, legal, returns, customer experience, learning and development, and analytics, and I presented authentication quality trends, risk areas, and recommended action plans to senior leadership on a recurring basis.

In the final chapter of my time there, I piloted and was the first person to fill a new senior position focused on the hardest problems in the operation. I triaged complex escalations and customer returns, and I uncovered and dismantled repeated patterns of abuse, including customers purchasing authentic items, swapping them for counterfeits, and returning the fakes. I then helped revamp the returns process so that returned items were re-authenticated, and I built ways to identify risk earlier, based on consignor submission patterns, customer behavior, and item risk signals drawn from trends, value, and the quality of the assortment submitted.

I also relocated from the Bay Area to New York City to expand my role, and I was part of the opening and early success of The RealReal's first retail store in SoHo. That work was genuinely omni-channel: authentication and luxury resale subject matter expertise at the flagship retail location and across the e-commerce centers, plus retail pop-up experiences in Las Vegas and San Francisco. Along the way I worked with teams well beyond authentication operations, including tech and product, sales, warehouse operations, and the merchandising organization at large. That breadth is why my consulting now spans every aspect of luxury resale, from online consignment and retail to social commerce and digital authentication solutions at scale.

Legitmark

At Legitmark, I built the luxury category as Head of Luxury. That work spans category development, authentication standards, team training, quality calibration, image requirements, and the operational workflows that keep review consistent at volume. Legitmark is partnered with TikTok Shop's Pre-Owned Luxury category, servicing sellers across the United States, and also services ShopGoodwill. Building for those relationships means designing standards that work for thousands of sellers with very different levels of experience.

Real Authentication

I have also served as a senior authenticator with Real Authentication. Roles with providers evolve over time, but the desk work itself has been the constant of my career, and it is what keeps my consulting and training practical rather than theoretical. Across all of my work and personal review, and not only through any single service, I authenticate roughly half a million dollars worth of luxury fashion goods in an average week, before counting the volume handled by the team I oversee. That might mean a run of Birkins and Kellys in the morning, Classic Flaps after lunch, and an archival tweed jacket from the Spring 1993 runway before the day is done. Counterfeits change, identifiers change, and the only way to stay sharp is to keep examining pieces every week. When I teach a team what to look for, it is because I looked for it recently.

I do not own either company, and I do not speak for every part of their business. I bring the perspective of someone who builds and works inside authentication operations every day.

How I work

I am direct, I ask a lot of questions, and I care about whether a change will actually be adopted by the people doing the work. I am as comfortable presenting to a room of executives as I am sitting next to a new authenticator walking through their first difficult case. I like teams who want to get better, and I like businesses that take trust seriously.

I bring a lot of forward energy to my work. I am usually two steps into the next idea while a meeting is still wrapping up, and I am comfortable changing direction the moment the evidence points somewhere better. I am late diagnosed neurodivergent, and understanding that about myself gave a name to a working style I had always had. The way my mind runs, constantly connecting patterns and testing possibilities, is the same thing that lets me adapt quickly, spot what a workflow is missing, and keep generating options when a standard approach will not fit. I do not treat it as something to manage around. It is a real part of what clients hire me for.

A meaningful share of my consulting is strengthening how a business actually runs. I bring steady ideation to intake, escalation, training, and review, and then I work with your team to decide which ideas are worth keeping. I am creative and quick on my feet, and I am honest about not having every answer on the spot. What I do instead is tell you where the answer most likely lives and how to test it, and then we find it together. Some of the strongest processes I have built started exactly that way, as a question nobody in the room could answer yet.

I am also not doing this work alone. I was mentored by pioneers in luxury resale, and I continue to be mentored by them today. Over the years I have developed dozens of career authenticators who now work at luxury resale giants and at some of the most credible and authoritative authentication providers in the industry. That is part of what my agency services can offer. A project with me can include more than just me. I can bring the people I have trained along with me, and their work is a testament to who I have developed and to the relationships I have maintained across this industry.

Writing

I write about authentication, resale operations, and trust in the luxury market on LinkedIn, where you can also connect with me directly. Two pieces I often point people to: