(Re)vive wants to turn returns into revenue.
The New York-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline returned or unusable inventory believes it has found the solution for handling these neglected garments (hint: it’s not a mystery box).
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“It’s shocking, the amount of waste a brand generates,” Allison Lee, the company’s founder and CEO, told Sourcing Journal. “If we were to really and truly make an impact and change, we need to empower the brands to be better about their inventory.”
The seed for (Re)vive was planted by during Lee’s experience with her previous business. The founder launched Hemster in 2017 as an alteration-as-a-service platform for brands like Reformation and Madewell. The digital tailoring platform provider “grew quickly,” she said, with about 300 stores using its services during the platform’s peak in 2019. But then the pandemic hit, and all those stores shut their doors.
“That was kind of a surreal experience as a founder, when you’re like, ‘Oh, I thought I found the product, except then major events happen and I don’t have it anymore,'” Lee added. “It was a very deep soul-searching moment of thinking about, what do I really want to do with the tech that I had built?”
So, the company pivoted. In 2021, Hemster started offering a repair portal to its brand clients. That’s when the team discovered that the biggest repairs customers were warehouse managers, as they lacked the infrastructure to properly manage their own damages, whether it be a missing button or stray cat hair.
“When you’re processing the return at the 3PL, there is just no way for this human to stock that unit back into circulation, so everyone [was] damaging out these very minorly imperfect units,” Lee explained. “We found that because they don’t really collect any data around why these units are damaged, they are making very suboptimal decisions.”
Managers were given three options for dealing with damages. The first, albeit most costly, option is to recycle the unit—a “glorified way” of saying they will shred the item down into insulation materials, Lee said.
“It doesn’t get recycled into actually reusable material because the units are not necessarily made to be recycled,” she continued. “It’s very expensive, so a lot of the brands actually end up choosing to sell these damaged units to offshore liquidators; that’s how you see all these terrible photos of clothing mountains in Kenya or Chile.” A second, and equally unattractive, option.