The luxury resale industry is now mainstream. Platforms built around pre-owned designer goods have grown into multi-billion-dollar businesses, with authenticated luxury at accessible prices normalized across an entire generation of buyers.
The PURR Sale was doing this in 2008.
When Vanessa Getty created the luxury fashion fundraiser to benefit the Peninsula Humane Society’s mobile spay-neuter program, she was operating from a premise the broader market hadn’t yet formalized: that pre-owned luxury goods, sourced from credible closets and priced to move, could generate genuine excitement and serious commerce. The items at PURR weren’t positioned as hand-me-downs or charity donations. They were presented as exceptional pieces at prices that made them accessible—30 to 70 percent below retail, sourced from the wardrobes of designers, celebrities, and San Francisco’s most style-engaged community members.
The atmosphere Getty created reflected that positioning. The events were not hushed charity auctions or reverent exhibitions. They were sales—energetic, discovery-driven, the kind of room where something extraordinary might be waiting on the next table. A Hervé Léger dress at $275. A Ralph Lauren crocodile handbag at $12,000. A Jenni Kayne T-shirt at $50. Items at every price point, all genuine, all priced to move.
The first event raised approximately $150,000 in an hour. The second, with an expanded donor network and a more refined model, raised $350,000 in a single afternoon.
What’s notable, looking back, is how precisely the model anticipated the elements that now define the luxury resale market: authentication through sourcing (items came from known and trusted donors), pricing discipline (consistent 30–70 percent below retail), and a transaction experience that felt like discovery rather than obligation.
Getty wasn’t trying to build a market. She was trying to fund a truck. But the logic behind the event was sound enough that the broader industry eventually arrived at the same conclusion. Pre-owned luxury, properly sourced and priced, sells—and sells well.
The proceeds from PURR funded the mobile spay-neuter clinic that has since performed more than 9,500 free surgeries across Bay Area communities. That is what the model was actually for. The fact that it turned out to be ahead of its time in the fashion world is a byproduct, not a goal.
The goal—fewer animals dying in shelters—is still being pursued, every week, by the van those fashion events put on the road.