The fashion industry has a huge problem: even though many returned items are unworn or damaged, many, if not most, of them end up 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. Modern York-based (Re)vive wants to assist companies find a better ending for returned items.
(Re)vive takes products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and repairs them – whether that 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 captivating. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software allows workers to sort, label and score a package of returned products in about three minutes. The software will also show retailers how much of a specific SKU – product identification number – has been returned and how much money they can 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 such as eBay and Poshmark and takes a cut of each sale.
Lee said the company is currently seeing mighty demand and expects it to grow as pressure grows on retailers to tidy up and minimize their impact on the environment. She added that companies are now under greater scrutiny for damages from investors and shareholders – they can no longer write off these losses as part of their business activities, as was the case before.
There’s a lot to like about this approach. First of all, I love technology that helps companies be greener and reduce their impact on the environment, even if that’s not their goal. Some companies may partner with (Re)vive because of its approach to sustainability, but many others are likely to sign up under shareholder pressure or to improve financial performance. It’s nice that they can also mitigate their impact on the environment.
Using such a service is also a relatively diminutive convenience for companies. Retailers already ship their “damaged” products from stores, and Lee joked that working with (Re)vive is as basic as changing the shipping label on the box to (Re)vive’s warehouse rather than its own.
(Re)vive is seeing mighty demand, and Lee told TechCrunch that the company’s revenue has increased nearly 15-fold in the past year. However, it took the team some time to adopt its current strategy.
The company today is very different from what it started out as: Founded in 2017 as an in-store tailoring company 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 trying to fix inventory in their warehouses, they decided to make a change. Since this change, (Re)vive claims it has helped companies 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’re nice, you don’t get priority [a retailer’s] Action plan. When we changed, we 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 raise venture capital after its latest transformation, but decided to do so after being approached by Equal Ventures, which had been conducting extensive research in the category for months.
I became interested 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 due to the slightest thread pull or imperfection. To make matters worse, employees were not allowed to take these items home – doing so would result in automatic dismissal – which meant that every day I watched a growing mountain of near-perfect items end up in landfill.
My perspective is that of one employee, one store, one shift, one salesperson. It’s challenging to fathom how much all this wasted material amounts to. Let’s hope (Re)vive makes significant progress.
