The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite the fact that many returned items are unworn or damaged, many, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An esteemed one £9.5 billion Returns only ended up in landfills in 2022, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help companies find a better end for their returned products.
(Re)vive takes products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and fixes them — whether that means washing, replacing a button, or dog hair. The items are then sold through various channels and (Re)vive’s data platform helps retailers track and manage their waste.
The underlying technology is quite interesting. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software allows its employees to sort, label and determine the outcome of a box of returned items in about three minutes. The software will also show retailers how much of a particular SKU — a product’s identification number — was returned and how much money they can make from stocking and selling the returned items.
Refurbished products that are still in season return to stores, while (Re)vive sells out-of-season products on third-party channels such as eBay and Poshmark on behalf of retailers and receives a cut of each sale.
Lee said the company is seeing strong demand now and expects it to grow as pressure continues on retailers to clean up and minimize their impact on the environment. He added that companies are now under greater scrutiny about losses from investors and shareholders – they cannot write off those losses as part of doing business as they used to.
There’s a lot to like about this approach. First, I like technology that helps companies be more sustainable and reduce their environmental impact, even if that’s not their goal. Some companies may work with (Re)vive from a sustainability perspective, but many others will likely sign up due to shareholder pressure or to improve their bottom lines. It’s nice that they can mitigate their environmental impact at the same time.
It’s also a relatively light lift for companies to use such a service. Retailers already ship their “damaged” products out of stores, and Lee joked that working with (Re)vive is as easy as just changing the shipping label on the box to a (Re)vive warehouse instead of their own the company’s.
(Re)vive is in good demand, and Lee told TechCrunch that the company’s revenue grew nearly 15-fold last year. But it took some time for the team to land on its current strategy.
The company today is very different from what it started out as: Founded in 2017 as an in-store tailoring service known as Hemster, the company raised a seed round and was used in more than 300 stores before the pandemic halted the business.
“I thought I found the product market fit and raised all these millions of dollars, and then things happen and it’s like what do you do now?” Lee recalled.
It then launched an online consumer-facing repair portal. But when the team realized the platform was heavily used by retailers trying to fix stock in their warehouses, they decided to pivot. Since the switch, (Re)vive says it has helped companies save $23 million in GMV and saved 150,000 garments from landfills.
“When we made Hemster, we were well-intentioned,” Lee said. “If you are hospitable, you are not a priority [a retailer’s] road map. As soon as we were spinning, we became a must-have.”
(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 didn’t plan to raise venture capital after their latest pivot, but decided to do so after being approached by Equal Ventures, which had been doing in-depth research on the category for months.
I was interested in this because I dealt with returns and damages for years as a sales associate at Anthropologie. I would process many returns that ended up as damages due to the tiniest thread pull or imperfection. What’s worse is that employees weren’t allowed to take these items home – if they did you’d be automatically fired – meaning I’d be looking at a growing mountain of near-perfect items headed for a landfill every day.
And my point of view is that of an employee, in a store, on a shift, in a retailer. It’s hard to fathom how much all this wasted material adds up to. Hopefully (Re)vive can make a significant dent.
