The fashion industry has a huge problem: despite the fact that many returned items are unworn or damaged, many, if not most, of them find yourself in the trash. estimated £9.5 billion According to data from Optoro, a reverse logistics software company, returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone. New York-based (Re)vive desires to help corporations find a higher ending for returned items.
(Re)vive takes products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and repairs them – whether which means washing them, re-buttoning them, or removing lint from dog hair. The items are then sold through various channels, and (Re)vive’s data platform helps retailers monitor and manage waste.
The underlying technology is quite interesting. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software allows employees to sort, label and rating a package of returned products in about three minutes. The software can even show retailers how much of a specific SKU – product identification number – has been returned and how much money they will potentially make by saving and selling returned products.
Refreshed products that are still in season return to stores, while (Re)vive sells out-of-season merchandise on behalf of sellers through third-party channels equivalent to eBay and Poshmark and takes a cut of each sale.
Lee said the company is currently seeing strong demand and expects it to grow as pressure grows on retailers to scrub up and minimize their impact on the environment. She added that corporations are now under greater scrutiny for damages from investors and shareholders – they will now not write off these losses as a part of their business activities, as was the case before.
There’s a lot to love about this approach. First of all, I like technology that helps corporations be greener and reduce their impact on the environment, even if that is not their goal. Some corporations may partner with (Re)vive because of its approach to sustainability, but many others are more likely to join under shareholder pressure or to enhance financial performance. It’s nice that they may mitigate their impact on the environment.
Using such a service is also a relatively small convenience for corporations. Retailers already ship their “damaged” products from stores, and Lee joked that working with (Re)vive is so simple as changing the shipping label on the box to (Re)vive’s warehouse fairly than its own.
(Re)vive is seeing strong demand, and Lee told TechCrunch that the company’s revenue has increased nearly 15-fold in the past 12 months. However, it took the team some time to adopt its current strategy.
The company today is very different from what it started off as: Founded in 2017 as an in-store tailoring company generally known as Hemster, it raised a seed round and was operating in over 300 stores before the pandemic halted operations.
“I thought I had found product market fit and raised all these millions of dollars, and then events happened and I said, what do you do now?” Lee recalled.
It then launched an online repair portal aimed at consumers. However, when the team realized that the platform was largely used by retailers attempting to fix inventory in their warehouses, they decided to make a change. Since this modification, (Re)vive claims it has helped corporations save $23 million in GMV and saved 150,000 pieces of clothing from landfills.
“When we did Hemster, it was nice to have us,” Lee said. “If you are nice, you do not get priority [a retailer’s] Action plan. Once we made the change, it became a necessity.
(Re)vive has now raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Equal Ventures and Hustle Fund, with participation from Banter Capital, Coalition Operators, Mute VC and others. Lee said the company had no plans to lift enterprise capital after its latest transformation, but decided to do so after being approached by Equal Ventures, which had been conducting detailed research in the category for months.
I took an interest in this because I dealt with returns and damages as a salesperson at Anthropologie for years. I have accepted many returns that resulted in damage resulting from the slightest thread pull or imperfection. To make matters worse, employees weren’t allowed to take these things home – doing so would result in automatic dismissal – which meant that every day I watched a growing mountain of near-perfect items find yourself in landfill.
My perspective is that of one worker, one store, one shift, one salesperson. It’s hard to fathom how much all this wasted material amounts to. Let’s hope (Re)vive makes significant progress.